Doctor appointment + 1 day (AM)

The next morning dawned grey and misty; reality hit Gab like a ton of bricks. She felt her innards drain out, out of the soles of her feet, and she was wobbly and empty. She also felt nauseous. And she felt warm, because Freya’s back was pressed against hers.

Freya felt Gab stir. She had woken early; she had been thinking.

“Gab?” she said. “Do you want some crackers? They’re meant to help with nausea.” Freya had been doing some early morning research. Gab shrugged and Freya got up and went to the kitchen. She dug out a box of crackers from the pantry. She also made a peppermint tea for each of them. When she returned to Gab’s room, her friend was retching into an empty yoghurt tub as if her life depended on it. The gut-wrenching episode over, Gab took a cracker and made mouse-sized nibbles around its edges.

“Gab,” began Freya, “if you don’t want to wait for the blood test results, you could get a test from the pharmacy.” Thankfully, Freya hadn’t mentioned the p-word. Gab nodded and nibbled.

“The other thing is,” said Freya, “your body is your body. If the test comes back positive, you still have options.”

***

Gab was lost. So many others had been in this situation before; countless others, like grains of sand on the seashore. But she couldn’t absorb all the lessons of history simply by being contemporary; the fresh immediacy of personal implication stung with a vengeance.

She was by turns disbelieving, angry, horrendously sad, as though she had lost something and she didn’t know what. And she felt caught in a web of dilemmas. Home. Money. Support. Uni. Where would any of it come from? And … a baby. A real one. It was all too bizarre.

There was so much Gab had to muster for herself; so much inventing, because she had no helpful blueprint for what happened next. Her care of Jack gave her some practical experience, but this was different. This was her own child. This was her whole identity and the trajectory of her life. It was her body. Her image. Her self-understanding, her place in the world.

She felt like a wanderer, an exile, with concerns different to those of her peers—and that had always been the way. It was those hard edges of lack that she continually brushed up against. They shaped a certain view of life. Others seemed to have a buffer; she didn’t begrudge them that. But she didn’t enjoy the knowledge that, when the cookie of life had crumbled, she’d seemed to get a particularly meagre helping. She knew others were worse off, of course, so she felt guilty for admitting to any sense of lack. But somehow recognising that her crumbs were meagre made her more determined. Was it possible to make something out of not-much? Was it possible to make crumbs somehow into a banquet, or deficiency into some kind of advantage? She didn’t know.