Side Effects May Vary

“Hurry, come on,” said a voice, interrupting my pharmaceutically induced sleep. “She just went to the teachers’ lounge.”

“I don’t want to do it,” said another voice. “I don’t want to know.”

“Oh,” said the first voice, “and you’d rather wait and find out when your clothes don’t fit in six months and you can’t see your freaking toes?”

From the other side of the curtain I heard a whimper.

“Come on,” said the first voice again. “You’re probably not even pregnant.”

My eyes flew open, my mind suddenly registering that this wasn’t a dream.

“Okay.” It was the second voice. “But you’ll keep an eye out, right?” The voice was panicked, but familiar.

“Mindi, yes. Of course I will.” Mindi. It was Celeste and Mindi. I held my breath, trying my best not to make a sound. Holy shit. Mindi might be pregnant. Quietly, I let my chest fall.

“You’re the one who didn’t want to take the test in one of the main bathrooms.”

“I can’t pee in public bathrooms like that,” said Mindi. “I have a shy bladder. You know that.”

I heard a zipper and papers rustling. “Here.”

“Do I just pee on it?” asked Mindi.

“I think you can use a cup if you want.” A cabinet door creaked open. I closed my eyes and could practically see them standing right there outside Miss Shelly’s bathroom, next to the cabinets full of supplies. “Pee in this if you want.”

“How much was the test?”

“I didn’t pay for it,” said Celeste.

“You stole it?”

“Uh, yeah, I did. I wasn’t about to be seen buying that thing. Hurry up.”

The door to the bathroom closed and opened again a few minutes later.

“I used the cup,” said Mindi.

“Now we let it sit for ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes? Are you serious? I can video chat someone in Russia in real time and it takes ten minutes for a stick to tell me if I’m pregnant?”

“Like five minutes ago you didn’t even want to know,” said Celeste. “Come on. Sit down.”

Mindi sighed as one of Miss Shelly’s stools creaked, and they sat in silence for a few minutes.

I hadn’t pegged Celeste as the type to risk stealing a pregnancy test for a friend in need. I never really had a girlfriend like that, though. Growing up, I was always sort of friendly with Celeste because we went to school together and spent so much time together at dance class, but as we got older, the competitive tension between us swelled. A month before freshman year and a few weeks before quitting ballet, Mindi invited all the girls from dance class to a slumber party for her birthday. After her parents had gone to bed, we all piled up on the couch with liters of soda and bags of jawbreakers. We flipped through channels until we found Carrie. For the most part, we laughed and made fun of the clothes, until the prom scene at the end where those skanks drop the pig’s blood on Carrie. We watched, our jaws slack, as the high school gym went up in flames and Carrie turned everyone else’s joke into their nightmare.

After the movie, I found Celeste in the kitchen, tears spilling down her cheeks as she held her phone to her ear. When I asked her who she was calling, she told me she was asking her mom to pick her up. The movie had freaked her out and she wanted to go home. I told her that if she left, none of the girls would ever let her live it down. After a few seconds, she nodded and hung up the phone. And that was it.

I was the first to fall asleep. And when I woke up the next morning, I was covered in shaving cream and permanent marker. Celeste had been the ringleader. I guess she was ashamed of how I’d found her in the kitchen. It took me hours to rinse off the permanent marker so that my parents wouldn’t see what had happened. That day changed everything for me. I would never make the mistake of trusting Celeste again.

It had been at least three minutes before Mindi began to cry. “How am I supposed to tell Drew? And what about my mom?”

“Hey,” said Celeste, her voice dropping an octave, and I had to strain to hear. “It’s going to be fine. You’re on the pill. You’re probably just late, and it’s not like your parents will make you keep it anyway. Drew’s nowhere near ready to have a baby. He goes to a freaking community college.”

“It’s just—” Mindi paused, and when she spoke again her voice shook. “I really liked him, and now—” She paused. “I’m going to get huge. And I’ll have stretch marks and my boobs will get gross. And he won’t stay with me. I wouldn’t want to stay with me. And I’ll have to do, like, night college—”

“Okay, stop. No more crying. In four minutes you’re going to feel so ridiculous when you find out you’re not pregnant.”

Mindi laughed a little.

“You’re totally wrecking your pretty makeup,” said Celeste.

It was so weird to hear Celeste like that, being a friend.

Mindi took a few deep breaths. “Okay, I’m good. I’m good. I didn’t even ask you—how did you feel about the Oklahoma! auditions?”

The school musical. Of course Celeste had auditioned.