None of the Above (14 page)

When Ms. Diaz gave me the list of places I could volunteer, I chose the Caritas Health Clinic, partly because I liked the idea of working with Dr. Johnson, and partly because it was the farthest location from our school, and only two other students had signed up to work there: Darren Kowalski and Jessica Riley.

As I drove up to the health clinic for my orientation, it became pretty obvious why so few people had chosen it for their service projects. The clinic wasn't in the best part of town, and was in the same building as a check-cashing and bail-bond operation. The hallways had a 1970s orange-brown carpet that was matted down with wear and spotted with bits of trampled-in chewing gum.

After a bit of wandering, I finally found a door with a sign saying:

Caritas Health Clinic

Our mission
: to administer quality health care regardless of age, race, gender, or ability to pay.

Just as I was about to press the buzzer to enter, another door just down the hall opened, and a familiar lanky figure came out.

“Hey, Darren,” I said. “Your notes were super helpful.”

He looked flushed, and blinked a couple of times owlishly. “Um, thanks. So, you're the new volunteer?”

I nodded.

“Cool. I mean, we need all the help we can get here.”

“Sure. I'm excited to help. Though, are you doing . . . janitorial work?” I asked, peering at the sign on the door he'd just exited.

He laughed, and opened the door to show me a tiny closet with a computer and a bunch of other whirring equipment with lights. “We call it the Dungeon—it's the main server for the electronic medical records. The desktop is so old you can practically hear it saying ‘I think I can, I think I can.' Anyway, it can get pretty hot in there. So I have to come out every so often for air. And to help with orientation.” He looked at his watch. “You're right on time. I'll show you the break room.”

Darren used his ID badge to buzz me into a waiting room lined with plastic chairs, and brought me behind the front desk to a tiny room set up with a Mr. Coffee, a cube-shaped fridge, and a folding bridge table. Jessica Riley was there, drinking a Red Bull. After the world's fastest double take, she jumped up out of her chair with a smile on her face.

“Kristin! So great to see you here.” The look of genuine delight on her face sent an unexpected wave of happiness through me, until I remembered that Jessica had been the female lead in our school play for two years running. If anyone could fake friendliness, she could.

I supposed I should be grateful that she tried.

Dr. Johnson came in, and shook my hand warmly. “Kristin, we're so happy to have you here. As I'm sure you know, we operate on a razor-thin margin and are very short staffed, so every volunteer helps.

“After you get your patient confidentiality training, Darren will get you set up with our electronic medical record system. And Jessica will go over our prenatal-care algorithm. For now, though, we'll just show you how to prepare rooms in between patients and checking people in.”

A tiny black-haired nurse's aide named Lisa led me around the back hallways, and taught me how to wipe down the counters in each exam room and change the paper covers on the tables. I tried not to imagine a scared teenage girl lying there,
wondering why the lights were so bright, and why the stirrups felt ice-cold, even through her socks.

When I was done, I went out to the front desk to see if they needed any help with mail or copies. The waiting room was starting to fill up with people. All women, which made sense, of course. Dr. Johnson had told me that she only ran her ob-gyn clinic twice a month. The other days, a family doctor staffed the clinic.

I hadn't prepared myself for how many children would be there. Most of the women had kids with them—a majority of them had more than one. A weary-looking woman in a black shirt and jeans had a baby wrapped around her stomach with a beach towel, a toddler in a stroller, and a pair of twin boys that looked to be around four or five. The boys were fighting over a worn copy of
Parenting
magazine. I gave a little laugh when one of the boys finally won the tug-of-war and cried out in triumph. Then I just felt sad, and went back to turn over some rooms.

At dinnertime, Jessica invited me into Darren's Dungeon to eat. The clinic's heating had broken down the night before, and it had only gotten fixed a few hours earlier, so I welcomed the heat coming from the computer's CPUs. I wedged myself onto a bench next to the main computer tower, meaning that I got an earful of the funky soul music blaring from the speaker.

“What band is this, anyway?” I asked.

Darren staggered back and put a hand to his mouth. “You can't say that this is the first time you've been exposed to the genius which is The Concept?”

“Um, yeah.”

“Well, prepare to have your life changed,” Darren said.

“Just in case you haven't noticed yet,” Jessica stage-whispered, “Darren here uses the terms
genius
and
life-changing
very, very loosely. The Concept makes my little sister's garage band sound like the Rolling Stones.”

“Hey, Riley,” Darren said, pretending to act annoyed. “First of all, don't dis Becky's band. They kick ass. And second: don't yuck my yum. I have my tastes, and you have yours. If you want to listen to something else, you can go back to Antarctica.”

Jessica rolled her eyes. “Can you at least turn it down? Not everyone wants to feel like they're at a rave when they're eating dinner.”

Darren sighed and moused down the volume. I was surprised that, once I could actually hear the lyrics, the music didn't suck. After the first track ended, the second track was so quiet and introspective that I asked Darren to turn the volume up. He did, grinning triumphantly at Jessica.

I munched on my turkey sandwich and nodded my head to the music. Jessica wolfed down her hummus wrap and took it
upon herself to give me the inquisition. “So, I didn't know you were interested in medicine,” she said, sounding kind of like a teacher trying to get to know a student better. “It's nice to have more people around, though. There's always work to do somewhere.”

“It seemed like a worthy cause,” I said lamely. Darren wasn't really involving himself in the conversation, taking bites of his tuna sub in between some work he was doing on the computer. While Jessica crunched on some carrot sticks, I mustered up something polite to say. “How about you? I always thought you were going to end up on Broadway or something. Don't they have a project volunteering at the theater?”

“Nah, I'm planning on nursing school. My mom's a midwife, and I think I want to be one too.”

That got Darren's attention. “I really don't get why anyone would want to do that. My uncle said that watching my mom's childbirth video scarred him for life.”

Jessica opened her mouth for a rebuttal, but I kicked Darren's chair with my boot. A lecture on the Miracle of Birth would just be more salt in my wounds.

“Don't yuck her yum,” I said.

“What?” He stared at me like antlers had just popped out of my head. It felt like the first normal look I'd gotten from him all day.

“Hmm,” was all the brilliant Darren Kowalski could think of to say.

But Jessica grinned at me, and despite my suspicions about actresses and their sincerity, I grinned back.

Make that
two
normal looks.

“Thank God you're here,” Dr. Johnson's physician assistant said the minute I walked into clinic the next week. “We're going to need you to help with the next two patients. We have two add-ons, and Jessica is coming late today.”

Dr. Johnson hadn't been kidding when she said they were short staffed. A maternity patient meant there'd be a pelvic exam. I felt a little queasy. “I haven't been fully trained for that yet.”

“All you have to do is give her the instruments she needs.” He handed me a bag full of plastic speculums and pointed me toward Exam Room 1, where Dr. Johnson stood reading the patient's chart. When she entered, I followed close behind but hugged the wall when I saw the patient, a tiny Asian girl with long black hair pulled back into a ponytail.
The one-size-fits-all gown hung on her slight frame like a muumuu. She looked about fifteen.

“Kristin, this is Vong,” Dr. Johnson said. Vong gave me a tired look, and I stared at the floor.

Speaking slowly, Dr. Johnson introduced me. She asked a few more questions, which Vong answered mostly with nods or headshakes. Then Dr. Johnson went over and started examining her from head to toe. When she moved the gown up to examine Vong's stomach, Vong's knees jerked together involuntarily. The movement caught my eye and I saw the stretch marks making faint white lines on her belly. There was an angry red ridge right at her bikini line. A C-section scar?

I felt a raw ache in my chest and closed my eyes. A minute later, Dr. Johnson called me over. Vong was already in the stirrups. I couldn't see her head anymore because of the drape over her legs.

My gloves stuck to the sweat on my palms. Dr. Johnson asked for a smaller speculum. I stared at the ceiling.

Vong didn't freak out the way I did when the speculum got in; she barely moved at all. After Dr. Johnson positioned the work light and peeked in between Vong's legs, she frowned and didn't ask for a swab like I'd been taught she would. Instead she reached up and pressed on her belly with one hand. She murmured a question that I couldn't hear and sighed at Vong's response.

“Was everything okay?” I asked when we left.

Dr. Johnson grimaced. “As okay as it can be for a girl who's going to be a mother of two before she reaches her sixteenth birthday. Because of her pelvic disproportion, she'll probably need a repeat C-section, which puts her at risk for some scary complications in the future if she keeps having kids.”

It took me a while to process. “Can't she . . . can't she have an abortion?” I asked painfully. I couldn't believe I was even suggesting it.

Dr. Johnson shrugged wearily. “Nope. She's Catholic, which is why she didn't get an abortion the first time, even though she was only thirteen and it was essentially a date rape.”

I was shaking my head before the words even sank in. I thought of the knobbly knees squeezing together.

“Besides,” Dr. Johnson said, “she wouldn't want an abortion even if she weren't Catholic. This second baby is by her new boyfriend.” Her voice was flat.

“Maybe things will work out,” I said. It was easier to dream up a happy ending than to think too much about Vong's past.

But not exactly realistic.

I was sitting at the front desk, helping with patient check-in, when Jessica and Darren came in laughing. Despite being more than half full, the waiting room was hushed, expectant.
So when the two of them walked in with their cheery outside voices it was jarring, even embarrassing. They dropped their voices almost immediately, but even then their energy buzzed, filled the room.

As he let himself behind the front desk, Darren caught sight of me and tilted his chin in my direction. “Hey. You all right?” he whispered.

I couldn't get Vong out of my head. My eyes flickered out to the waiting room. How many more stories like hers were out there? “I'm fine. Just getting used to how intense things are here.”

Darren nodded, understanding. He put his hand on my shoulder and held it there for a heartbeat. It was just a touch, but I shivered at the intimacy.

Later, as Dr. Johnson finished up her charting, I asked her what pelvic disproportion was.

“The term is for when a woman's hips aren't big enough to allow a baby through,” she said. “In general, a woman's pelvis is much larger than a man's so it can allow a baby's head to go through. But there's a limit to how wide hips can be before it interferes with your ability to walk—it's called the obstetrical dilemma.”

I thought about the pictures I'd seen of Caster Semenya and her stick-straight hips, and grimaced.

Jessica misunderstood my frown. “I know, how messed up
is that?” Jessica said. “To have to choose between having kids and being able to run away from something that wants to eat you? The tyranny of childbirth knows no bounds.”

“Hey,” said Darren. “What about the tyranny of having your gonads on the outside? It's not like men chose to be one swift kick away from a world of pain.”

“Puh-leeze,” Jessica said. “Like there's any question that girls have it worse? Menstruation? Labor? PMS? You don't even know how awful it is to have to sit down to pee at rest stops.” She turned to me. “Kristin, back me up here.”

The two of them turned to stare at me, and in an instant I felt the tomato-and-cheese sandwich I ate for lunch start to come up. With a squeal of metal, I pushed my folding chair back. “Excuse me.” I ran to the staff bathroom until the nausea passed. Then I washed my face with cold water and sat down on the toilet seat.

After a few minutes went by I heard a tentative knock on the door.

“I'm almost done,” I shouted.

“Kristin? It's Jessica. Are you all right?”

I sighed, and opened the door. Jessica peered in, as if to make sure that I really was done, then walked in and locked the door behind her. She leaned against the sink.

“I'm sorry,” she said, looking at the floor. “Darren set me straight on what it means to have your condition.”

Darren the Fact-Checker strikes again.

“If all that talk made you uncomfortable, I apologize.”

Uncomfortable?
I thought. Was that the word to describe what I felt, a combination of wretchedness and hopelessness and revulsion at both what I was—and what I wasn't?

“But to be honest, I'm a bit jealous of you.”

I looked up at Jessica, who wasn't smiling, and rolled my eyes. “Seriously?”

“Yes, seriously. You're like . . . Woman 2.0. All of the girl with none of the worry. You never have to stress about getting your period, or about getting pregnant. That's, like, huge. They're the two things I hate the most about being a girl.”

I couldn't believe that someone as smart as Jessica was saying these things. “Don't you think that birth control is better than not having a uterus?”

“People always forget their pills, and things happen.”

“But at least then you can have a baby someday. I can't.”

“I don't mean to sound insensitive, but you can always adopt.”

I felt an unfamiliar rumble of anger boiling up inside of me. “It's not the same,” I said dismissively.

“No,” Jessica agreed. Her voice was cheerful, but her look steely. “It's better. You get to take a child that would otherwise be unloved and give it a home.”

Now I felt like the jerk. I looked up at Jessica. Something
about the edge to her voice set off a warning bell: the topic was personal. “You're adopted?”

“I wasn't, but my sister was.” I thought back to Homecoming, trying to picture Darren's date. Now that I thought about it, Becky and Jessica couldn't have looked less alike. Becky was all petite with stick-straight dark hair, while Jessica was tall, almost big-boned, with frizzy dirty-blond hair.

Neither of us said anything for a while.

Jessica broke the silence. “So are you done feeling sorry for yourself?” She smiled to take away the sting of the words, and offered me a hand off the toilet seat.

I gave a choked laugh. “For now, maybe. No guarantees about an hour from now.”

That night as I got ready for bed, I wondered what Jessica would think if she found out her Woman 2.0 had to take estrogen pills. I'd been procrastinating about starting my hormone therapy, but my dad had picked up the bottle from the pharmacy, and each night he sent me to bed with a kiss and a “Don't forget to take your meds!”

I opened the childproof bottle and slid a tablet into my hand. It was tiny, round, and pink-colored, as if that would somehow make you feel more feminine when you took it. I wondered if testosterone tablets were blue. Who decided that pink = girl and blue = boy, anyway?

As much as I hated the idea of popping pills, I hated the
idea of hot flashes more. If Dr. Cheng was right, the meds would give me more energy, too.

Before I could change my mind, I put the pill in my mouth, and swallowed.