After three nights of shoving parsley up her vagina, Stephanie had finally accepted the fact that she was definitely pregnant.
She was having a really good night out with her lesbian friend when she realized that she might be pregnant. They were at a dive bar in Silverlake. Dani invited her into the bathroom to do some coke. It was fun until Dani pulled out a tampon and Stephanie realized she hadn’t needed to buy tampons in quite awhile. She silently told herself, Shit. But the moment she left the bathroom and returned to the loud dance part of the bar she lost herself in the music and heard the words, “These are the good times of your life so put on a smile and it’ll be all right.” She figured that was good advice and put erased the thoughts from her mind.
Later that night she invited Dani and a couple other girls to her tiny apartment in the valley to finish off the coke. There were four of them total and it was crowded. They squished together on her futon and talked to men in Turkey on chat roulette until four in the morning. Towards the end of the binge she ended up telling them about how she just realized that she might be pregnant. One of the girls from the bar started talking about how her sister had used parsley to get rid of it. Another one said she should go steal a pregnancy test immediately because that type of information should be free. Dani offered to steal one for her in the morning because she had to pick up some more tampons anyway and she always shoplifted those anyway. The four of them obsessively googled “herbal abortion” until the sun came up and everyone crawled back to wherever they came from.
When she woke up the next night, Stephanie watched a lifetime movie and laughed her hangover away. As she started to put herself back together by showering and checking her Facebook she remembered the words pregnancy and parsley. Luckily the girls from the night before had bookmarked some feminist blog that looked like a really bored 17 year old had created, but it gave her some guidance, so she appreciated it. “Wrap up about four or five leaves in a cheese cloth. Insert. Leave over night. Rinse & Repeat.”
Stephanie didn’t know what cheese cloth was and neither did the girl at the health food store so she just omitted that part of the instructions. The only change she noticed was an odd taste in her mouth in the mornings.
Reaching deep inside herself and pulling out the soggy green stuff felt gross to her. It reminded her of the time the condom got “lost” inside her. Stephanie was 18, in college, fucking the bartender from a margarita bar who thought she was at least 23. He vaguely mentioned not being able to find the condom. He felt too awkward asking her to look for it inside her and assumed she’d figure it out.
She was to young and inexperienced to know that these things happen. Eventually she was masturbating and felt something up there. Feeling it and not knowing what it was frightened her into getting lost in thoughts of ending up on a daytime talk show to talk about her rare deformed vagina. She was living in college dorms then so she really remembers the walk to the communal bathrooms to see if she could “pee it out” more than the sex or finding the condom. She stared at the stains on the cheap blue carpet. There were so many black gum spots that she had never noticed before. All the doors had white boards that said names. One said Cunt in a pink Sharpie. Another said, Who the fuck made broccolli? She thought about how she didn’t know any of these girls and the realization that she was living with twenty strangers scared her. Then, pulling it out felt disgusting and throwing it away felt degrading and that was what she thought about in the mornings when she was dealing with the parsley.
