Anything but Normal - Melody Carlson [30]
“Yeah, right. It’s a dance that I’ve been coerced by my best friend to go to. What fun.”
“You seriously need to lighten up, Sophie.”
“I seriously need to finish this opinion piece for journalism tomorrow. It’s bad enough that I made a total fool of myself and ran out of there like a baby. I really need to be able to hold my head up tomorrow.”
“Well, you go, girl.”
“Thanks.”
“And thanks for telling Wes you’d go to the dance.”
“Right. Now you owe me.”
“I owe, I owe,” Carrie Anne sang like one of the dwarfs in Snow White, “so off to bed I go.”
“Very cute, Dopey.”
“Night night, Grumpy.”
Sophie returned to her opinion piece, rereading it from the beginning and then cutting about a third of it. Tighten, tighten, tighten. Her topic was school security. Or rather the lack of it. Sure, their school put on the appearance of being safe and secure, with a part-time guard wandering around in uniform, but the kids knew it was all show and no go. If someone really wanted to sneak homemade bombs or automatic weapons into the school, it wouldn’t be all that hard.
Finally satisfied, or perhaps just tired, Sophie hit save and then print. Once the doc was printed, she shut off her computer and crawled into bed.
She missed her old routine of reading the Bible and praying before going to sleep. But after two weeks of skipping, she was slowly getting used to it. Didn’t they say it took only two weeks to make or break a habit? Still, it got harder and harder to shut down her mind and go to sleep. During the day, she could distract herself from reality, but her worst fears always seemed to confront her at night.
It was during the night that she reconsidered the whole abortion thing. Sure, she had run out of that horrible clinic with the certainty that abortion had always been—and still was—wrong, wrong, wrong. Taking a human life to cover up your own stupid mistake was wrong, wrong, wrong. She was able to convince herself—during the daylight hours—that she would never, never, never kill an unborn child.
But that all got blurry and gray when she turned the lights out. Like demons coming out in the darkness, her doubts and fears would torment her until she thought the only answer was to simply end this thing. Sometimes she imagined ending it even more completely than simply having an abortion—she imagined ending her own life as well. That way no one would ever know. Her shame would be buried with her. Well, unless someone did an autopsy. What then?
And on she would go—round and round until she finally succumbed to sleep. But that escape was only temporary because, almost like clockwork, her bladder would demand to be emptied at four a.m. And after that, wide-awake, she would be tortured anew.
Finally morning would come, and as if frightened by the light, these demons and doubts would all scurry away. Well, for the most part. She was still plagued with one major fear: what if someone found out? What would she do?
Every morning after her shower, Sophie would peel back her robe and examine herself in the full-length mirror on her closet door. She knew her body was changing, be it ever so slightly. Her curves seemed curvier and fuller. Her stomach was rounded a bit more. She knew no one else could see these changes, and she tended to carry extra weight anyway, so she’d probably be able to conceal it for longer than most. But she also knew it wouldn’t be long before the changes were obvious. And what then?
Sophie had heard of teenage girls who’d gone full-term in their pregnancies without anyone knowing. She’d read stories of how girls had delivered their babies by themselves . . . and how some even killed their infants and hid them in dumpsters. But it seemed that they were eventually found out. How else did it make the news?
Sophie knew that, although she wanted to hide her secret forever, she wasn’t about to murder an innocent baby and drop it in a dumpster. At least she knew that in the light of day. Sometimes, at night, her imagination