Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [45]
Carmen nodded. He’d given this speech before.
“Okay?” he said, like a coach sending her back onto the field.
She shrugged. “I don’t know if I can.”
Jones stood there staring at her for an extra moment. She knew her hair was wild and her face looked sallow. The sweatpants were not attractive. He was probably thinking how ugly she really was. It was probably a relief not to have to get married to her. She thought of the beautiful girls in Jones’s office who were constantly fluttering around him with their straight, silky hair.
He dropped his coffee cup into the sink with a clang and it startled her.
“All right, Carmen. If you don’t want to get married, that’s your decision.” He walked to the door, then turned around. “I love you. I want to marry you. I’d marry you today. I want to keep moving forward. You know how I am. But if you don’t want to, that’s for you to decide.”
Carmen put her hands over her face.
“But I’m not moving backward,” he said as he put on his coat. He opened the front door to leave. “That’s one thing I’m not going to do.”
Bridget slept in a field for the third straight night and woke up under a hot, damning sun. This bit of earth was positively the sunniest place in the state of California, and she was not enjoying it.
She was still nursing the hangover from the night at the bar, and she couldn’t shake it. Too much time had passed to blame the alcohol anymore. Was it the guilt? The self-loathing? She biked into Sacramento to look for something to eat that might settle her stomach. After she ate a sourdough roll and drank a cup of jasmine tea she rode by a Planned Parenthood office and stopped her bike.
There was a part of her that cringed at what she had almost done that night and a part of her that wished she had done it. She wanted to cross a boundary, not stay on this side of her life anymore. She wanted to tear it all down and dare herself to feel any worse.
She walked into the office with a long-haired swagger and signed her name on the sheet. As instructed, she went to the bathroom and left a urine sample. She penned a little drawing of the sun on her warm plastic cup. An ancient Earth, Wind & Fire song was playing when she went back to the waiting room, and she found herself dancing to it. She didn’t feel like sitting down.
She was free. She had that, at least. She had nowhere to be, no one to answer to. She slept under the stars. If she was going to be wrecked, at least she’d be free.
The nurse came into the waiting room and called her name. “Bridget Vreeland.”
“Me,” she said. Her name was one thing she was left with, and she had mixed feelings about it. Maybe she could change it. She’d call herself Sunny. Sunny Rollins, like the saxophone player. Or Sunny Tomko. She’d borrowed Tibby’s old name once before when she’d needed to be someone different; Tibby would let her borrow it again.
She followed the nurse to an examining room. “Should I change into one of those gowns?” she asked. She wasn’t afraid of anything.
“Let’s just talk to begin with,” the nurse said. She was pretty old. In her sixties at least. She had hopeful eyes, Bridget thought, but sort of sad. It was hard to say which they were more. “What can I do for you?”
“I need birth control.”
“Are you using any now?”
“I had one of the rings you put on your cervix. I think it’s expired. I can’t remember exactly the date when I was supposed to change it, but I think it passed.”
“Can you give me the date of your last period?”
Bridget thought back. She had no idea. It wasn’t exactly at the front of her mind these days. “I have no idea,” she said honestly.
“Are you sexually active?”
“Now? Today?”
“Well. Not today necessarily. Over the last two or three months.”
She hadn’t had sex with Eric since the night before Greece. “Not in the last couple of weeks, but before that, yes.”
“Are you married? In a relationship?”
“I have a boyfriend.” She didn’t know why she kept saying