Four
She loves working there. Loves the routine of seeing patients, drawing labs, cleaning rooms, and restocking medical supplies. It shuts her mind off for a few hours, silencing her endless to-do lists and intrusive thoughts about an annoying, attractive man with capable hands and an arrogant smile.
“You have very gentle hands. Has anyone ever told you that?” Jessie, a thirty-something young woman whom Charlie has gotten to know from her STI checks every three months, says.
Charlie smiles, untying the blue tourniquet from Jessie’s upper arm. Maintaining steady pressure on the butterfly needle nestled in her vein, Charlie watches the tube fill with blood.
“I can’t say they have.” She removes the first vial, exchanging it for another without so much as jostling the needle.
Two years of working as a medical assistant has honed her phlebotomy skills, and her hands no longer shake with apprehension when she draws a patient’s blood, afraid she’ll stick them too hard with the needle.
Jessie flutters the fingers of her free hand over Charlie’s forearm. “Very light and delicate. It’s comforting.”
Laughing softly, Charlie removes the needle, applying the gauze to Jessie’s arm to stanch the blood before securing it with medical tape.
“Well, thank you. I’ll be sure to add that to my list of skills on my résumé.”
Jessie winks and flicks a lock of long, wavy auburn hair over her shoulder. Her eyebrow piercing—a simple diamond stud—glints in the fluorescent lights of the clinic.
Dropping her supplies into the sharps container and biohazard bin, Charlie tucks the two vials of blood into the front pocket of her scrubs and gathers the clipboard with Jessie’s information.
“Anything else you want me to mention to Dr. Angelo before she comes in to see you?”
Jessie shakes her head. “Nope. Just the routine works. Y’all know I love coming here.”
“We love seeing you,” Charlie returns.
Jessie leans back on the exam table, the paper crinkling under her palms, swinging her legs off the end. “You guys talk to me like I’m human.”
Charlie keeps her face neutral even as her heart clenches at the words. “That’s because you are,” she says, holding her smile steady.
Jessie smiles back, but it’s full of tired ruefulness, not her usual bubbly effervescence.
“I know.” She shrugs. “But a lot of people don’t think that once they find out what I do.”
Charlie presses a hand to Jessie’s shoulder, her heart aching for the woman. “You’re always welcome here.”
Jessie’s bright grin returns. “I know, my love.”
Retreating from the room, Charlie closes the door quietly behind her and releases a small sigh.
Jessie is a sex worker who had already been visiting the clinic for years before Charlie started working there.
She remembers the day she found out, a slow afternoon a few weeks after she’d completed her medical assistant training.
When Victoria told her Jessie was waiting in room two, her body language must have tipped Victoria off, something that made Victoria take Charlie’s hand, her expression one of both understanding and firm authority.
“They’re humans, Charlie.” Her tone was soft but insistent.
“Whether it’s sex work or abortion care or hormone therapy, they all want to live a life they choose.
It’s our job to treat them with empathy and respect.
We have the power to ensure that they receive kindness and respect, so that’s what we do. ”
While Jessie’s sentiment—gratitude, relief—is not the first she’s heard from a patient, it’s one that’s familiar to her.
Growing up as an only child in a small town in Indiana, her parents insisted on the importance of saving herself for marriage, disparaging anyone in their small community who failed to do so.
Charlie, however, was a curious child and soon developed into a curious teenager with feelings for cute boys in her class.
When one of those boys paid her some attention during her sophomore year of high school, she liked how it felt.
She agreed to meet him at the mall after school under the guise of seeing a movie with a friend.
But her mother showed up early to retrieve her, arriving at the exact moment the boy kissed her on the bench outside the main entrance, one hand on her leg, the other sliding under her shirt.
Charlie will never forget the way her mother said her name, her voice full of vitriol.
Charlotte. Like it was something dirty, a swear word she was forbidden from using.
Charlotte. How dare you whore yourself in public.
Whore.
Her mother called her a whore.
The word stuck in her mind for weeks, painful and raw. Charlie grew desperate to graduate high school and escape her town.
Why did kissing a boy mean she was a whore?
Early freshman year, a bright pink flyer with an image of a cartoon doughnut and a condom appeared on her floor’s bulletin board.
doughnuts and dildos: come for the doughnuts, stay for the sex talk!
It listed an address off campus—the clinic, she soon learned.
She attended the event with Sy, who’d suggested they attend in the first place.
Charlie listening as a stunning, bubbly young woman with deep olive skin, a perfectly straight black bob, and bangs that should be illegal on anyone else spoke excitedly about the importance of communicating with your partner, how to achieve pleasure, and ensuring enthusiastic consent.
Sex education, Charlie learned, could be modern and inclusive.
It could be pleasure-positive and based on actual science instead of the scare tactics Charlie had been subjected to growing up.
She—and other people who’d been raised like she had—didn’t have to arrive at college and fumble around in the dark with boys who didn’t know what to do when she herself hardly knew, either.
What if she could know what she wanted? What if she could gain confidence and rid herself of shame through an education that promoted healthy discussions around consent and bodily autonomy?
She began to read voraciously to satisfy her curiosity, researching the origins of purity culture and how it had shaped the abstinence-only sex education she’d received in school, which had contained a bare minimum of information about how sex actually worked.
She researched proper sex education and the benefits of comprehensive sex ed around the world.
A few weeks later, she saw the listing for an assistant program director at the clinic, and when she met with Dr. Victoria Angelo and the current program director, she expressed her desire to create something entirely unlike her abstinence-only education. She never looked back.
Even when it placed a strain on her relationship with her parents.
After depositing Jessie’s blood samples in the centrifuge in the lab, Charlie enters the small clinic office.
Sunshine spills through a large window, bathing the two desks in natural light.
A medicine cabinet containing samples of birth control, lidocaine for paracervical blocks, and a small assortment of oral antibiotics sits adjacent to the door next to the refrigerator where HPV and hepatitis B vaccines are stored.
A random assortment of reproductive-themed artwork covers the walls.
She passes the clipboard to the woman sitting behind one of the desks. “Jessie’s here for testing and a PrEP refill.”
Dr. Victoria Angelo glances up, a faraway look in her slate gray-blue eyes. Then she smiles. “Thanks, Charlie.”
At thirty-five, Victoria is the clinic’s founder and medical director.
Victoria started the clinic shortly before the fall of Roe, navigating bothersome protestors shouting heinous things at patients outside the doors and additional rollbacks and attacks on reproductive rights.
Undeterred, she forged ahead, adding gender affirming care appointments and abortion services on the weekends.
Victoria stares at the computer screen, unmoving, a crease between her brows.
“Dr. Angelo?” Charlie prompts.
Startled, she snaps her head up. “You know I’ve told you to call me Victoria.”
Charlie does know this, but ever the consummate professional, she believes Dr. Angelo should be called by the title she worked so hard to achieve when they’re in the clinic.
Charlie leans against the desk. “Is everything okay?”
Tucking one side of her hair behind her ear, Victoria stands and presses a hand to Charlie’s shoulder. “Do you mind coming to my office after we close today?”
Charlie’s stomach twists, the lack of an answer flooding her with a disquieting sense of foreboding.
She forces a smile. “Of course. I’ll meet you after I lock the labs in the box.”
Scooping up the clipboard, Victoria leaves the office.
The rest of Charlie’s shift is uneventful, a blur of recording patient vitals, drawing blood samples, and cleaning rooms. She completes each task with the focus and precision she applies to everything in her life. Soon enough, she’s locking the main door and placing the labs in the box for pickup.
She changes out of her scrubs and back into her leggings and cream cable-knit sweater before climbing the stairs to the second floor.
The walls are painted pale pink and purple under a mural of faceless people of all different skin tones, splashed with bold, colorful words like persist and choice and equality.
The cubicles located throughout the floor are empty of staff; everyone has gone home for the day.
As she approaches Victoria’s office at the end of the floor, Charlie hears faint classical music—Victoria’s playlist of choice after a long shift—along with the clacking of a keyboard.
She knocks on the open door.
Victoria looks up from her computer and gives a tired smile. “Hey. Come on in.”