Cake Time - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Siel is a writer in Los Angeles. Her novel-in-stories, Cake Time, is the winner of the 2015 Red Hen Press Fiction Manuscript Award. Siel is also the author of two poetry chapbooks. Her stories and poems appear in ZYZZYVA, The Missouri Review (Poem of the Week), The Los Angeles Review, Denver Quarterly, and other places. Siel is the recipient of a residency from The Anderson Center at Tower View and Vermont Studio Center; she holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. Find her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at @sielju.

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How Not to Have an Abortion

If suspicious, stop eating. Nibble haphazardly on the edge of a bagel, then squish the rest into a glass of milk. Watch it bloat. Pour out the orange juice and drink a second cup of coffee. Then a third. When hungry, have a diet coke. The carbonation fills you up, and the caffeine gives you energy. Stay awake nights. Wait.

Ditch AP English and visit Planned Parenthood, the downtown branch. At ten a.m. the waiting room's already filled up, so when you open the door you're hit with a blast of hot, sticky air. Everyone turns to look, then turns back to their conversations. It's a friendly scene, mostly Latina women in their thirties and forties talking in Spanish while their children run circles around them. They all look settled in, like they've been there for hours. Sign in on an old clipboard and sit down in the last empty chair. You're the only teenager; everyone else is in class.

Wait. Stare at the walls. A few announcements are tacked up near the front, one an orange warning about the above-average radioactivity detected in the area. Below it are scratched-up plastic holders with pamphlets on STDs, pregnancy, proper condom use, the same ones a thirty-something Planned Parenthood volunteer brought when she spoke to your health class last month. "What's most important is that you plan ahead," she said, then told a story about how the week before she was in this very unprepared situation with a guy she'd started seeing. ?We were like, "What do you want to do?" and I was thinking, "I should know better, I teach this stuff!?" The main message she got across was that she had a new boyfriend.

When the woman at the sign-in window calls your name, she's already looking straight at you. Walk up and say," I'd like a pregnancy test," clearly and firmly, the way you practiced in your head. She buzzes you through the door. She hands you a styrofoam cup and points you to the bathroom. Pee in the cup. The cup has no lid. Walk back through the hall and hand the cup to the woman.

In five minutes, another woman calls you back into a cramped clinic room. She closes the door. "So, do you know what you want to do?" she says.

***

Ask how much abortions cost. In Los Angeles, the government pays for contraceptives, pelvic exams, and HIV tests if you're a high school student. If you want a free abortion though, you have to qualify for Medicare or Medicaid. In any case, you have to be at least eight weeks pregnant to get an abortion here, she says. She recommends another clinic that does it at six weeks. "Plus they're cheaper," she says. "$160."

She hands you a proof of pregnancy form, a photocopied half-sheet with a checkmark next to "pregnant." "Don't lose it, you'll need it for the abortion," she says, "and don't forget to make an appointment with the clinic." She gives you a buck-up smile. Nod the way you do when your calculus teacher explains a concept then stares hard at the class for signs of understanding. Fold the sheet and stick it in your backpack.

Walk up two blocks to take the Melrose bus to your afternoon classes. All the seats on the bus are taken. Grab onto a pole and watch the buildings go by: All American Party Store, Paramount Pictures, squat, white shops with thick prison bars on the windows and signs that say just LIQUOR. The streets get cleaner as you go west, then dirty again in front of the school. Before getting off the bus, scribble yourself a note about being sick, then fake your mom's signature under it. When you get to the door though, the teacher on duty doesn't see you because she's laughing with a trio of her students. "I mean, one was a flat and one had a heel, like two inches!? she says. ?I thought it felt funny but I still didn't realize it until second period!" One of the students, a guy in your French class, sees you and slyly cocks his head to the left, a signal to sneak in, fast. As you do he laughs loudly, putting his arm on the teacher's shoulder and turning his body to block you from view.

***

After school, call the clinic. It's called Family Planning Associates Medical Group, according to the recording while you're on hold. Wait. When the receptionist answers, she takes your name and gives you a Saturday morning appointment. She tells you not to eat for twelve hours before the abortion, "or you may not wake up, okay?" She says this very firmly then waits for you to say okay before going on. She's used to talking to teenagers. She instructs you to bring a driver for the ride home. Ask, "What about the bus?" "No," she says. "Girl, you need a driver."

Call Ryan that night, after he gets home from his part-time job delivering pizzas. Without preamble, say, "So, I'm calling because, I'm pregnant." Hear him suck in air. He says, "Can you hold on for a minute?" Then there's silence. When he comes back on the line he says, "Hey." Then there's silence again.

Let the silence stretch. There's a part of you that's excited to be having this conversation, that's proud, in a way, to have surprised him, to know more than he does. Before this, he hadn't called you for a little over a week, and you'd begun to suspect he wasn't planning to call at all. When he first heard your voice on the phone, he probably thought you'd come up with some coy excuse to hear his voice. Now you have his attention.

Not that you and Ryan ever talked much, on the phone or off. You met him at a party Monica threw when her parents were out of town. He was a quiet one, but he was cute and tall and had a car, and the girls hung around him, so the guys did too. He was the exact kind of guy that never went for you, but halfway through the party suddenly the two of you were sitting on the front steps together, haloed by the bright porch light. You talked vaguely about the people at the party; you didn't really know anyone in common. At some point he said he lived with his mom, like you.

You made out with him behind the house for hours, first standing against the wall until your neck hurt — he's a foot taller than you — then sitting twistedly on the concrete. He gave you hickeys, hideously big purple ones. You gave him a blow job, but stopped before he came because you thought you heard someone coming around the house. He said he'd break up with his girlfriend, and the next week, you heard from Monica who heard from Laney that he had indeed dumped her, a waspy brunette called Jenny.

Those were the happy times, when you got the news about each other through the grapevine. Once you started talking directly, things turned shitty.

"Are you okay?" he says now. Answer with the abortion appointment info. Say, "I think that's what we should do." "Yeah," he says quickly, "I'm way too young to have a baby." His voice turns to a whisper, so you know his mom's home. It's almost eleven so soon she'll yell at him to get off the phone. He quickly agrees to split the cost. Give him the appointment info again; it's in eleven days. Tell him to honk when he gets to your place so you can just run out. Tell him he can't be late this time.

***

Each day, follow the regular schedule of classes. Marvel at how normal everything seems, how unchanged. The steady part of you, the part that memorizes ten SAT vocab words a night and recalculates the problems you got wrong on the physics test, has kicked in. There's no room to panic. It's just about following procedure: Get pregnancy test, make appointment, find ride, abort fetus.

On Wednesday morning, get what looks like your period, except a darker, almost brownish red and a thicker texture than usual. Be surprised. Put a pad on. After school, go to Monica's. Her dad's a gynecologist. Tell her the situation. "Oh no," she says, but sounds a bit excited. She's a virgin. She says you should call...