A Year Straight by Elena Azzoni Read Free Book Online Page A

you’re in your own world.” And for a split second he softened.
    â€œYou’re not the first person to say that to me.”
    And then he stepped away from me and said, “Well, I would have liked to spend some more time together, but I didn’t think you were the girl I was going to marry or anything.” He looked down and smoothed out the wrinkles on his shirt.
    I laughed and shook my head, feeling like myself again, back on my New York turf. Then I turned to head toward the Q train, which I’d grown to count on to take me home.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Early Detection Testing
    I wasn’t late and I’d always used protection with the lawyer, but it had been a while since a penis had come within three feet of me. I was paranoid. When I darted into my neighborhood pharmacy for a pregnancy test, I felt like I was back at Babeland, overridden with guilt and acting shifty, as if I were planning to shoplift. Of course, I found myself face to face with a lesbian couple I knew, in the middle of the magazine aisle. Thankfully, at that moment I had been innocently browsing Us Weekly, stalling my purchase. Even so, my cheeks flushed to match the pink boxes that sat on a shelf two aisles over. I’d walked by the pregnancy tests three times already, conjuring up the courage to grab one and bring it up to the cashier. They lived right next to the UTI medicine, for which I’d limped into the same store the month before.
    If you’ve ever had a UTI, you know what the initials
stand for—urinary tract infection—and you also know that you have to run to the bathroom every five minutes for a phantom pee. When you finally do collapse onto the toilet seat, it feels like you’re pushing out trickles of battery acid, accompanied by muffled howls of disbelief: “Oh My God, Oh My God, Oh My God.” I’d had UTIs in the distant past, when I’d dated guys before. They are usually the result of too much friction (not enough lube), dehydration, or stress. If you feel one coming on, you can often chase it off with cranberry juice and vitamin C. But that one had come out of the blue.
    It started with the twinge of a vaguely familiar feeling, down there. I couldn’t nip it in the bud, and I couldn’t help but take it as a sign that I shouldn’t be sleeping with men. I nearly crawled over to the Duane Reade drugstore across from my house and purchased God’s Greatest Invention: those little orange pills that turn your pee a numb neon orange. They were prescription only back when I’d last needed them in the early nineties, so the triumph of finding them over the counter, next to the Monistat, rivaled the time I stumbled upon a six-foot-tall Swatch watch on a family trip to Switzerland. With that hanging on my bedroom wall, I was the coolest girl at school. For a week.
    â€œWe haven’t seen you around in awhile,” said one of my friends. “What have you been up to?” I hugged each of them in their lofty retro down vests, a sure sign that fall was under way. Where had I been, they wanted to know? I honestly couldn’t say.

    â€œOh, I’ve been working a ton. Start-ups,” I said, nodding my head as if in agreement with them. I overzealously petted their newly adopted, blind, three-legged dog while they eyed me inquisitively. I’d never been known to stay at work a minute past six, which was one hour past the time I would have liked to leave. Many of my coworkers would stay until eight or nine, but they were the computer programmers and salespeople. As the bookkeeper, I kept banking hours (I’d decided). And since no one had ever protested, that’s the way it was. Besides, I was the eccentric artist at work, so other rules applied to me. Like, I was allowed to take up half the kitchen counter for my rice cooker and stink up the office with steamed broccoli. So when I had to run to the bathroom to pee every twenty minutes on the first day