Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6

Maddy is slathering peanut butter on a toasted sesame bagel at the kitchen counter when her mother walks in, barefoot in black bike shorts and a flamingo-pink sports bra, sweaty from her Peloton ride and drinking water from a blue Stanley bottle.

“Good, you’re home,” her mother says. “We’ll leave here in about thirty minutes.”

“For what?”

“The gynecologist.”

Maddy stops licking peanut butter off the knife and groans.

“Do I have to?”

“Now that you’re having sex,” says her mother, pausing to take a deep breath, “you have to take care of your health.”

Maddy and Adam have been having sex, in this house, since she was fifteen, but her mother only caught on the other day when she found a condom wrapper in Maddy’s bedroom wastebasket. That was careless of them, and she was mortified when her mother confronted her, but whatever. Her mother shouldn’t have needed physical evidence at this point to know that her daughter was having sex. But her mother grew up Catholic and a good girl, and all that no-sex-before-marriage dogma still rules her thinking like a constitutional law with no amendment. And religious brainwashing aside, her mother is a master of seeing only what she wants to.

Maddy endured a tedious and unnecessary lecture about birth control, but beyond that, her mother was surprisingly chill about it. It helps that she loves Adam. He’d essentially been part of their family for four years, and her mother was almost as shocked and heartbroken as Maddy when they broke up last summer. They’ve been back together, almost inseparable, for two weeks now, and her mother is thrilled.

“Fine.”

Maddy settles into her seat at the table, takes a bite of bagel, and begins scrolling Instagram.

“Are you going to shower before we go?” her mother asks.

“I showered this morning.”

“But you worked and rode your bike in this heat.”

“So?”

“Go shower. You don’t want to smell… there .”

“Ew, Mom. Stop.”

She’s already nervous about going to a gynecologist, about stirrups and the speculum and a stranger poking around inside her, but she hadn’t thought about this particular detail. Her pussy usually smells like bread and body odor and sometimes pennies, none of which she finds disgusting or a problem to fix. But now she feels pressured to hide her natural essence from this doctor she’s never met, whose nose will be between her legs, that if her vagina doesn’t smell like a meadow of fucking lavender, her mother will die of shame.

“You have to shower before tonight anyway.”

“What’s tonight?”

Her mother shoots her a look of disbelief. “We’re going to the club for Jack’s last night.”

She forgot. Jack leaves for his junior year at Boston College in the morning.

“I can’t. I have plans with Sofia and some friends.”

She doesn’t say that she’s going to a comedy club with a two-drink minimum in New York City because she knows her mother would end all discussion.

“You can do something with them another night. Invite Adam.”

“He has other plans.”

“It’s your brother’s last night home. We’re going as a family.”

“He won’t care.”

“Well, I do.”

“We won’t all be together when it’s my last night home next week.”

“The rest of us can go to the club on your last night, too.”

“I don’t care about going to stupid Pine Meadows. Please, Mom. Sofia’s going back to Tufts in two days and I won’t see her again until Thanksgiving.”

“Maddy—”

“You’re always making me do everything I don’t want to do!” Her voice explodes, shrill and loud, a tantrum of tears assembling behind it. “I’m sick of it!”

Her mother pauses.

“You are going to the gynecologist and getting on some kind of birth control, but fine, you don’t have to go to the club. I’m tired of arguing with you.”

Her mother walks to the refrigerator, exchanges her Stanley for a Pellegrino, and leaves the room.

Maddy goes to take another bite of bagel, but a knotted ball of anxiety has lodged itself at the mouth of her stomach, rejecting even the suggestion of food, and she sets her uneaten bagel back on the plate. She checks the time on her phone. She returns to Instagram.

She’s tired of arguing with her mother, too. She’s tired of being told what to wear and what to do, tired of doctor and dentist appointments, tired of boring dinners at the country club, tired of old people asking her what she’s majoring in. She’s tired of Instagram but can’t stop scrolling. As she views post after post, she senses a different kind of tired, a presence encroaching at the edge of her consciousness, familiar but not yet discernable, like the shadowy shape of someone she knows approaching from a distance at twilight, closer than it was yesterday.

She’s probably just tired of being home. That could explain all of it. She’s an adult now, but she’ll forever be a child in this house, under her mother’s roof and rules. She’ll feel better in five days when she’s back at NYU, a sophomore with a new roommate and a boyfriend who loves her only a hundred blocks away.

She switches from mindless scrolling to opening her own profile page. She taps on the selfie of her and Adam that she took yesterday in the parking lot of Cumberland Farms. She smiles. This year is going to be great.

Dr. Shapiro is a dude. She really wishes he were a she, assumed he would be, and didn’t think to ask. What kind of man decides to become a gynecologist? She can’t fathom an answer that doesn’t totally creep her out. A nurse practitioner is standing by her head, silent and motionless. Is she looking on because she’s in training, or is she a mandated spectator, there to protect patients from being violated by their gross male gynecologist? She’d put all her Starbucks tips on the latter. The nurse practitioner’s presence should be comforting, but it also prompts Maddy to imagine the reported cases of assault that had to have happened to require this highly trained woman to simply stand witness, and she feels even more unsettled.

The room is cold, but she feels hot. She’s reclined on a table, a blanket-size tissue draped over her front, her sweaty bare ass sticking to the disposable paper pad beneath her. Her bare feet are planted in the stirrups, knees knocked together. Her midnight-blue toenail polish is chipped on the big toes. She needs a pedicure.

“Can you scooch your bottom closer to me?” asks Dr. Shapiro. “A little closer. And open your knees a bit? A bit more. Good.”

He’s sitting on a low stool at the base of the table, eye level with her gaping vag and wearing a headlamp, as if he’s about to go coal mining. He’s got a dark beard and the hairy forearms of a werewolf, but that’s about all she takes in before her panicked eyes dart around the room, desperate for something else to focus on. She can’t look at him examining what she herself has never seen. The nurse is out of view behind her, useless. The walls are clinical white and bare, no posters about women’s health, no tranquil beach scene or floral landscape, nothing academic or soothing to distract her. What she wouldn’t give right now for a poster of Elmo drinking a glass of milk.

“Now a little cold and a little pressure.”

She closes her eyes. He inserts what must be the speculum into her, and she flinches, not because it hurts exactly but because it is alarmingly cold. There’s a click and a very uncomfortable pressure, like he’s just cranked her vagina open with a car jack, and then he does something that begins as a mild twinge but fast blooms into a monstrous, give-me-all-the-chocolate-in-the-house-now menstrual cramp.

“All done. That wasn’t so bad, right?”

Did he basically just ask, Was that good for you?

She sits up and crosses her legs, aware of the cold gel dripping out of her, soaking into the paper pad, and the breeze from the air vent violating her now-exposed naked backside. He removes his headlamp and latex gloves and swivels his stool over to the side.

“So how are you?” he asks, looking over her chart and not at her.

“Good.”

“A note here from your PCP says you’ve been dealing with severe PMS.”

“I don’t know, it’s probably just normal PMS.”

“Mood swings, depression, fatigue—those can be pretty debilitating. Not fun for you, or anyone around you.”

“I guess.”

She’s actually been feeling pretty good all summer, even better now that she’s back together with Adam. Sure, her boobs swell a cup size once a month, a premenstrual symptom Adam is fond of, and she gets a bit bloated and grouchy, but that’s normal.

“Are you sexually active?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you using for birth control?”

“Condoms.”

“Perfect, especially to prevent STDs, so keep using those, but if you want, there are a number of birth control options that can give you some relief from the PMS.”

Maddy shrugs. “Okay.”

“There’s the IUD, with or without hormone. It’s ninety-nine percent effective at preventing pregnancy. Women like it because they don’t have to do anything once it’s in. We call it ‘get it and forget it.’?”

She’s heard it hurts going in, much worse than menstrual cramps, more like labor pain, although, now that she thinks about it, she’s not sure how girls in high school would be able to make this claim. But the bigger reason why she’ll never get an IUD is her friend Claire. She had the copper IUD, and it made her periods intolerably heavy, so she went to have it removed, but her doctor couldn’t find the string. An ultrasound located the IUD embedded somewhere in the north pole of her uterus, and she needed full-on surgery to get it out of her.

“I don’t want that.”

“Okay, there’s the implant. Also a good ‘get-it-and-forget-it’ option, it’s a small rod, like a flexible matchstick, that gets inserted on the inside of your upper arm. It releases a hormone called progestin and is just as effective as the IUD at preventing pregnancy. It’s good for four years, but you can also have it removed at any point if it’s not right for you or your situation changes.”

Her friend Abby had the “arm bar.” She got drilled with a soccer ball in that arm during a game, and the bar broke, spilling its entire contents into her body all at once. She was crying and eating ice cream nonstop for a week. Scary, but Maddy doesn’t play any sports.

“Does it hurt going in? Would I need stitches?”

“No. I’d give you a local anesthetic. You won’t feel a thing and there are no stitches. It takes less than thirty seconds. No one will know it’s there.”

“Okay, I’ll do that one,” she says.

“Do you smoke or vape?”

“No.”

“Do have a family history of breast cancer?”

“No.”

“Great. I think you’re going to like it. It’ll probably make your periods lighter, which would be nice, right?” he asks, smiling, as if he’s ever bled through a super plus tampon into white pants. “And it really should help with the PMS. Women shouldn’t have to endure having their moods hijacked every month.”

On the surface, his words seem kind, born out of genuine concern and empathy, but something about his delivery feels off, and instead she feels patronized and agitated. She’d love to give this doctor a long-ass list of things women shouldn’t have to endure, starting with handsy guys at clubs, making eighty cents on the dollar compared with men, and having cold fucking speculums shoved into their vaginas as preventative “care.” Would it have killed him and taken more than sixty seconds to run it under warm water first?

But she’s barefoot, naked-assed, and sitting in a puddle of lube, hardly in a position to put up a fuss. She just wants to get dressed and go home. She swallows her “emotional” rant and instead offers her doctor an awkward, tight-mouthed grin. At nineteen, she is well practiced in the art of ending unwanted conversations with men in a smile.

Showered and wearing a bathrobe, Maddy is almost done applying her eye makeup when a text comes in from Sofia.

See you in 30 at the train

Maddy gives it a thumbs-up. She applies a couple more swipes of smoky gray across each lid and checks herself out in the bathroom mirror.

She hates her hair. When she was ten, she was obsessed with Emily’s American Girl doll, Kit Kittredge, the only doll she’d ever seen with short hair. She copied the cut and rocked a bob for a few years, enjoying compliments like cute and sassy . But as she got older, she didn’t feel or want to look cute or sassy anymore, but she wasn’t sure what she wanted to feel or look like instead, so she’s kept the same boring style.

She walks into her bedroom and nearly screams. Adam is sitting on her bed, playing a video game, probably Call of Duty , on his phone.

“Jesus, what are you doing here?”

“Nice to see you, too,” says Adam without looking up from his phone.

“I thought you were going out with the guys.”

“Pete’s helping his girlfriend move into her dorm and Nico’s out with Sara. Let’s get a pizza.”

“I’m going to the Comedy Cellar with Sofia and some of her friends from Tufts. You wanna come?”

“Nah, if those comedians were any good, they’d already be on Netflix.”

Maddy opens the top drawer of her dresser and tries to choose a bra. It would help if she knew what she’s wearing. She opens her closet door and starts browsing through her hung shirts. Adam looks up from his game and notices that she’s getting ready for a night out.

“Come on, I’m not really friends with Sofia, and we don’t even know those other people. Skip it and stay with me. This is one of our last nights together.”

“You were going out with Pete and Nico until they bailed on you.” She pulls out a black sleeveless Free People shirt that ties in the back. “We’re going to be in New York together. We’ll see each other all the time.”

She meant to punctuate that sentence with a period, but her tone betrayed a lack of confidence, the hint of a question.

“Yeah, but we’ll have to deal with roommates and stuff.” Adam puts his phone down and walks over to Maddy still standing by her closet. “Where is everyone?”

“They’re at the club for Jack’s last night home.”

“So we have an empty house, you practically naked, and no one home for a couple of hours. Why would you want to leave me?”

He starts kissing her. She resists at first, making him work for it, and he does. She knew she’d blow off Sofia and the Comedy Cellar the second she saw him on her bed, that this is where the conversation would lead before he even opened his mouth. She’ll text Sofia and let her know she can’t go. She’ll blame her mother, say she couldn’t get out of family dinner. Hopefully Sofia won’t be mad.

She kisses him back now. Part of her feels pathetic for allowing Adam’s whim to derail and dictate her plans. Another part of her acknowledges that she’s placed all her emotional eggs in his basket and that this is dangerous, that one or many or all of them could end up broken, shattered. Again. But the voices of those parts are weak whispers, soap bubble opinions easily popped.

The part of her that is steering her ship knows that if she has to choose, she’ll pick Adam. Every time. She’s happiest when she’s with him, and choosing to be happy can’t be wrong.