“I asked Melanie if she knew what color the carpet was in her brother’s room, and she said green.” Brooke brings the wooden mallet down on the skull of our fetal pig, sending some cartilage onto my safety goggles.
“So taking that and the toe of the shoe I spotted in the pic, I’m guessing that is Cole’s dick. Hardly worth Instagramming.” She gives the pig another whack.
Lilly perches on a stool, elbows resting on the black countertop of the biology room. “Dammit,” she says. “It is a little dick.”
My friends have been plumbing the depths of the mysteries of the size of Cole Vance’s dick for a few days, not coming up with any solid evidence as of yet.
“Hmmmm . . .” Brooke watches Lilly carefully. “You could always ask Charity.”
Lilly flushes. “No way.”
“I can find out for sure,” Brooke says, pressing her thumb on the cranium.
“Excuse me?” Lilly says, her embarrassed pink kicking up to an angry red.
“Chill,” Brooke says, “I’ll just ask him to whip it out sometime.” The skull gives way underneath the pressure with a distinct pop.
“Does it matter how big it is?” I ask Lilly. “I mean, do you like him or not?”
“It matters,” Brooke says with conviction.
“It matters more if you like him,” I say, putting a reassuring hand on Lilly’s shoulder.
Lilly’s face scrunches up a little bit like she might cry at the unexpected support. “Thanks, Sasha.”
It’s not something I’d usually say, but I’ve come to the realization that while I might be the alpha of our group and Brooke the firm beta, Lilly can’t ever decide which one of us to please. She’s a toddler getting conflicting advice from her parents, and watching her confusion is solid entertainment. I’ve learned that if I can veil my words in something like kindness she tends to respond better, and I could use the distraction of being a good friend right now. Isaac gave me a knowing nod in the hall this morning that sent my stomach plummeting but my pulse skyrocketing.
I checked my phone the second I got to my car yesterday. No texts had been sent in the middle of the night—to anyone. None had come in either. I’m chalking it up to some semiliterate trying to connect with Isaac for God knows what and an errant radio wave identifying it as my number.
“I definitely like Cole,” Lilly says. “But I don’t want to end up in a micropenis situation.”
“You’re not the only one who enjoys a guy with a ’boner, Sasha,” Brooke adds.
I roll my eyes. “Do you have that brain exposed yet?”
“Ohhhhh yeah,” she says, ignoring the tools on the tray and cracking bone away with her gloved fingers. “Nervous system, here I come.”
“Also endocrine,” I say.
“You need to get out more.”
A sudden shriek makes everyone jump; Lilly almost topples off her stool.
“Mrs. DeBrau,” Charity Newell yells from across the room. “I think my pig is totally pregnant.”
“Like it could be only kind of pregnant,” Brooke says under her breath. I think of gray shadows and twining umbilical cords, one baby born, one forever in limbo.
“No, that’s not possible,” I say, and Brooke makes a duh face because she thinks I’m talking to her.
“Not possible at all,” Mrs. DeBrau echoes me. “It’s a fetal pig, Charity, only a baby herself. However, you’ve done excellent work here.”
She leans over Charity’s tray to inspect the splayed animal, skin pinned around it like a macabre cape. “You preserved the reproductive system while dissecting. You have a deft touch.” Mrs. DeBrau looks at Brooke pointedly.
“I prefer my mallet,” my friend says, spinning it in her fingers.
“Mrs. DeBrau,” I ask. “At what point can a fetus stop existing?”
She looks up from Charity’s table, a cautious look on her face. “What do you mean, Sasha?”
This is exactly the problem. I don’t know what I mean. Last night I did search after search on my laptop, ruling out the obviously wrong answers right away. Mom’s stance on abortion has always been unwavering, so that’s out. I have no way of knowing if a miscarriage occurred, but we both seem healthy and whole in the ultrasound.
“I mean . . .” Everyone is looking at me now, because Sasha Stone not knowing what to say is an event worth noting.
“Can there be a fetus, no miscarriage or abortion, and then . . . suddenly no fetus?”
“Sure,” Mrs. DeBrau says, leaning back over Charity’s fetal pig. “That’s called resorption. It happens alongside a miscarriage, and the mother’s body reabsorbs what’s left of the material. Typically she won’t even know she was pregnant.”
That doesn’t work. Mom definitely knew. There aren’t ten fingers in that ultrasound. There are twenty.
“But what about twins?” I blurt, and Mrs. DeBrau looks back at me. “What if there are twins and then . . . then there’s not?”
“Aahhh.” She smiles. “You’re talking about vanishing twin syndrome.”
I smile back. That sounds about right.
Vanishing twin syndrome: also known as fetal resorption, is a fetus in a multi-gestation pregnancy that dies in utero and is then partially or completely reabsorbed by the twin.
“‘Partially or completely reabsorbed,’” I say to myself, tapping a fresh pencil against my lip.
My desk is a mess of papers and scribbled notes, half-drawn illustrations of various stages of embryo development with question marks penciled on the sides. I’ve been fending off texts from Heath all evening, responding with nonanswers and varying degrees of meh when he tried to invite himself to dinner. He’s usually good about respecting my space, but when he calls I capitulate and answer.
“What?”
“Well, hello to you too,” he says.
“I’m kind of busy,” I tell him, my pencil sketching a version of myself in the margin, bored and on the phone.
“Do you have a minute to talk to your boyfriend about this rumor that you’re pregnant?”
My pencil skids across my notes, jerking the whole paper sideways and exposing the pig-heart diagram I’m supposed to be studying. The tip of the lead shakes along with my hands, the stuttering of my heart dotting Morse code across the aorta.
“Wait, what?”
“I don’t know what you said in biology today, but Charity told Cole you were asking about abortion.”
“Resorption,” I clarify. “It’s when one twin absorbs another in the womb.”
I expect a sigh of relief, Heath’s usual noncombative tone restored so I can handle him and go back to what I was doing. Instead I get: “Why were you asking about that?”
“Why does it matter?” I shoot back. “It’s not like I’m pregnant. We don’t have sex.”
“Just because we don’t have sex doesn’t mean you can’t be pregnant.”
Lead punches through sheets of paper down to the wood of my desk.
“Heath.”
It’s one word, his name. But I know how to use it. I’ve heard girls adopt the cajoling tone to calm down their man, an upward lilt with a flirtatious accent that changes the subject. I say his name like a brick wall. One he can run into and break his damn face on. Heath is still talking, but I’m not listening, my brain derailed by the fact that I just swore. Only in my head, but it counts.
What is wrong with me?
I can’t get Isaac Harver—who is a total scumbag—out of my head. I practically stuck my tongue down his throat right in front of his parole officer for the love of God. I’m arguing with a perfectly nice, useful boyfriend over gossip. I’m using bad words and . . . my foot nudges my clarinet case, safely stowed under my desk.
As in, put away. There’s a thin film of dust across the top.
I realize I haven’t practiced all week.
This is not who I am. This is not me.
“This is not me,” I say, interrupting Heath.
“What? Sasha? What do you mean?”
“I have to go.”
I hang up, my phone dropping to the floor next to my clarinet case as my eyes devour chambers of the fetal pig heart, so similar to ours, the colors of the diagram—red, blue, purple—vibrant against the dull grays of my ultrasound, still half curled, hiding in shame. One corner touches my notes, the sketch of myself, bored with my perfect boyfriend, now surrounded by a heavy script, all caps, vicious lines meeting at sharp angles to create a message I didn’t write.
WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING TO ME?
I think of Isaac Harver and bad words, my heart racing.
This is not me.