Oh, and I curse a lot in this, or the characters curse a lot.
Warning- coarse language, possibly offensive subject matter
Beth Daily
This is where we start... sort of like the dawn of time, but not as bright and with a lot less of a bang.
This story will not change you. I don't think it will teach you any lessons, except maybe this: even if you do everything right, even if you try hard to be a nice person, even if close your eyes when you pray and cover your mouth when you cough— something will come along and you will mess up. You will screw up, you will fuck up and you will fail. There isn't a thing you can do about it, so just get used to the idea.
This story will not change you, but just listen, because it changed me.
“Bethy, are you peeing or are you...well, you know!” my best friend Stella calls out, banging on the bathroom door. A small part inside of me wants to tell her to be quiet, to stop drawing attention to us in this moment, this second, but right now that small part is drowned out by the funnel of pure noise inside my head that is clogging my ears.
I am sitting on the toilet, and staring into the mirror on the wall beside me, examining my own reflection. Straight brown hair that is level with my shoulders, freckles dotting my cheeks. I am nondescript, tall, but not too tall, soft but not too chubby. My thighs are dimpled, but my ass doesn't shake like cottage cheese. My face is forgettable, but what is sitting on the counter in from of the mirror, is not.
A tiny white stick sits in a cup of my own urine on the vanity. It has been soaking longer than it should be because I have been too afraid to take it out of the glass and actually look at it. Maybe that's affecting it now. Maybe when you leave it in too long it's guaranteed to say you are pregnant. Maybe.
“Dammit, Beth, hurry up! I have to go!” Stella pleads outside the door, but her words do nothing to pull me away from this moment. I keep pondering the end of the thin white stick, and how I can almost see what it says. It almost makes my heart stop. You’d think something this important would be bigger, to match the size of its implications but I could crush this under my flip-flop if I wanted to. If I could make it go away, I would.
“Oh my god, I am going to piss on myself!” I can picture her outside the bathroom, the small blonde, banging on the door and drawing too much attention to herself. I am ready to yell back, to slip back into Beth Daily, the one who everyone thinks is sweet and upstanding. In truth though, the real Beth Daily, the one only Stella gets to see, would tell her friend to urinate on the carpet, but I catch sight of the pregnancy test on the counter and it is enough to silence me.
“You're kinda scaring me now,” she says quietly, rattling the door knob softly. I'm scaring myself, so truly, I am in no position to comfort her. I' m pretty sure that the noise in my ears is the sound of my life crashing down around me.
“I know about the test,” she whispers into the door, so maybe only I hear her. “Now are you going to let me in there, or and I going to have to go get big daddy Frances to take the door off the hinges?”
The thought of my 6'5 father, whom everyone but Stella calls Frank, marching up here and prying the door open makes me leap up from my perch on the toilet and fumble with the knob. Stella is leaning on the door, so when I open it, she comes flying inside. Her tiny frame slams into me, making me struggle to maintain my balance, as if I'm not feeling off kilter enough to begin with.
“Holy fuck Beth, you don't need to do shit like this!” she says righting herself. I lock the door, and when I turn around she is holding her arms out for a hug. Stepping into her embrace is hard because of the lack of space, but I am still glad for it. This comforting position is made all the more ridiculous by the vast difference in our height. I'm not crying, but this feels right, the first normal moment since I realized I should be waking up with blood in my panties. Since I bought the stupid test at Wallman's when Stella wasn't looking, and since I peed in the damn cup, getting more urine on my hands than in the container.
“You know you could have told me, Beth.I could have just gone up and bought the thing, although it was pretty entertaining to watch you sneak it up to the register wrapped in a Snuggie.”
“Well, you should have told me you knew!” I cry out, as loud as I dared. “Stella, I wanted you to know what was going on without having to say it!”
“I was trying to see where this was all going. I was trying to figure out why my best friend in the whole fucking world wouldn't tell me something like this.” Stella is propping on the counter, her hand dangerously close to the cup of urine.
I exhale long and slow before I respond. “I didn't want you to be disappointed in me.”
“You were worried about me being disappointed in you? Did you really think that Beth?” Stella asked, her eyes filled with hurt.
“I'm supposed to be the good girl, the sensible one in this relationship, remember? You're the one that gets to cry and yell and sleep around. I am the pillar of society.”
That's the way it's always been with us. She was the one in the sixth grade who always got in trouble for passing notes in class, and as we got older Stella was the one who got into fights with the skanks who had been sniffing around her flavor of the week. I'm the one that turned her homework in two days early, the girl that everyone always borrows pencils from because they knew I had extras. I'm the one who lost her virginity to the guy she had been dating since freshman year. I am not supposed to be the one that needs to buy a pregnancy test.
“We're more than what we're supposed to be. We're us, and we tell each other everything. So I'm going to forgive you for this, because I know you have been torturing yourself about this for... how long have you been late?”
Stella is looking at me, expecting me to answer her question, but I can't pull my eyes away from the cup on the counter. She repeats herself, a little firmer this time and I look down at my hands before replying. “For three weeks. I started to get worried when I didn't break out the week before I was supposed to get my period, and my boobs felt kinda tender to the touch, but that might have just been in my head. Last week, the next week, I didn't get my period, so that made me super nervous. That's when I bought the test, y'know just to be safe. When my period still didn't show up, I decided to take it.” Everything comes out in one jumbled mess, and I think she might have misunderstood because now she is starting to smile.
“Bethy, you're a week or so late?” Stella said, full out smiling. “That's not a big deal. That's pretty normal. You're just freaking out because you started to do it.”
“Stella, you look at it. I can't.”
We're soul mate sisters, so my urine doesn't faze her. She plucks the stick out of the cup, a smile still on her full lips. She is confident, and for just a minute I believe that she has the power to change something I had already glimpsed. Maybe I had seen it wrong, or maybe I just didn't know how to decode the pee stick.
“Holy. Fucking. Shit.”
“Beth? I need someone to take me to choir!” My little sister calls out, making both of us jump.
“Why can't Daddy take you?” I yell back, going on autopilot.
“He had to go to an emergency deacons meeting. I think it's about Mrs. Wade, the secretary. They've been saying she's been stealing the offering money,” she said, shifting outside the door.
“Maryanne, I can take you in a minute. Go wait in the car,” I say, my heart thumping loudly in my chest. Stella is standing there, dumb struck, mouthing “shit” over and over. She is not moving, so I shove her out of the way before I grab the glass. Thinking quickly, I dump it into the sink, the disgust not even registering. Still not really looking at the test, I pluck it out of the sink and shove it into my back pocket.
“What are y'all doing in there?” Maryanne asks, from outside the door.
“Stella thought she was going to throw up. She doesn't feel good.” I open the door and exit the bathroom, dragging Stella behind me.
Maryanne is standing close to the door. At 10, she is very nearly eye to eye with me (at 5'8), meaning there is a good chance that she's going to be even more of a freak than me. Her head has a red tint to it, while mine is just brown, brown as in boring. Her eyes are blue while mine are gray. For the most part, I like Maryanne, but right now I want to throttle her.
“Is she coming with us? She better not throw up on me!” Maryanne cries out, spinning on her heal and then leaves. As soon as I hear the screen door slam I whirl around to face Stella.
“I need you to breathe. You don't have to be you right now, but you need to not die. We are going to talk about this later, but don't you breathe a fucking word in front of Maryanne,” I say, gripping her shoulders.
“I'm breathing, but I have no idea how you are, let alone functioning!”
“It's flight or fight, and right now I'm flying,” I say as I hear Maryanne in the car outside honking. “We can fight after we drop her off.”
Stella blinked like she was waking up. “Bethy, I'm not going to fight you on this.”
I moved down the hall, hearing Maryanne honking again. I'm not sure why I am so calm either, but I know that freaking the fuck out isn't going to solve any problems. This isn't me, and this isn't right, but this is happening.
“I know, but I know you will fight with me.”
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