Anything but Normal - Melody Carlson [15]
“Hurry up,” said a girl who was coming her way.
“Just chill,” another girl said.
Sophie shoved the box back onto the shelf and turned her attention to the rack next to it. Unfortunately that was the birth control section. As the two girls, both from her school, approached, Sophie reached out and grabbed a package of sanitary pads without looking closely at them. She wasn’t a pad user since she preferred tampons, but anything was better than being caught with an at-home pregnancy kit.
Acting as if nothing was unusual, she turned and carried the large, hot pink package of pads to the registers, getting into the line with only one woman in it. As it turned out, the pads she’d chosen were some kind of supersized, mega-absorbent, recommended-for-elephant-use sort of product. And when she got to the cash register, she realized that a guy about her age was the cashier.
Avoiding his eyes, she shoved the enormous package toward him, and with heat racing up her neck, she fumbled in her wallet for the right amount of cash. What were the chances of a robbery just then? A masked man could burst into the drugstore and just shoot her. Of course, with her luck, the morning paper would read Teenage Girl Found Dead with Maxi Pads Clasped in Her Arms.
Sophie heard the girls laughing as she made her way out of the store. They were probably just laughing for the sake of laughing. That’s what girls her age did. But it sure felt as if they were laughing at her, as if they had known what she’d been up to, as if they could read her like a book.
She threw the detestable Walgreen’s bag into the backseat and started her car again. Maybe she should just give up this fool’s errand. Maybe being the queen of denial wasn’t such a bad thing after all. Maybe her suspicions were totally wrong. Seriously, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d been wrong about something, now would it?
She drove across town, considering the possibilities. She could just continue like she’d been doing—telling herself that she was delusional, that no way was she pregnant. Seriously, she’d only done it once . . . okay, twice. But that was only if you counted the first time, which didn’t actually even seem like the real thing. Or maybe it was just because it had been so painful.
“I’m sorry,” Dylan had told her afterward. “Are you okay?” She hadn’t known what to say, what to do. It was all so awkward, so unexpected and messy. She wasn’t totally sure what had happened or how, only that it had hurt a lot, and that she had told him to stop. But he hadn’t seemed to hear her. Maybe that was her fault. Maybe it was all her fault. Maybe she’d given Dylan the impression that she was that kind of a girl—experienced. Or maybe she’d been like those girls Dylan’s mother had been complaining about—the ones who chased him relentlessly. And then she had caught him, even if only temporarily.
Sophie parked in front of a Wal-Mart now. But with a fairly full parking lot and teens milling about, it seemed even riskier than Walgreen’s. Plus, there was Staples—and her mom’s car— just across the street.
Finally Sophie decided to drive to the next town, just ten minutes away. She would locate a small drugstore, go straight inside, and look around, and if the coast was clear, she would snatch up an E.P.T. box and head straight for the checkout. In and out. Just like that.
As she drove down the freeway, she considered the possibility of buying a pregnancy test online. She was sure that could be done. Except for two major obstacles: (1) the package would be delivered to her house, and who knew how obvious it might look, and (2) she would probably need a credit card to buy it. Besides that, she would have to wait. And now, especially after losing her lunch in the cafeteria today, she wanted to know.
The more she thought about it, the more certain she felt that Dylan had to have been right when he’d assured her afterward that “no one gets pregnant the first time.” Okay, that didn’t absolve the second time. But Dylan had brought protection that time. Who would’ve expected that the condom would rip?