I pee on a stick to prove it.
“I’m not pregnant!” I yell out from the bathroom.
Aidan comes in to verify.
“Let me see,” he says, silly and relieved. “Wait, you are pregnant, though.” He points to the stick.
“No, I’m not, look at the line,” I snap.
“Yeah, two of them means you are.”
I spend the next three hours scrambling to prove the test wrong, comparing the color of the lines to the pictures on the box, comparing the box to the pamphlet, and googling false positives, which turns out are much rarer than false negatives.
I get to Planned Parenthood five minutes before they open and say bye to Aidan. No visitors allowed. After an hour in the initial waiting room, a nurse takes me to a room where she draws my blood and hands me a cup for my urine sample, which confirms the pregnancy.
“Okay . . . Can I get an abortion?” I ask, genuinely not knowing what comes next.
“Yes, we will talk about all your options and schedule it. Probably sometime next week.”
“I have to get it now,” I say. “I’m leaving for Europe in two days.”
They’re able to squeeze me in the following morning at 10:00 a.m. while my mom and brother are on a flight to New York, the first stop in an incredible, nonrefundable, family-only trip to the Amalfi Coast for my birthday.
I look six months pregnant by the time we get to Positano, which Reddit tells me is “post-procedure belly,” even though I was only pregnant for about five weeks. I know I’m not making it up when my brother says, “You look pregnant,” out of the blue.
When I finally tell my mom, once a twenty-one-year-old pregnant with me, I feel guilty for being thirty and getting rid of it within forty-eight hours. I think about the so-called life I’m protecting by not having a baby—the partying, the numbing, the running. How can I bring new life into the world when I don’t live a life worth keeping myself?