Beluga

ASHLEY LITTLE

When you’re fifteen and you’re a prostitute and you get pregnant because one of your clients rapes you, you get an abortion. That’s just what you do. I hadn’t told my mom, but that’s what my mom would’ve said. All logic and no emotion. I hadn’t told my brother, Steve, because Steve was in the Don Jail and couldn’t take phone calls. The only person I told was Tucker. Tucker’s a pale eleven-year-old kid who moved into Bright Light about a month ago. Bright Light is the youth group home in Niagara Falls. It’s where losers and rejects whose own parents don’t even want them get sent to live until they’re eighteen. There’s nothing that special about Tucker except for that he’s the only kid in the group home who doesn’t treat me like a leper. That’s why I asked him to come with me to the appointment. He’s only eleven, but he’s more mature than some adults I know. Plus, I didn’t know how out of it I would be afterwards and I wanted someone around to catch me if I fell.

We walked to the clinic and stopped for Cherry Coke Slurpees on the way. It was one of those disgusting July days where everyone has pit stains, and wherever you go, you smell garbage baking in the sun. Tucker wore cut-off jean shorts and a Hypercolour T-shirt that the colour had drained out of. His blond head bobbed as he walked and slurped from his fat green straw. Every few steps he would turn and look at me as if he expected me to say something. Or change my mind. Or I don’t know what. I’d pretend that I didn’t notice him looking at me. I’d pretend that everything was alright. Maybe it’s weird for a fifteen-year-old to be hanging out with an eleven-year-old, but when I’m thirty-four and he’s thirty, no one will care. So it doesn’t really matter.

The receptionist at the clinic raised a drawn-on eyebrow when Tucker trailed in behind me. We sat beside each other in the waiting room while I chewed my nails. My thighs stuck to the plastic seat. The radio played Celine Dion. I hate Celine Dion. I wondered if Celine Dion had ever had an abortion. Maybe that’s what “My Heart Will Go On” is really about. That would explain how such a shitty song could make people cry.

I looked around at the other women in the waiting room. One wore huge white sunglasses that made her look like an alien. One sniveled into a Kleenex. One had her face mashed against the chest of a man