The Plot полностью

Her decision was: she wanted an abortion. It should have been straightforward, given the fact that her parents seemed to want an addition to their family about as little as she did. But there was an unfortunate complication, namely that her mother and father were Christians, and not the Jesus-is-love kind of Christians but the Hell-has-a-special-room-waiting-for-you kind. Also, the laws of the state of New York gave them veto power over Samantha (who was very much not a Christian of either kind, despite her hundreds of Sunday mornings in the pews of the Fellowship Tabernacle of Norwich) and over the blastocyst inches south of her navel. Did they regard said blastocyst as a beloved grandchild, or at least a beloved child of God? Samantha suspected not. She suspected, to the contrary, that the point here was to teach her some kind of “lesson” about the wages of her sin, something along the lines of In pain you shall bring forth children. It would all have been so much simpler if they’d just agreed to drive her to the clinic in Ithaca.

It hadn’t been part of the plan for her to drop out of school as well, but the pregnancy made that decision on its own. Samantha, it turned out, was not one of those girls who could carry on, attend the prom, throw the javelin into the ninth month, and generally power through every single quiz, test, assignment, and term paper, with only the occasional hall pass for the purpose of upchucking in the girls’ bathroom. No, she got diagnosed in month four with upwardly trending blood pressure, was ordered to bed for the sake of her baby’s health, and forced to summarily forfeit her position as a tenth grader without a single complaint from either parent. And not one of her teachers lifted a finger to help her finish out the year, either.

For the five brutal months that remained, she gestated uncomfortably—mainly horizontally in her childhood bed, an old cannonball four-poster that had been her mother’s father’s, or her father’s mother’s—and grudgingly accepted the food that her mother brought up to her room. She read whatever books were in the house—first her own books, then her mother’s from the Christian bookstore outside Oneonta—but already Samantha was noting a disruption in the hardware of her brain: sentences folding in on themselves, meaning draining away by the midpoint of a paragraph, as if even that part of her body had been scrambled by the unasked-for tenant. Both of her parents had given up on trying to ferret out the name of the impregnator; maybe they’d decided Samantha didn’t know. (How many boys did they think she’d slept with? All the boys, probably.) Her father wasn’t talking to her anymore, though it took Samantha some time to figure that out, given that he’d never been all that much of a talker. Her mother was still talking—or, more accurately, screaming—on a daily basis. Samantha wondered how she had the energy.

But at least there was going to be an end point to all of it, because this thing, this ordeal, was going to be finite. As in: it was going to end. And why?

She did not want to be a sixteen-year-old mother any more than she’d wanted to be a fifteen-year-old pregnant person, and here, at least, she dared to believe that her parents felt exactly the same. Therefore, in the fullness of time, the baby would be given up for adoption, and then she, the gestational host, would be returning to high school, albeit in the company of those dull classmates she’d powered past back in sixth grade: a year further from her goal of going to college and getting away from Earlsville, but at least back on track.

Ah, the naivety of youth. Or had she dared to believe her parents might one day recognize that a sentient human, with her own plans and priorities and aspirations, had lived alongside them, lo these fifteen years? She dwelt in the possibilities and even took the step of reaching out to one of those “abortion counselors” (not really an “abortion counselor,” as she well knew) who advertised in the back of the Observer-Dispatch: “A loving Christian home for your baby!” But her mother wouldn’t even look at the pamphlet they sent her.

The wages of her sin, it turned out, had a shelf life of forever.

Wait a minute! she yelled at them. I don’t want this baby and you don’t want this baby. Let’s let somebody who does want it have it. What’s the problem with that?

The problem, apparently, was that God wanted it this way. He’d tested her, she’d failed, and thus, this was what was supposed to happen.

It was maddening, infuriating. Worse: illogical.

But she was fifteen. So that’s what was going to happen.