Sunday, May 22, 2005

This post reminded me of my worst Where-the-hell-is-my-Aunt-Flow experience (come on, girls, fess up, we've all had them) -

I was in high school and my long-haired dirtbag boyfriend, Andy, and I had just broken up (okay, he dumped me because I made out with some other boy at a party - sheesh, some people are so sensitive) and I've never really kept track, but after a while, I realized that my Aunt Flow was suspiciously absent.

I couldn't tell my mom (because she's always been psychotic and you never can tell how she's going to react) and I couldn't afford a pregnancy test because I was a slacker and didn't have a job and the internet wasn't so readily available so I couldn't sell a kidney on the black market (those things are expensive as hell - pregnancy tests, not kidneys... well, I'm sure kidneys are expensive, but I've never priced one) - so my slutty friend, Jenn, came to the rescue (every girl has that slutty friend, like Rizzo, from "Grease") comes to the rescue and offers to take me to some clinic where they offer free pregnancy testing (she's there so often that she's practically got a reserved parking space)

So one day after school, we head down to there and I fill out a questionnaire filled with horribly personal questions, then I go and pee in a cup and go back to the tiny, deathly quiet waiting room where Jenn is reading a People magazine and there are three or four anxious looking couples.

"After they run the test," Jenn tells me. "They'll call you into the back and talk to you about how you should be using protection and shouldn't be sleeping around, yadda yadda yadda, and then they'll tell you your results and your options... I mean, if it's bad, you know?"

"Holy fuck, what am I going to do?"

She shrugged. "Wanna go to Taco Bell after this?"

I put my head in my hands - abortions were a mere inconvenience for her (I told you she was slutty). After about a million years, the girl at the front desk calls out my name - loudly - first and last name - for everyone in this teeny tiny waiting room to hear. I'm mentally preparing myself for what I'm going to find out, getting myself ready to find out my fate.

"YOUR TEST IS NEGATIVE!"

Wow, good thing I wasn't an emotionally fragile teenage girl or I would have been MORTIFIED!

There were murmurs of "Omigod" and "How embarassing"

I just made Jenn sit with me for about five more minutes before we quietly got up, shuffled out and went to Taco Bell.