Between the two of them, Marnie and Jessie had a collection of funny stories: people they had slept with, kissed in bars, been on anxious first and only dates with. Marnie had ill-advisedly slept with her friends in college; Jessie had dated men who messaged her years later behind their girlfriend’s backs looking for validation. They were sex positive. Their stories were kindling for laughing and cringing and shaking their heads at their youthful mistakes.
“Are you hungover?” Jessie asked. It was late on a Saturday morning. She and Marnie lived on opposite coasts. Marnie was lying on her couch, cradling her phone in her elbow crease. Jessie had her on speakerphone as she drove inland to pick her toddler up from her mother-in-law’s house.
“I’m massively hungover. I don’t know about you, but my hangovers have been getting worse every year since I turned twenty-five.”
“Dude, I know. Are you drinking water?”
“I’m trying. You know how when you’re hungover water tastes awful?”
“So you hooked up with what’s-his-butt from work? Baby Face?”
“Baby Face?” asked Marnie. “Where did you get that?”
“Don’t you have a thing for his face?”
“I wanted to slap it. His face is so cute I just want to slap it.”
“And did you?”
“I did. That was the silver lining, I guess.”
“Oh no, the sex was bad?”
“It was kind of wild, but I was too drunk. I’m mad at myself for being that drunk. And at one point he just tried to slip his dick into my ass.”
Jessie laughed in her high-pitched, staccato way. In high school, Jessie had been famous for her laugh. Marnie had coined the joke: you sound like a child falling down the stairs.
“What a dick! Some guys are just the worst,” said Jessie.
“Did he think he was being sneaky? Like I wouldn’t notice?”
“Totally fucking absurd.”
Marnie liked the high that came from knowing that Baby Face—Jack—wanted to fuck her. They flirted for weeks, drinking together after shifts. Half the time she forgot to bring something else to wear so she just went out in her dirty kitchen clothes. She smelled like sweat and fryer grease and the perfume of pan-seared meat and he still told her jokes and nudged her and bought her drinks. He told her he was a womanizer but also that he was a feminist. This was fine with her because she didn’t want to date him. She wanted to pin him to her bed and slap his cheeks until they were bright red.
“At least I got him out of my system,” said Marnie. “I was honestly a little surprised when I met him. I haven’t been this attracted to a man in a while.”
“Yeah, I thought you were trying to date more women?”
“Date, yes. But it’s hard to find women to hook up with! I’ve told you—Lady Tinder is ridiculously ineffective.”
Marnie had recently switched all her apps to women only; it was easy to find men to sleep with just walking around in the world. Jessie had, years before, a brief fling with Tinder before she matched with her husband. She had responded to him because he had written her a complete sentence that began with a dignified “hello.”
“Good, you shouldn’t date him,” said Jessie. “He sounds like a bit of a turd.”
“He reminds me of the douchey guys I used to lust after in high school. Like Caleb Conway.”
“Ew, what? You liked him?”
“No, I just wanted to make out with him,” Marnie giggled.
“I mean, that makes sense. I’m a little offended you didn’t tell me back then!”
“I was embarrassed. He was so into the gym.”
“He drank protein powder at lunch.”
From her position on the couch, Marnie watched the subtle glitter of dust hover in the sunlight coming in her window. If she waited till eleven to order delivery she could get lunch. She had eaten half a box of crackers for breakfast, and now that the nausea was gone her stomach squeezed itself with hunger. She kicked the sweatshirt she had left crumpled on the couch the night before as she stretched out her legs. Jack had grabbed her as soon as they stumbled in her door, dragging wet leaves behind them onto her carpet. He took off her ragged sweatshirt, her dirty tank-top, and her bra before she could blink. She remembered scooping up his butt-cheeks in her hands through his jeans. She had been craving that for weeks.
“I want to try something,” she told him. He was on top of her on the couch, and she pushed her hand into his warm, lightly-haired chest. “I think I may be more of a top.”
“You want to be on top?”
“I, well, maybe not literally. Can I slap you?”
“Yes.”
“Like, on your face. Is that okay?”
“Yes.”
But she had not slapped hard enough. Her muscles didn’t cooperate—she had been too drunk to pull it off. His cheeks didn’t pink; it was like a soft tap of affection. He grinned, blinking his blue eyes up at her as she straddled him. As she clambered off he swatted her ass, startling her. She laughed instinctively; she was aroused and annoyed.
Marnie ordered herself delivery and eased her aching body off the couch. Her tiny apartment was divided in three by walls without doors. In her bedroom the sunlight was sneaking in her blinds. The room stank of an unfamiliar body. She considered crawling back into bed instead of into the shower. She ran her hand through the twisted lump of sheets and blankets and found the condom she had given Jack the night before. She remembered pressing it into his hand somewhere near the beginning. It was open, but unused. She squeezed the squirmy round ridge made by the rolled rubber. It reminded her of the condoms she would find in her parents’ bedside table as a kid; how she liked to squish the packages between her fingers.
“Fuck,” she said.
“Hey babe, how’s the hangover?” Jessie asked when she picked up.
“It’s manageable. How’s your kiddo?” Marnie was calling from her car in the Walgreens parking lot. She was delaying going in. She felt like a spectacle.
“She’s actually being a little monster today,” said Jessie. “I finally got her watching this Barbie TV show—have you seen that? It’s bizarre. Talk about uncanny valley. But she loves it. Puts her right to sleep.”
“So, guess what else Mr. Attempted Sneaky Anal did?”
“What?”
“Fully did not use the condom I gave him.” Marnie picked at the loose strands on her yoga pants. She had a growing heat spreading over her like a wave of nausea.
“Oh my god, are you serious?” Marnie heard a muffled thump and Jessie’s distant voice. “I’m sorry, I dropped the phone. I’m trying to get Lydia’s snack ready.” She lowered her voice. “He like—you gave it to him? And he didn’t use it?”
“I guess. I was way too drunk. I can’t believe I didn’t notice.”
“I mean, I can’t tell when a guy has a condom on when he’s fucking me, honestly. That’s his job!” Marnie could hear Jessie banging something like she was trying to open a jar. “Are you mad at him? I would be so fucking mad!”
“Yes, I’m mad.”
“Really? You just sound, like, sad. Oh babe, I’m so sorry this is happening. Are you ok?
Where are you now?”
“At Walgreens. I have to get the morning after pill.”
“Fuck, that’s right.” There was a silence and Marnie felt the hot glass of her phone screen press into her cheek. She switched the phone to her other ear. This was not what she wanted to do with her day. She had meant to spend the afternoon writing a pitch; now she had to scramble to protect her body from a mess that she, even in her drunken state, had attempted to prevent.
“Do you think, I mean, were you too drunk to consent?”
“No,” said Marnie. “I was just too drunk to make good decisions.”
“Hmm.”
“I’m mad at myself.” Marnie said it like a confession.
“Well I’ll be mad at him for you,” said Jessie. “This is on him.”
“I know I can’t drink like college anymore; I don’t know why I keep forgetting.”
“I don’t think—I mean, it doesn’t matter that you were drunk. It’s still on him not to be a fucking asshole.”
“He was drunk too. Maybe he didn’t realize he didn’t put it on.”
“I doubt that. Men can always tell when they’re wearing a condom or not.”
Marnie turned off her car. The blasting dry heat was making her itchy.
“I wonder if I should buy some shampoo or something as well. Just so it’s not weird.”
Jessie laughed quietly. “I wish I could hug you right now,” she said. “Get some popsicles! Those are the best hangover cure.”
Recently Marnie had been having fantasies about Caleb Conway. They would meet again at their ten-year reunion this summer; she would get him tipsy at the open bar and they would have sex in the front seat of his boosted pick-up truck. She would be on top—she would hold him down by his round, rocky biceps and fuck him wildly. He wouldn’t know what hit him.
The Plan-B pills were on the top shelf, above the pregnancy tests. They were locked in plastic cases like razors and electronics. “Fifty fucking dollars?” Marnie muttered to herself. You’re beautiful crooned James Blunt from fifteen years ago from the tinny speakers. The music muffled all the rest of the sounds in the store. It was supposed to be chilly, November was setting in, but Marnie felt hot and damp under her sweater. She could feel little pools of sweat gathering at the place where her bra wires met her upper belly.
A woman appeared next to Marnie and began to inspect the pregnancy tests. She was dressed like Marnie—leggings, clogs, a dark green jacket over a sweater—but she looked a little older. Her black hair was pulled into a cluster at the back of her head that was dripping down onto her shoulders. She glanced at Marnie and laughed as if in solidarity.
“Do you know which one is best?” she asked.
Marnie shook her head. She pretended to ponder the tests as well.
“I guess they’re all fine,” said the woman. She grabbed one off the shelf and examined it, clutching it with paint-chipped nails. She snorted.
“What a dick,” she muttered and sheepishly rolled her eyes at Marnie. Marnie looked from the pregnancy test in the woman’s hand to the wall of plastic boxes. She closed her eyes. The heat rising in her body was crashing over her in waves like rounds of laughter.
“It’s cheaper at Planned Parenthood.”
“What?” Marnie opened her eyes. The woman hadn’t left, and the music was louder than ever. Was this Franz Ferdinand? Why did it sound like her freshman year of college in here?
“Plan B, it’s a lot cheaper at Planned Parenthood. Even if you don’t have insurance,” said the woman. She smiled a small, crinkle-eyed smile at Marnie.
“I feel like everyone is looking at me,” said Marnie.
“They’re not,” said the woman. “Fifty fucking dollars. What a racket.”
The music reverberated off the walls of Marnie’s head. Was she supposed to ask someone to unlock a box for her? Was she supposed to ask that balding man with the mustache who clanged around the store with his giant cluster of keys?
“I need to go to Planned Parenthood anyway,” said Marnie. “I need to get an STI test.”
The woman nodded, but her eyes followed a teenage boy in a staff polo who passed jerkily by the aisle.
“Are you okay? You’re shaking,” said the woman.
“I’m cold.” Was she? “And I’m angry.”
“I know the feeling.”
“I’m angry but I still want him to think I’m cute,” said Marnie. Was that the source of the shame that had been roiling in her lower belly all morning?
The woman laughed, but not at Marnie. “That’s the fucked-up thing,” she said. She tapped thoughtfully on the purple pregnancy test boxes. “We are taught to seek male approval above all else.”
Marnie bought a box of Popsicles and a pack of on-sale toilet paper and drove herself to Planned Parenthood.
“Did you know the morning after pill has side effects?” Marnie was home, lying on top of her smoothed out blanket on her bed with a colorful pillow full of hot clay beads pressed against her abdomen.
“Like what?”
“It feels like a really shitty period. And I have a headache—but that might be the hangover.”
“The all-day hangover. That’s a fun new development of getting older, isn’t it?”
Marnie thought she could hear a faint wailing behind Jessie’s voice.
“Is that Lydia?”
“Yeah, she’s fine. Brian’s trying to put her to bed, and she likes to put up a fight. She does not like to be told what to do.”
“That’s good,” said Marnie, “that will serve her well.”
“That’s what I keep telling myself,” said Jessie. “At least it’s my night off.”
Marnie imagined Jessie sprawled on her bedspread, cozy, maybe her fluffy sock-wrapped feet up the wall, like how they used to lie on Jessie’s bed as teenagers: feet tingly from the reverse fall of blood, foreheads close together.
“I think I should get an IUD,” said Marnie.
“The pill works too, babe,” said Jessie. “Less invasive.”
“But more hormonal. Navigating my emotional landscape is already like a fucking treacherous journey through a mountain range.”
“Ha, same. I wish we still lived in the same place.”
“Me too.”
There was comfortable, crackling silence in the phone space except that Marnie could hear Jessie rustling around: the muffled sound of a body moving against cloth.
“I wish I could come kick his ass,” said Jessie.
“Whatever, at least it wasn’t boring.”
“You deserve better.”
“Okay.”
There was a beat and then Jessie grunted into the phone.
“What on earth are you doing?”
“Oh—I’m—trying to take my bra off.”
“Under your shirt? With your phone in your hand?”
“Yes—grrah—ah, got it!”
“That was always your move,” laughed Marnie.
“It was Mom who taught me,” said Jessie. “She pulled that move every day the second she came home from work. I always thought it was such a graceful art.”
Didn’t you know that you get breast cancer if you sleep in your bra? said the cool girl chorus at a middle-school sleepover, the year Marnie and Jessie had fallen for each other. Marnie thought that sounded suspicious, but she didn’t fuck with cancer. Her mother taught her never to stand in front of a microwave. In the morning when she collected her clothes, aching from sleeping on the floor, she couldn’t find her bra. Amidst the twittering of the other girls the bra was located in the freezer. Marnie held it uncertainly. It was an attractive bra—blue with flowers and as big as an adult’s—but now it was cold and stiff and damp. It was an odd prank, but her face prickled under the scrutiny of the group.
“That’s lame” Jessie said. Jessie was cool without appearing to try, which was annoying to everyone. She wiggled her arms inside her t-shirt and unhooked her own bra. She slid it out through one arm like a magic trick. “You can wear mine,” she said to Marnie. The chorus protested. It was gross to go out into the world without your bra; boys would notice your nipples.
“You had the best boobs that year. All those little punks were jealous.”
“I still have the best boobs.”
“Fucking right you do.”
Marnie moved one hand from her abdomen to press it soothingly into her chest.
“It’s been a weird day,” she said. “Thanks for talking to me.”
“Of course, that’s what I’m here for.”
“I hope you actually get to relax tomorrow.”
“Wouldn’t that be great? I’ll probably be lesson planning. But let’s talk next weekend?”
“That sounds lovely.”
“I love you, you beautiful nerd.”
“You too, weirdo.”
At work the next day Marnie opened the walk-in door to come face-to-face with Jack’s pretty eyes. He laughed conspiratorially and she glared at him, although she had planned to play it cool. He shrugged and walked away and she felt the inward heat rising in her stomach again.
“Marnie,” he said, later, as they cooked side-by-side on the line. She was unsurprised to feel her body tingle with his closeness.
“What?”
“Jesus, I was just saying hi,” he said. “Here.” He handed her a crisp, newly blanched green bean.
She crunched into it. She rolled the fresh sweetness around in her mouth and felt a crushing, disappointing feeling. He glanced at her, watching her chew with a look on his face like the expression of an uncertain dog. She had meant to be impassive, self-composed in her coolness, perhaps even wryly sweet to him. Instead anger leaked out of her gut and showed up on her face. He didn’t flirt with her again and at the end of the shift he followed the other cooks outside for a cigarette without saying goodbye.
At home Marnie changed her sheets and aired out the bedroom, but the evidence was still there in the tugging knot of her distraught uterus. Her phone dinged—a text from Jessie—and Marnie responded I saw him. I think I scared him off for good. Marnie knew it was for the best, but she felt suddenly overwhelmed with sadness. She lay on the bed with her hot pillow against her belly and curved her body into the shape of a bean. In her hand she had her phone: a tether to Jessie, her collector of stories. What she had not told Jessie made the story hers to laugh at, to tuck away, to regret, and forget.
Eleanor Howell is a writer and former baker living in Portland, Oregon. She recently earned her MFA at Western Washington University, and is the nonfiction editor at Sweet Tree Review. She writes fiction and nonfiction about feminism, pop culture, cults, romance plots, sex, and living in bodies. Her work has appeared in The Southeast Review, semicolon literary journal, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @EleanorHowell1, on Instagram @thedivineintoxication, and on her website.
Photo by stillframe on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND