April, 2009

    Iggy hated hospitals, but it wasn't like she ever spent much time in one. She had never known an ill family member, or an injured friend. So, in all actuality, she hated the idea of hospitals. She believed them to be the places were people went to die, and just the thought of that sent a shiver twisting through her bones like a wire. She had too much life to live to be spending her time in rooms full of ghosts. Iggy decided in her childhood that she would avoid any infirmary whatever the cost. Even breaking her left wrist in middle school during P.E. wasn't enough for her to seek treatment. Instead, she had her sister make her a cast out of gauze and household plaster. Her wrist hadn't been the same since.

    The leather examination table was hard and cold on Iggy's bottom. She tried swinging her legs over the side of the table to create circulation, but the terrain of her skin still pricked with goose bump hills wherever she made contact with the leather. It was then that she wished she bothered to get dressed that Sunday morning instead of commuting around in her pajama shorts, but she didn't think it would matter. She was at a hospital, after all. They'd seen worse.

    Every aspect of the room was sterile and bleak. Everything from the institutional white walls, to the harsh ceiling light that illuminated every follicle of her skin, to the little cotton swabs in the tediously polished jars beside the sink. The aromas of bleach and chemicals mingled in the air, burning her nose. She was tempted to spray the room with the perfume from her purse, and that was exactly what she did she when she felt the familiar lurch of her stomach.

    The bile crept up her throat like a live squid. Her eyes watered and her hand shot to her mouth like last time, and the time before that, and the time before that. The vomiting she could handle, but it was the chronic pains that forced her to overcome her aversion to medical institutions. The migraines and the lower-stomach aches always followed the disgorging. It got to the point where she laid crippled in bed for hours, and her mother would run about the house shouting things in Spanish about Iggy dying.

    The situation really put a damper on Iggy's usual routine: 1. school, 2. party, 3. hook-up. As soon as she got home from school was when she would resign herself to her bedroom, not to come out until the next morning. She felt unbearably old and lifeless when her friends would call with plans for the next get-together, but Iggy was too pained to attend. She would even cry because of it, and Ignatia Lucia Lane never cried. She claimed it was "against her religion" not to party. Really, she was an Atheist.

    Iggy couldn't forget the last party she went to despite the gaps her alcohol consumption left in the story. It was about a month ago. It was someone's birthday party, but, really, that was just an excuse to make a brothel out of someone's house. She didn't know whose house it was or who the supposed birthday person was. All she did know was that she came with Todd (becoming his new party buddy since Ever was away at college), the party served great alcohol, the DJ played the best beats, and there were enough rooms in the house to accommodate the smorgasbord of one-night stands soon to occur. And another thing she knew was that no matter how drunk she was and whether or not she remembered it, she was sure as shit going to sleep with the tall, handsome guy in the corner who had had an eye on her the entire night. Even when she danced with other guys, she still found herself checking the corner to make sure he was there. He was all a blur now, but he must have really been something if he was the only thing she could think about in the midst of all the sweaty bodies, heavy bass, and Jell-O shots being passed her way. And he really was something. She remembered the sex being great, although the details were as smudged as her lipstick. But the morning after was the worst. She woke up hungover, naked and alone in a foreign bedroom, and practically initiated a manhunt — rather, a brahunt — with Todd for her undergarments.

    She smiled haughtily at the memory.

    There were three knocks on the door. A short Asian man in a white coat meant for someone much taller slithered into the room. His bald spot was fruitlessly covered with a graying comb-over, and his scalp was dotted with dark liver spots. Iggy tried not to laugh.

    "I have the results of your urine test, Ms. Lane," the man, Dr. Song, spoke. His voice held licks of a suppressed accent.

    "What is it, Doc?" Iggy restrained a smile. "Am I dying?"

    "No." He shook his head, cleared his throat, and relieved his hands of Iggy's medical chart before pulling up a stool to sit in front of her. "You're pregnant."

    "What?" she laughed, shifting uncomfortably on the table.

    Dr. Song's expression remained the same. Stoic and unamused.

    He wasn't joking. She suddenly felt very ill. The bile almost succeeded in spewing from Iggy's throat and across the examination room.

    She was out of breath, although she hadn't moved at all. "Can you repeat that?" she panted.

    Dr. Song nodded. "You're pregnant, Ms. Lane, and I am one-hundred percent positive of that."

    Her eyes brewed with a distraught wetness. "You're sure?"

    "One-hundred percent," he said.

    Iggy never thought that just one month before her eighteenth birthday and two months until her high school graduation, she would would be faced with the possibility of buying baby clothes instead of her cap and gown. She was in shock. A heartsick, debilitating shock that tore through her flesh in bright flashes and burned her eyes from the inside out. She couldn't organize her thoughts or listen to the words pooling out of the doctor's mouth. All she saw was his lips moving, but she couldn't hear anything coming out. She was upset, disconnected from reality, and some of that feeling came from the last memory she had of Ever. They had gotten into a fight about Iggy's promiscuity. Now, Ever was no angel, but her trysts were far and few between compared to the extensive list of Iggy's lovers. All Ever wanted was to tell Iggy to be careful, but Iggy didn't listen. She hardly listened to her parents, so heeding the warning of someone just one year older than her was out of the question. But now, as she sat on the cold leather table with the realization that one night of "fun" had changed her entire life, she wished she would have listened.

    What upset Iggy the most was that she knew it was the guy from the birthday party. She didn't even know his name or phone number, and she couldn't even remember what he looked like. She was carrying the child of a man who might as well not exist. And, as immature as it may have seemed, the only thought clear enough in her head among all of the other fragmentary, disconnected words and sentences, was, "My parents are gonna kill me."

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