Friends With Benefits

Chapter 15 (part 2)

I sat in stunned silence, my heart thudding dully in my chest and stomach swirling bleakly. The unnatural, shiny, clean room suddenly seemed suffocating, and although it was a room meant for reassurance and kind assistance, it felt like a tiny corner of hell to me right now, with twisted, disturbing plastic models of dissected reproductive systems, and jeering posters of grinning, happy families taunting me from the walls. My heart rate was still stuttering and stalling irregularly as the shock of the facts I'd been enlightened of seeped slowly into the fabric of my brain.

I was 8 weeks pregnant.

My surroundings were blurring as the cheery, middle aged nurse with a blunt bobbed haircut continued her cheerful nattering, blabbering on about 'options' and 'plans for the future' and 'moral decisions'. Her chirpy voice distorted into a mix of irrelevant drivel in the back of my mind, my head swimming with my flurry of conflicting thoughts.

I was definitely pregnant. Single, aged sixteen, and 8 weeks pregnant.

I had always imagined that this sort of news would be ground shaking and earth shattering. That suddenly the whole world would change and go spinning, crashing down around me. It would surely be like every terrible, awful, horrific nightmare I'd ever dreaded balled into one. Teenage pregnancy had been drilled into my head as being the worst possible situation that could ever arise, full stop. Death would be a more happy alternative, indisputably - because pregnancy at the age of 16 was horrifying. It would be the end of the world as I knew it.

And yet here I sat, still. My chair was rooted firmly to the floor, and to my surprise, the ground had not crumbled and cracked, not split down the middle into deep, fragmented, creviced pits revealing bright, fiery lava beneath my feet. The sky had not fallen in, the birds still sang outside the generic, governmentally financed windows. My heart was still beating, and to be perfectly honest, I felt no different. I was no more aware of the tiny life inside of me than I had been these last few weeks. My stomach felt no heavier, no more rounded or significant. I felt perfectly the same, all in all.

Really, that was the scariest part of it all. The part that really unnerved me the most. The fact that life would still go on as normal, even now that this dreadful thing had happened to me.

It reminded me of when being seven. Of the moment I found out about the crash.

Your parents are dead, they told me. Your sister is dead, they told me. And even then, I expected everything to just fall apart, for the entire globe to begin wailing and weeping, for the clouds to float down from the sky like ashes in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. And yet the traffic kept moving, veering around the twisted scrap of junk metal that obstructed the highway by the instruction of a few well placed cones and road signs. The birds continued singing then, too, and my aunts and cousins continued nattering aimlessly around me.

Just like the stupid, Smiley Nurse.

I looked up from my hazy daydreaming as I vaguely registered her voice repeating my name over and over in an attempt to regain my attention.

"Tamara, I understand what you're going through," she assured me caringly, her voice full of empathy and a sickeningly condescending smugness. My guess from one look at her was that she had a few well mannered, timid little children at home and a nauseatingly average husband who was pathetic in bed. She had unimaginatively become a nurse, aiming to help young, misguided girls like me find the right path in life, away from the temptations of openness to sexual exploration, popular culture and freedom of speech.

I glared back at her bitterly. No, she did not understand what I was going through. She did not know, nor understand, anything about me, no matter how strongly she believed she did.