Barbara the Slut and Other People by Lauren Holmes

because it couldn’t pick up the antibodies in Asian blood.
    “What?” I said. “That’s crazy.”
    “Is it?” said Dr. Wagner to the resident. “What do you know about that?”
    “I can find out more,” said the resident. “I’ll make a call.”
    “Are you retarded?” said Dr. Wagner. “Did you even go to med school?”
    “I know,” said the resident. “I was just joking.”
    •   •   •
    Davey called at three to make sure I was getting off of work at four and could help him cut the dog’s nails. He said they were clicking on the floor and if we didn’t cut them at four he wouldn’t be able to get any work done for the whole rest of the day. I swore on the book of skin diseases that if he called me on the private line one more time I was going to break up with him. When I hung up, my coworker Pregnant Patricia asked me if I could stay late for her, because she had to go to an emergency doctor’s appointment that she had been waiting a month to get. I told her I could. I called Davey back and left a message so that he wouldn’t come to the clinic right at four with the dog and the nail clippers. I said the baby inside of Patricia had a life-or-death situation and I had no choice but to stay until eight.
    After Patricia, Boss Donna, and Louisa left at four, Louisa called to tell me that Patricia had lied and was really going to a job interview. Before Pregnant Patricia was Pregnant Patricia she was Fat Patricia, because she was fatter than anyone else, even me. Fat Patricia and the women who had been working at the clinic for four years or six years or eleven years sent out their resumes from the fax machine whenever Boss Donna was out of the office, but no one had gotten a new job in the ten months I had worked there. Even though I was going to leave the job and hopefully the city and the state when my lease was up in two months, I imagined myself doing STD screenings when I was seventy. If I gained five pounds a year eating the donuts that the drug reps brought, I would be enormous by then.
    •   •   •
    A little before seven, Mike Anonymous came back with a woman. She was tall and black and didn’t look like I would have expected her to look, if I had expected to see her. She had perfect teeth and perfect skin, and she had purplish-blue contacts.
    Mike said he had an appointment. I was starting to understand his accent well enough. I looked at Melissa, who was working the front desk with me.
    “You were already here,” I said to Mike.
    Mike said he wanted to give the woman his appointment, and when I said we canceled it, he said she would wait for a same-day appointment.
    “I ain’t waiting,” the woman said.
    “Hang on,” I said.
    I went to the back and asked Eunice what to do. She looked at the clock. We had to take walk-ins until seven and it was six fifty-four.
    “Fuck,” she said.
    Back at the front, I gave the woman an intake form and an STD questionnaire, and she filled them out with her back to Mike. Melissa entered her into the computer and I put her chart together and brought her in.
    Her name was Marla Jones. Marla Jones looked like she was twenty but the birthday in her chart made her thirty-eight. She wasn’t wearing makeup and she wasn’t wearing a miniskirt. She was wearing jeans and a puffy coat.
    Marla had answered all of the questions in loopy handwriting. I asked her the standard counseling questions, like whether she was ready to get a negative or positive result in fifteen minutes, and what she would do either way. The only question that wasn’t standard was whether she felt like she was being forced to get tested, which we asked when patients were with their moms, and which seemed relevant now.
    “I ain’t being forced,” she said, “I’m getting paid.”
    I started the test and put Marla in a counseling room. I didn’t want to send her back out to wait with Mike Anonymous. When I got back to the lab, Eunice and Melissa were standing over the