“I can’t believe it’s taking this long,” Mom complains as she flips through an old magazine. “When I called to make the appointment they told me they had a bunch of cancellations and could get you right in today.”
Yes, my wonderful, loving mother took it upon herself to call up the doctor and make an appointment for me without my knowledge, informing me when I woke up this morning that I had fifteen minutes to get dressed and get out the door. Thank God Charlotte answered her phone on the first ring as I raced around my bedroom getting dressed and trying not to panic. She got to the doctor’s office before we did and mom only seemed a little bit surprised when I told her I asked Charlotte to come for moral support.
“He’ll call, don’t worry,” Charlotte whispers while I stare in annoyance at my phone.
I quickly shove it into my front pant’s pocket and roll my eyes. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Charlotte snickers. “Nice try. You might be pretty good faking a pregnancy, but you suck faking noninterest in a guy.”
I glance nervously at Mom sitting across from us and see she’s still engrossed in the magazine, not paying any attention to us or preparing to ask a hundred questions about what we’re whispering about. She’s got to wonder why Charlotte and I are suddenly spending more time together considering we’ve never kept it a secret that we haven’t been able to stand each other for most of our lives. Even though I’ve always felt like an outsider with my two sisters and have nothing in common with them, I’ve always been a little closer to Ava. She has the same sarcastic, brash attitude that I do and it’s just easier to talk to her than Charlotte. I have no idea why our mother hasn’t asked why Charlotte is the one I called for the supposed moral support today, but I guess I should be glad that it’s one less thing I have to lie about.
“I’m not faking noninterest in Marco,” I tell Charlotte. “I just don’t want to be one of those girls who drops everything for a guy and acts stupid whenever he’s around. This isn’t exactly how I pictured us together the first time he finally noticed me and it’s confusing and weird and I don’t like it.”
Charlotte laughs softly and shakes her head at me. “I’m pretty sure this is not the first time he’s noticed you. He definitely has much stronger feelings for you than you realize. No guy would go through all of the shit he’s gone through in one day for a girl he just ‘likes’. You need to have more faith in yourself, Molls. You’re smart and beautiful and talented. If he hasn’t noticed those things long before now, he never would have set foot in Mom and Dad’s house the other day, let alone put up with all that torture from Dad and the guys.”
I’m pretty sure I still remember the last time my sister said anything this nice to me. I was seven and she was nine; it was the first day of school and mom forced me to wear this frilly pink dress that I hated. Charlotte stared for a few seconds and then said, “It’s fine. You don’t look that gross.”
These compliments throw me for a loop, and it’s not until Mom gets up from her chair and leans across the coffee table to tap my knee, that I realize the nurse was calling my name.
“Molly Gilmore?”
I raise my hand meekly and the nurse smiles. “You can come on back. You’re family is welcome to join you.”
Shit! How the hell do we keep Mom out of the room?
Before I can go into a full-blown panic trying to come up with a plausible reason to give my mother on why she needs to be blindfolded and wear earplugs, Charlotte quickly speaks up.
“Mom, if you don’t mind, can I go back with Molly alone?” she asks so sweetly that I start to wonder if that baby inside of her has some sort of magical powers. “It’s just…I know I haven’t been the best sister to her growing up, and I’d really like to do something important like this with her, just the two of us.”
Mom practically melts into a puddle of goo right on the floor of the waiting room, her eyes filling with tears as she looks back and forth between the two of us.
“I’ve been waiting twenty years for you two to stop being assholes to each other and all it took was one of you getting knocked up,” she sniffles. “If only getting pregnant when you’re a teenager wasn’t frowned upon, we could have solved this problem years ago.”
The nurse gives her a funny look and Mom rolls her eyes. “Oh, don’t judge me. You try giving birth to three spawns of Satan who constantly try to kill each other.”
With those parting words to the shocked nurse, Mom wipes a stray tear from her cheek and waves us away, sitting back down in her chair and grabbing the magazine she previously tossed onto the coffee table.
Charlotte and I leave her in the waiting room and follow the nurse down the hall. She weighs me on the scale in the hallway and takes my temperature with an ear thermometer before leading us further down the hall, pushing open a door and handing me a small plastic cup with an orange lid.
“I just need you to give us a urine sample. I’ll be right over there at the nurse’s station so you can bring it out when you’re finished,” she explains with a smile before looking at Charlotte. “If you’d like to come with me, I can show you to the exam room and you can wait for her to finish.”
I quickly grab Charlotte’s arm and the cup from the nurse.
“It’s okay, she can come in with me. I need her to hold the cup for me,” I blurt without thinking.
The nurse gives me a quizzical look, and I laugh nervously. “I’m a little freaked out and my hands are shaking and if I try and hold the cup I’ll probably pee all over the place so I need someone with steady hands and Charlotte’s are rock steady. She’ll make sure the pee goes where it needs to go.”
Charlotte nods, confirming my crazy explanation and then pulls me into the bathroom, slamming the door closed in the poor, confused nurse’s face.
I hand her the little plastic cup and lean against the wall, bending forward with my hands on my knees to take a few calming breaths while Charlotte goes to work.
“I think I’m going to hyperventilate,” I tell her. “Do you think I could go to jail for insurance fraud from filling out all those medical forms when we got here? I can’t go to jail; I’d never survive. In theory I feel like I have enough balls to make someone my bitch, but I don’t know if I could actually do it. I can make an amazing sugar display, but I don’t know if that will translate well when I need to make a toothbrush shank.”
I realize I’m rambling and it suddenly occurs to me that I might not be as different from my sisters as I always thought considering I’m acting just as insane as they usually do. None of this makes me feel any better about what is happening right now.
“You’re not going to jail. Stop freaking out or you’re going to make me freak out, and it’s not good for the baby,” Charlotte tells me as she flushes the toilet and washes her hands. “Personally, I think you’d make a great badass in jail. You’d have plenty of bitches offering to make toothbrush shanks for you.”
I stand up and scowl at her. “You’re not helping.”
She picks up her cup of pee, walks over to me, and holds it out in front of her.
“Eeeew, get that thing away from me,” I complain, scrunching up my nose.
“You have to take it out there to the nurse. Technically, this is your pee,” she reminds me.
With a sigh, I tentatively reach out and take the cup from her, trying not to drop it as soon as my hands wrap around it. Charlotte opens the bathroom door and I walk as slowly as I can behind her, holding the cup out as far away from me as possible.
“Oh, my God, it’s so warm,” I whisper in disgust. “And why does my hand feel wet?”
Charlotte glares at me over her shoulder as we make our way down the hall to the nurse’s station.
“I might have dribbled a little down the sides, it’s fine,” she whispers back to me like it’s no big deal.
“I have your pee on my hands?!” I hiss a little too loudly and she stops quickly, almost causing me to slam into her with my pee-covered hands
holding her warm cup of pee.
“Will you keep your voice down?” she scolds quietly. “It’s just a couple tiny drops of liquid. Just pretend it’s water.”
“But it’s not water, it’s your warm, wet pee! And it’s touching me!” I reply, wondering if I’ll ever be able to look at my hand again and not picture Charlotte pissing all over it like a dog marking its territory. “I cook with this hand, and now it’s a pee hand! You had one job to do—piss in a fucking cup without getting pee on my hand. This is why we can’t have nice things, Charlotte, because you piss all over everything, and now I smell like pee!”
She rolls her eyes and grabs my wrist holding the cup, dragging me the rest of the way down the hall to the waiting nurse. I sigh in relief when the nurse takes the cup from my hand and tells us to head right across the hall to examine room number four, letting me know she’ll be in as soon as she processes the urine sample.
I run to the room without saying a word, racing to the sink in the small room and start scrubbing my hand as Charlotte follows me and closes the door behind her.
When I’m satisfied that there are no lingering traces of Charlotte pee on my skin, I dry my hands, and the door opens right as I’m throwing away the paper towel.
“Okay, Molly, I just need you to get fully undressed and put on the paper robe on the exam table,” she explains as she walks to the table and starts pulling the stirrups out of their hiding spots inside it.
I shoot a worried look at my sister and she just shrugs, her expression mirroring my own as we watch the nurse move to a side table and start extracting things out of the drawers.
“Um, I thought I’d just be peeing in a cup today,” I mutter.
The nurse turns around and Charlotte and I both gasp loudly when we see the world’s biggest vibrator in the nurse’s hand. And that’s saying a lot considering my mother owns one of the largest sex toy stores in the world and I’ve been around those things since birth. I still have nightmares about Chocolate Thunder.
“What the hell is that for?” I ask, pointing at the huge, white phallic object in her hand that the nurse is busy putting an equally huge condom over top of.
She laughs sympathetically.
“It’s an internal ultrasound wand. According to the date of your last period you put on the medical form, you’re not very far along in your pregnancy. Ultrasounds done on the stomach won’t be very accurate at this point, so the doctor will use this internally to get a better reading,” she says with a smile.
“That thing has to go inside me?!” I screech loudly.
“Believe me, it looks much worse than it actually is,” she explains. “It’s really no different than having sex, maybe just a tad more uncomfortable, but it won’t hurt.”
I’m willing to do a lot of things for a KitchenAid mixer and money for an apartment, but having a tree stump shoved up my vagina is not one of them.
While I try my best not to hyperventilate again, the nurse finishes setting everything up for the doctor and leaves Charlotte and I alone to wait for him.
“That thing is not going in me, Charlotte,” I warn her as soon as the door closes behind the scrub-clad woman. “You better figure something out before the doctor gets in here, or I will lose my shit all over this exam room!”
Charlotte starts to pace next to the paper-covered table.
“Well, obviously you can’t let him give you that ultrasound or he’ll figure out right away you’re not pregnant,” she says. “I don’t know why you’re freaking out. It’s not like you’ve never had a penis in there before, and like the nurse said, it’s not much different than that.”
My silence immediately gives me away and Charlotte stops pacing to stare at me. “Holy shit, there’s no way you’re still a virgin. What about prom and Quinn Curtis?”
I growl at her and point an accusing finger her way. “I knew you read the texts on my phone that weekend, you lying slutbag!”
The morning after that disastrous prom night I walked into my bedroom after taking a shower and caught Charlotte standing by my dresser with my phone in her hands. She told me she accidentally erased all her contacts and needed Gavin’s number.
“How else was I supposed to find out how it went? You refused to answer any of my questions, dick-face vagina-hole!” she fires back.
“Maybe because it wasn’t any of your business, you asshole fuck face!”
We stare at each other angrily for a few minutes before we both burst into laughter.
“Oh, my God, we sound like Mom and Aunt Claire,” Charlotte giggles.
“Dick-face vagina-hole?” I ask through my laughter.
“Oh, please, like asshole fuck-face was any better,” she smiles. “Grandpa George would be so disappointed in our lack of follow through with strings of curse words.”
Charlotte hops up on the examine table, the paper cover crinkling noisily under her. When the room is silent again after she gets situated, I sigh heavily and move to lean against the table next to her.
“According to Quinn, it was amazing,” I tell her. “According to me, his picture is now in the dictionary next to the words ‘just the tip.’”
Charlotte laughs, looking at me questioningly.
“Seriously. He barely got the tip in before he came, screaming to God about how good it felt. Tampons have gone in my body further than that boy’s tiny penis,” I complain.
“So, technically you’re a pregnant virgin,” she smiles.
“Just call me the Virgin Mary,” I reply sarcastically.
“What are the chances the doctor is really old and senile, and we can switch vaginas without him noticing?” Charlotte asks right as the door opens.
A very handsome, very young man who doesn’t look a day over forty walks in wearing a white lab coat and a nametag that reads Dr. Christenson.
“Not good at all,” I whisper as he looks up from his clipboard and smiles.
“How’s your vision, doc?” I ask casually. “Twenty-twenty or blind-as-a-bat?”
He looks puzzled at my question and I don’t blame him. I don’t even understand half the things coming out of my mouth lately myself.
“Do you have the results from the urine sample?” Charlotte asks.
“I do and congratulations,” he tells me with a smile. “You are definitely pregnant. I just need to do an internal ultrasound so we can nail down how far along you are and discuss your next couple of visits.”
Charlotte hops down from the table and slides her hand through the crook of my arm. “Actually, doctor, I’m really sorry about this, but my sister isn’t feeling very well so we’re going to have to reschedule. She’s already thrown up twice, so we really need to be going.”
I put my hand over my mouth and make some pretend gagging noises as we walk to the door.
“Morning sickness…can’t stop puking,” I mutter behind my hand in between gags, giving him an apologetic look.
“Yep, so much puking,” Charlotte agrees, a loud gag coming out of her own mouth.
“What are you doing?” I whisper as we move through the door. “I’m the one fake gagging, not you!”
“I.”
Gag
“Can’t.”
Gag
“Help it,” she finishes as we rush down the hall towards the bathroom instead of the waiting room.
“Your fake gagging made me real gag!” she complains, dropping her hand from my arm and running the rest of the way to the bathroom and right to the toilet.
Once again, I’m stuck in a small, enclosed space listening to my sister upchuck the contents of her stomach while I hold her hair back.
While I hold my breath and try to ignore the smell and sounds coming out of Charlotte, I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket. Holding Charlotte’s hair with one hand, I pull my phone out with the other and smile when I see a text from Marco.
“Marco apologized for not calling,” I tell Charlotte.
She lifts one arm from the bowl and gives me a thumb’s up wh
ile she sits back on her feet and sighs in relief.
“Oh, and good news,” I continue, reading the second text he just sent. “He’s finally finished throwing up hot dog pieces and feels much better.”
Charlotte whimpers, quickly sitting up and sticking her head back over the toilet bowl, another round of gagging overtaking her.
“You hairy-ball-sack-whore-of-a-whale’s-dick!” she curses in between gags.
“Oh, pipe down you smelly-ass-giant-vagina-scrotum-licker!” I shout back, quickly shoving my phone back into my pocket and holding her hair back with both hands.
There’s nothing quite like the love between two sisters.
Chapter 10
– Titillating Tube Socks –
Marco
“Today’s my daddy’s birthday. He farts a lot.”
I don’t even get my mother’s front door closed all the way before a squeaky little voice starts rattling off strange, random facts.
“My dog Ralphie pees on all of our pillows. Daddy called it humping but mommy said I can’t say that word and I’m ’upposed to say he’s peeing.”
Valerie, my four-year-old niece and the spitting image of my sister Tessa with her long, curly black hair and big blue eyes, starts running around in circles in front of me.
“Hump-hump-hump, I’m gonna pee on you!” she chants loudly as I pat her on the head awkwardly and walk towards the noise I hear coming from the kitchen. I love my niece, especially now that she can walk, talk, and take a dump without assistance, but I’m not really that great with kids. I love kids, don’t get me wrong. I’d like to have my own some day, I just don’t know what to say or do when I’m around them. At least I got a weekend off from getting yelled at for teaching her new swear words at Sunday dinner last week, since Valerie spent the night at Tessa’s husband’s parent’s house. Hopefully, I can remember to watch my mouth today and avoid my mother’s wrath. Tessa should be the one getting in trouble, since she hasn’t taught her offspring to stop repeating everything people say.