Barbara the Slut and Other People by Lauren Holmes Page B

again. Eunice tightened her grip on him and then loosened it. It made me want to cry that this old lady was showing him what was what.
    She led him to a bench and activated the safety light on the side of the building. She had on her calmest face, but she was shivering. I wondered if I should bring her her coat but I didn’t want to interrupt. Mike put his head down again and Eunice talked to him, and I could hear her voice in my head. Her voice was very soothing and she had been the only clinician I wasn’t afraid of when I started working at the clinic.
    Mike didn’t get worked up again, so Melissa and I closed the exam rooms and Melissa did the deposit and I put the pamphlet display back together and left a message for maintenance about the pictures and the track lights. When we were almost ready to go Eunice came back in alone and said that Mike Anonymous would be back in three months for a follow-up test.
    •   •   •
    When I got home Davey was mad about me working late and he made me help him clip the dog’s nails right away, before I had a chance to pee or open a bottle of wine.
    “How was work?” he said, but it sounded like he meant,
I hate you for fucking up my day
.
    “It was fine,” I said, hoping it sounded like,
I hate you for fucking up my life
.
    I made cereal for dinner and Davey played Call of Duty. When I told him I was going to bed he waved at me, and then later he tried to wake me up to have sex with him. I was pretty asleep but I figured if we did it then, we wouldn’t have to do it while I was awake, and he would leave me alone for at least a week.
    When he got on top of me the dog went under the covers. Davey was taking a long time to come and while he was working on it, I decided to tell him.
    “I don’t want to live here anymore,” I said.
    “Fuck,” he said. “That fucking dog is licking my feet. What did you say?”
    “Nothing,” I said.
    “Vivian, what?” he said.
    I pushed him out of me and closed my legs. “We had an HIV positive today.”
    He tried to separate my legs again. “Don’t you have HIV positives all the time?”
    “No. We never have HIV positives.”
    I moved over and put my underwear back on.

I WILL CRAWL TO RALEIGH IF I HAVE TO
    M y mom and I were going to stop to break up with my boyfriend on our way to Emerald Isle, but the muffler fell off of my car right before we got to the exit we needed to take to Raleigh, and my mom said we couldn’t stop anymore. I was driving, and I had been waiting for this exit for three hours, since we left home. I started crying and for a while I was crying so hard I could barely see. The car was so loud that I could barely hear either, and my mom was trying to talk to me but I didn’t care because I was mad at her for not letting us stop. Finally she got in my face and yelled, “PULL! OVER!” so I did and we switched seats. I cried for at least ten more minutes, which was more tears than it sounds like. My mom shouted over the noise that it was okay because we would get the car fixed when we got to Emerald Isle and I could stop in Raleigh to break up with James on the way back. I yelled that my vacation was ruined.
    We had no choice but to spend the next three hours in silence, or obviously not in silence but not saying anything. My mom drove in the right lane. She put on her sunglasses and tried to ignore all the cars passing us and staring.
    I had insisted on taking my car because I didn’t want it to look like my mom drove me to break up with my boyfriend. My plan had been to drop her off near James’s house and pick her up when I was done, but now all my plans had gone to shit.
    When we finally got to Emerald Isle, my mom’s boyfriend, Mak, was unloading beer from his car, and my brother, Noah, was on a walk with the dog, meaning he was smoking weed somewhere and letting Petey chew on rocks. The three of them had left Virginia at the crack of dawn that morning because Mak was in a big hurry to get to North