Sarah Mlynowski - Monkey Business

After I told him, he stared at the windshield. He turned the wipers on and then watched them go back and forth, back and forth. “Do you need money to take care of it?” he asked.

Take care of it.

I felt the baby die right then. Shrivel up like a popped balloon. “Is that what you want?” I asked, my throat contracting.

“What choice do we have?”

Instead of explaining the choices, I nodded.

In the middle of the night, I crawled into my mother’s bed, crying. I hadn’t done that since my father left. I told her everything, and that I wanted to keep the baby. Then she started crying, too, and told me that I couldn’t keep it, that it would ruin my life, that I had to take care of it, take care of it, take care of it, and two weeks later I did. We sat together in the waiting room, my mother and I. She read the Redbook that was on a table and I stared at the safe-sex posters on the wall. Another girl, a tall blonde who looked about sixteen, was also there with her mother. We didn’t make eye contact.

I called in sick for the next week. It’s easy to get out of work when your dad’s your boss. Told him I had bronchitis. Smoked a cigarette before I spoke to him so my voice sounded scratchy. Decided that since I was no longer pregnant, I might as well take up smoking. Went on the pill the next week. Wayne thought it was the best present ever-now he could come inside me.

I doubt I’m pregnant again, since I’m a few weeks into my continuous birth control taking. My trick worked-I didn’t get my period during exams. The only problem is, I realized that if I take the entire month, I’ll start my next period on January 9, which sucks, because I go back to LWBS on the eleventh. Since I want my period to end on the ninth so there’s none of that “aftermath” left by the eleventh, I have to get it on the fifth, which means I have to take my last pill on the second. Maybe I’ll keep taking the pills straight until I go through menopause, and then I’ll never have children. Then will my father encourage me to work?

What if I never get married? What if I decide to spend the rest of my life as a mistress instead? Under the circumstances, that seems likely. No worries, Dad, I think I’ll just spend my life sleeping with men. Especially attached men. Have any friends you can introduce me to?

I sit on the toilet and pee out the margarita. What am I going to do? Drop out? Take out loans? Maybe my father is right. Maybe I don’t care about my career. I never used to. I applied to LWBS only because of Wayne. Maybe I am wasting my money. Maybe I should throw in the schoolbag and head up to Alaska. I’ve heard the male-to-female ratio up there is comparable to LWBS’s, but knowing me, I’d probably head straight for the guy with the serious girlfriend. The guy who stops calling as soon as he’s out of the country. I pull a sheet of rough toilet paper out of the dispenser and use a square to dry my eyes. Why did I fall in love with a guy who loves someone else?

I’m in love with him. I love that the only music he listens to are soundtracks to superhero movies and that he hums them when he doesn’t think I’m listening. The way he plays with my ears. The way he smiles. The way he smells.

I wish it wasn’t so cold up in Toronto. He’s going to need some body heat.

I take a deep breath and flush. I wash my hands and stare at myself in the mirror, at my bloodshot eyes. Maybe staying at B-school is a waste of time. Maybe I should drop out. My mother would kill me. She’s a hundred percent behind me being in business school. Emotionally, not financially. She doesn’t want me to end up like her. Happy housewife until she found out her husband was having an affair. And it wasn’t a one-night-stand affair that was over; it was an I’m-leaving-you-for-someone-else affair. She got alimony, but she hated taking money from him, and so she got a job as a secretary, which she hated.

She blamed herself, said she’d let herself get treated like shit. She’d always treated my father like the king he wasn’t. Every Sunday she’d pick oranges off the tree in the yard and make him freshly squeezed juice. Each glass would take her twenty minutes, and sometimes he would ask for seconds. She was too tired to make herself a glass. She never made me one, even though I would beg. Once in a while, if my father didn’t finish, I was allowed to drink whatever was left, savoring each drop against my tongue.

Maybe I’m more like her than she thought.

Maybe LWBS isn’t for me.

My final Stats mark was posted before I left for the airport. Seventy-eight. The class average was a seventy-nine. Not great. Not horrible. Our group assignments probably raised my mark. I guess I did all right on the exam, which is good to hear. But I studied my ass off and came out average. It’s a little sad.

What will I do if I drop out? Come back here? I don’t know if I could live in Phoenix again. Last night I went to the same lame-ass bar I went to when I was twenty-one, and saw the same people who I hung out with, including Wayne and Cheryl.

Wayne pinched my ass when Cheryl was ordering a Heineken. “You’re looking great,” he said. I thought I was looking thin. Exams will do that.

“Thanks,” I said, wondering if all men cheated. He cheated on me. Now he wants to cheat on her. Russ cheats on Sharon. My father cheated on my mom. Is it their fault? Or our fault for letting it happen?

What have I done? And what should I do now?

Thursday, January 1, 2:10 a.m.

Is it time to go yet? I’ve had too much champagne and I’m now feeling frisky. I pat Sharon on the knee. “Shar, you ready?”

It’s two-ten, definitely time to leave her sister’s New Year’s party. All that’s left of the chips and booze are crumbs and bottles. Most of the thirty guests have left. Rena, unfortunately, is still here. Whenever I’m not paying attention, she corners me to harass me about school.

At eleven she wanted to know if I’d gotten any grades back. I told her I hadn’t checked. At eleven-thirty she asked me if I had gotten any interviews.

“Yeah. BCG, Accenture, Stewart & Co. and O’Donnel.”

“Good for you!” she exclaimed, while straightening her ridiculous tie. I’m not wearing a tie, so why is she? “Who are you waiting for?”

“Bain and McKinsey.”

“I’ll see if I can get you an interview with McKinsey. I may have some pull now, you know.”

Second-years had their interviews in October, and Rena has been gloating about her McKinsey acceptance all evening.

Sharon kisses me on the cheek and stretches off the couch. “Let’s get our coats.” She has a pimple on her chin. In all the years we’ve dated, I’ve never seen her with a pimple. She fought with it for twenty minutes before we went out tonight, with ice cubes and concealer creams, but it still shines through, red and angry. For some reason, the pimple calms me, reminds me of her flaws. If she finds out about Kimmy and never wants to speak to me again, I’ll remember this pimple. Since I’ve been home, I’ve found myself rejoicing in all of her flaws. Her short temper with her mother. How she won’t let me smoke dope. How she insists on manning the remote control.

I tell myself that this is what I won’t miss when she breaks up with me.

Inversely, every time she does something sweet, like bake my favorite chocolate peanut-butter brownies, or kiss my finger when I somehow slice it on a butter knife, or when she wears the purple V-neck mohair sweater that makes me want to lay my head against her stomach and be held for hours, the one she’s wearing right now, a knife spears through my heart. And not a butter knife. A machete.