Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
We race through, weeds whipping our shins, and scramble up the berm separating campus from the road to the east shore.
My side cramps. I slow to a jog.
“You can still shift, right?” Nia asks, panting. Her golden eyes know what I haven’t admitted yet, not even to myself.
“Abertha’s shack isn’t far,” I say for an answer. “We can go there.”
“I have a better idea.” Nia leads us into the woods, and we cross a stream a few times in case we’re followed. I don’t scent or hear anyone, though. They probably aren’t going to bother. It takes me a little time to realize that we’re heading toward the Bogs.
It’s like my brain has narrowed itself as much as it can so that only the smallest trickle of thought can come through—Nia’s earthy, metallic scent, an impending snow storm thickening the air, the skitter of twigs as a desperately skinny rabbit bolts into the underbrush.
Nia leads us parallel to the lakeside path and past the entrance to the boards, almost as far as the Narrows. It isn’t until she elbows through a stand of brown marsh grass, revealing the pilings of a long-vanished dock, that I realize where we’re going. The Empties.
We hop from piling to piling, snapping the brittle marsh grasses as we pass. At the end of the old dock, in the murky water, at least two dozen abandoned trailers float on their old, cracked platforms, creaking and swaying, held together with ropes and rusted chains. A platform in the northernmost corner split, the trailer tipped and took on water, and now the whole mess tilts at a downward angle, too vast to sink.
When I was a pup, we’d come here on a dare or to find a bolt hole where we could snarf down food we lifted from our elders. I haven’t been in years.
“This way.” Nia picks her way past empty metal hulks to a small trailer with white siding speckled with mold, pale blue trim around the bottom and around the windows as decorative shutters.
Nia steps inside and helps me after. Despite the busted-out windows, it’s dim and damp.
Nia plops to the floor, legs straight like a doll.
“Home sweet home,” she grins, letting her combat boots drop to both sides.
I didn’t start hanging out with Nia until after her father went on his walk, and her mother decided that this trailer was cursed, and it should be banished to the Empties with the others that only brought bad luck and heartache. The trailer I was born in is somewhere on the sinking side. I’ve never searched it out. When I was younger, I stuck close to shore.
I lower myself to the linoleum and sit with my arms wrapped around my knees. I’m still shaking. By some miracle, despite the moldy, musky smell, the nausea has passed.
“So you’re preggers, eh?” Nia breaks the silence.
I shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
Probably.
The nausea started last week, but it doesn’t come in the morning. It comes after I eat, and until this morning, I never actually puked.
Nia drags her backpack over, rummages, and pulls out a rectangular box. “Got you this.” She tosses it to me.
It’s a pregnancy test.
“I took it from my aunt’s closet the day after you didn’t want to share my deer jerky.”
“It was gamey.”
“That has never stopped you in the past.”
I look into Nia’s swirly tiger eyes, my toughest and best friend, and I lean on her bravery for the thousandth time.
“I’m scared,” I say.
“You’re stronger than you know.”
“What am I going to do?”
“What you have to.”
There’s a moment when I feel like I’m talking into a mirror, when I can vividly imagine another time and place—maybe last year when Nia mated Pritchard, and we were hiding under the covers in her bed, and she’d covered herself head-to-toe with ice cubes wrapped in dish towels—when she might have said the same thing to me, and I might have said the same to her.
“How does this work?” I squint at the back of the box.
“You pee on it.”
“It says it expired last month.”
“Expiration dates are a human scam.”
I nod. It’s commonly known.
I fiddle with the box and look around. I’ve been here before, but not for a long time. It’s exactly the same as I remember except for a new layer of graffiti on the walls. There’s the built-in breakfast bar stripped of everything except the particleboard. The square hole in the wall where the oven was, and the rectangular hole in the counter where the sink had been.
The toilet is long gone. What am I going to do—squat over the hole where it used to be?
My gaze flies to Nia, panic rising. “I don’t even have to pee.”
She reaches into her bag for a half-drunk sports drink. She tosses it to me. It’s room temperature. My throat gags on air. It can’t taste worse than barfed-up baked apple, though, right?
I pinch my nose and chug.
“Hey, that’s Icicle Blast. Savor it. That’s the good stuff.”
It is not. My stomach revolts as the lukewarm liquid sloshes and settles, but I breathe through it and struggle onto my wobbly legs. I’m vaguely aware that I’m still in shock. I must be because I’m not crying, and I’m not huddled in a hysterical ball with ‘did you leave any virgin holes?’ echoing in my brain.
It’s fine. I can lose it later. Right now, I need to figure out a place to pee. It’s too gross to squat in the trailer bathroom, so I go outside. Nia follows. I open the box and unwrap the stick. My hands shake so I focus hard on keeping a tight grip. If I drop this overboard into the marsh, Nia will never let me hear the end of it.
I peel down my gym shorts and panties and step out so they’re circling one ankle and out of the way.
“How you want to do this?” Nia asks.
“I’m gonna stick my ass over the edge.”
“All right.” She holds out a hand. I take it. She bends her knees and braces herself to take my weight. I squat and stick the test between my legs. My thigh muscles burn.
Overhead, a goose honks. The platforms creak and thunk as they jostle each other.
Out of nowhere, Nia giggles, and I feel myself starting to crack up, too. I wobble. “Don’t you dare,” I hiss. “I’ll lose my balance.”
“Is it coming anytime soon?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want me to turn my head?”
“Yeah, maybe that would help.”
She does, and I concentrate, and what feels like five minutes later, a few dribbles come out. I hit my hand and miss the stick. I focus harder, and finally, I nail it. I don’t know if it’s a five second stream like the directions say, but the whole stick and all my fingers are drenched.
“Hold this.” I shove the test at Nia. She yanks her sleeve down over her hand as an impromptu glove and takes it. I walk a few feet and squat to rinse my hands in the marsh.
“What do we do now?” I ask.
“Wait.” She leads the way back inside and puts the test on the busted breakfast bar. We sit on the floor again facing each other, both of us legs crossed, like we’ve done a hundred times when we play slapjack or tell each other’s fortunes or do each other’s makeup.
“How long do we wait?” I can’t remember what the box said.
“Three minutes.” Her forehead wrinkles. “Do you have a watch?”
“Yeah, but not here.” Cadoc’s smartwatch is in my backpack which is back in my locker. Nia keeps her bag with her. She doesn’t care if Mr. Arnold hassles her. I don’t make waves if it’s not a big deal.
A memory claws its way into the forefront of my mind. My guts cramping, my throat convulsing, my body utterly out of my control as Cadoc stood silent and unmoved, staring at my back as Brody sneered, “Did you put a pup in a Bog rat’s belly?”
I seek out Nia’s golden eyes, anchor myself before the pieces come apart.
“What is it, Rosie-cakes?”