Ivan was the one who put the thought into her head. She would have been happy right now, carefree. Not hoping to see a red splotch each time she pulled down her underwear, not wasting pads in useless anticipation. Not dreading the worst conversation of her life with her parents. He’d never put his dick in her, but he had put in the thought.
“I think I might be pregnant,” Micaela finally told her best friend Elena during lunch time. They were sitting up against the lockers outside the biology classroom. Someone’s padlock dug into Micaela’s shoulder, and the heat from the hard concrete penetrated her polyester plaid skirt.
“I thought you were a virgin,” Elena said, rummaging through her chili cheese fries with lilac nails the length of a sloth’s.
“I know!” Micaela shrieked. “That’s what’s so messed up about it.”
Elena stopped chewing. “Wait, what?”
“Okay, so that guy I mentioned—” Micaela lowered her voice, even though of course Ivan didn’t go to their school. “We’ve been messing around, right? But we’ve never actually done it. And then last week, he asks me, ‘What if some of my soldiers got past the gate?’”
“The gate?”
“It’s a figure of speech.” Her eyes dipped low. “The gate.”
“That’s really unlikely, isn’t it?” Elena asked. “And doesn’t a gate swing out? Or in, I guess.”
Micaela shook her head. “Listen, he asked if I’d had my period lately. And I haven’t.”
Elena held a loaded fry over her open mouth. “When’s the last time you had it?”
“I don’t know, I don’t keep track! Do you remember when it was I borrowed that tampon from you?”
“Hm…” Elena chewed.
“It was after gym.”
Micaela remembered the tampon with some annoyance. It hadn’t been the kind with the plastic applicator that she normally used. Elena only had one of those small, hard bullets of cotton that she had to push in with the tip of her finger. It had made her late, trying to get the thing in deep enough so that it didn’t feel like she was walking around with a bat between her legs.
“Was that the day Jackie got caught stuffing her bra?” Elena asked.
“That happened like a month ago!”
“That was hilarious.” Elena shook her head and excavated another fry. “Yeah, I don’t know.”
Micaela lie on her bed, her body tense, the springs from the old mattress jabbing into her back. It bothered her. Well, the whole thing bothered her, of course. But the expression Ivan had used. Soldiers getting past the gate. He had never warned her that could happen. And who said they could do that? Who gave them permission? She envisioned little sperm wearing helmets, throwing hand grenades, making a mess! And what could she do but wait? Maybe another expression would make her feel better. She wracked her brain but could not think of one that would ease her anxiety. Finally she got up to get a drink.
Her brother, Alex, and older cousins were in the living room watching an old Star Wars movie. The characters were in a desert and Harrison Ford knocked the guy in a helmet with some pole by mistake, and the guy’s jetpack went off and he flew, crashed into the side of a ship, and tumbled down into the sand where he rolled into the mouth of some kind of giant, toothy creature.
“What’s that thing in the sand?” Micaela asked.
“The Sarlacc,” Alex said.
“What does it do?”
He shrugged. “It eats you.”
Her cousin Paco imitated a British accent, “And digests you over a thousand years.”
Micaela frowned. “Wouldn’t you be dead long before then?”
“That’s not really the point.”
“Well, what is the point?”
“That it fucking hurts!” Alex said.
Micaela rolled her eyes. She watched the Sarlacc grab a man with its tentacle and try to pull him into its gaping mouth.
“What are you staring at?” Paco asked.
“Maybe it’s just misunderstood.”
“You know Star Wars?” Micaela asked Elena the next day at school.
“Uh huh.” Elena opened her can of Sprite with one mauve nail and gulped.
“You know that sand creature on Tatooine? Jabba the Hutt wants to feed Luke Skywalker to it?”
“What?”
“When Leia is wearing the bikini.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Maybe it’s more like that.”
“Maybe what’s more like that?”
“My vagina.”
Elena choked on her soda.
“Maybe that’s what happened. Although, then it seems like it’s a monster. Like it wanted to eat up stuff. That’s kinda gross, right? And not true! Unless it has a mind of its own…”
Elena coughed. “Can we talk about something else please?”
“Elena!” Micaela put her head in her hands. “When am I gonna get my freaking period?”
“Don’t worry, it’ll come. You’re a virgin, right?”
“Yes,” she said through gritted teeth. “I am a virgin.”
Elena tipped her can toward her mouth, then slowed and narrowed her eyes. “Are you sure?”
Micaela had always considered herself a virgin. But if she was afraid she might be pregnant, was she really a virgin? All this time she had thought she was holding something back from Ivan. Had she been lying to herself?
He had tried to talk her into having sex a bunch of times. He would be gentle. He’d wear a condom. He felt super strongly about her. But she had always been firm in her refusal. He stopped asking and instead moved his penis along her, outside. She let him do it. But if he got too near the center or if his dick felt too hard on her soft spots, she’d complain, “You’re poking me!”
Was a virgin someone who’d been poked? She Googled it.
“Virgin: A person who has never had intercourse.” That was right, she never had. Oral yes, but did that count? You couldn’t get pregnant that way. She recalled Health class, where they did call it sex.
Second definition: “a person who is naïve, innocent, or inexperienced in a certain context.” Was she naïve? Was she innocent? She was not innocent like she used to be when she was a little girl maybe. But did that make her guilty?
For adjective, the entry read, “not yet touched, used or exploited, eg. virgin forests.” Well, she had been touched. Quite a lot. Had she been used or exploited? She hadn’t thought so, but maybe. She was pretty sure she could not call herself a virgin forest anymore. Ivan had set foot in her, stepped on her twigs.
What had they said about the Virgin Mary? That she didn’t “know” man. What did that mean? Did Micaela know Ivan? She certainly knew things about him. She knew what his penis looked like, and how it felt. She knew he liked to bite her, on the arm, on the thigh. But that kind of knowing seemed very fuzzy, not helpful.
Micaela looked online for things she could know.
Friday night, as usual, Micaela and Elena sat in the back row of the church cafeteria exchanging notes beneath their hard, metal chairs. This week a married woman had come to speak to their youth group.
“And that is why each morning I show my outfit to my husband before I leave for work, to make sure I’m not showing too much skin and that I am dressed modestly.” The woman looked around the room, especially at the girls, Micaela thought, perhaps to see if her wisdom had sunk in. “Does anyone have any questions?”
Micaela’s hand shot up, while with the other she passed a reply to Elena that read, “Honey, am I showing too much vulva?” “I have a question about Mary.”
The woman smiled. “Our Blessed Virgin Mary. Go ahead.”
“Was Mary really a virgin?” she asked, ignoring Elena’s muffled laughter beside her. “I mean, isn’t it true that the word ‘young’ was mistranslated into ‘virgin’ when the text was translated from Hebrew to Greek?”
The woman looked exactly as if someone had paused her with a remote.
“And that’s all we have time for.” Ivan walked over from the side of the room, stuffing his cell phone into his back pocket. “Thank you so much for coming,” he said to the woman. “Micaela, stay after class. We need to talk.” He walked the woman out, lamenting, “These kids.”
***
After class, Micaela and Ivan did not talk. They did what they always did, make out in Ivan’s car behind the community center.
He was giving her an enormous hickey she would have to cover with foundation, maybe even a turtleneck, and it was April. Also, she didn’t own a turtleneck.
Since his “soldiers/gate” comment, he had not ventured below her waist. Micaela was not sure whether to feel relieved or insulted. “Have you had your period yet?” he asked when he came up for air.
She shook her head no.
He sighed. “If it doesn’t come by Monday, we’re gonna have to do a pregnancy test.”
Micaela pulled away from him and pressed back into the car seat. “A pregnancy test? I don’t wanna do that.”
“Micaela, it’s gotta be done. We have to be responsible.”
He didn’t even blink when he said this.
Monday night they were on the quest. They had told her mom they were going to Adoration at a neighboring parish. Instead they drove to a CVS a few cities away. Ivan walked quickly, scanning each aisle, and Micaela followed, her sweatshirt dangling from her head by its hood, the sleeves hanging limp. At the feminine products section, they were greeted with an array of maxi pads, tampons, and pregnancy tests. Ivan began reading boxes. Micaela spun in place, making squeaky sounds on the floor with her shoes.
“It’s probably not the best marketing idea,” she said, “to have the pregnancy tests right by the condoms.”
He didn’t respond.
“Oh, look at these ones.” She picked up a box of condoms. “They’re ‘almost as if you’re wearing nothing at all.’ Do you remember that Simpsons episode? With Flanders and his new ski suit? `Why it feels like I’m wearing nothing at all, nothing at all…’ and his butt just keeps wiggling in Homer’s mind?”
He still did not respond.
“`Stupid sexy Flanders.'”
“Micaela,” Ivan said, his eyes closed like when they all held hands and stood in a circle to pray, Micaela spying with one eye open. “I am…I am this close to losing it.”
She turned away from him and spread her legs to balance on the sides of her feet. He was angry with her. For what?
For not really being a virgin? For just being young?
“I thought that was you!”
Micaela turned to see a woman smiling madly at Ivan, her shopping cart piled high with boxes of diapers.
“Erica, hi,” Ivan said, and Micaela could tell from his voice this was not good.
“I never see you in here! What brings you to the neighborhood?” The woman’s eyes were wide with wonder, as if Ivan appearing in her CVS was some kind of blessed event.
Ivan struggled to answer, and the woman’s eyes slid to Micaela. Micaela realized too late that she shouldn’t have been watching them. She should have pretended not to know him.
“Hi,” the woman said uncertainly.
“Hi!” Micaela nearly shouted. She was standing in front of the lubricants and she grabbed a box. “Here’s what I wanted. Silky. My favorite.” And she ran out of the aisle, her sweatshirt slipping off behind her.
Some minutes later, Micaela saw Ivan approach the check-out counters. He didn’t look at her when she went to stand behind him, just placed a few pregnancy tests and some other random stuff on the conveyor belt. He had her sweatshirt tucked under his arm.
It was cold with the air-conditioning, but after her screw-up with the woman, she didn’t dare to ask him for her sweatshirt. She stood still, hugging her goose-pimpled arms and looking out the windows. The silence was awkward, but it was also a magnet, and as much as she wanted to go off on her own, she could not move. They’d come in together, and they would leave together. And when they got to his apartment, she’d have to go into his bathroom and open up one of those boxes. When would she get to leave him then? Never, maybe. At least, not really, not if she carried something of his.
Dread settled in her gut, and the feeling spread to her chest, her limbs. She felt sick. Achy at her core. And then, standing so still, she felt the slightest of movements. Something only she could have felt. A cramp!
A familiar craving jolted her to unfreeze. She snatched a chocolate bar and a soda from the mini fridge and dumped them on the belt just as the cashier was about to pick up the divider.
Ivan glared at the new items but didn’t say anything. He nodded at the cashier to ring them up.
Back in the car driving home, Ivan banged the steering wheel. “Shit! Shit! I am so careful! You know I am so careful! She’s gonna tell everyone. I’m fucked!”
Micaela pulled the chocolate bar out of the shopping bag and tore open the wrapper with her teeth. The cramps ebbed like waves, and she let herself be rocked. She closed her eyes, envisioned the saturation of her underwear, her jeans.
Ivan went on cursing. She let him.
Outside the car, the twilight world rolled by, one long strip of silhouettes, the sky much lighter, and wide open.
Maybe she wasn’t really a virgin. But she was something better. Free.
