Dark Rooms by Lili Anolik

pain. I was in a lot of it. My hand, in particular, the one I’d used to break my spill over the chairs. I held it up to my eyes. It looked like a rubber glove filled with water, not a knuckle in sight. I touched my face. It felt soft, shapeless, pummeled. There was a ridged scab above my eyebrow, and a lump as big as a walnut above that, and my upper lip was twice its normal size. The shoulder that had hit the ground first ached. So did the hipbone. So did the knee.
    Was all this damage the result of my drugged-out, boozed-up attempt to pass through a door without opening it first, falling seven or eight feet (the way the Amorys’ house was built into the hill, the second story at the back was only half a story high), or had something happened after, something during the period my memory went so disturbingly blank? At the same time I posed this question, it dawned on me where exactly I was: the spare bedroom, directly down the hall from Jamie’s. It was one of last year’s hookup rooms. This year’s, too, judging from the stiffness of the sheets beneath me. Suddenly I felt a fear so big it filled my head, the room, the entire house. Had I lost my virginity? And then I felt a fear so big it filled everything, had no bounds at all. Or had my virginity been taken from me? All at once I was sick, barely having time to turn my face to the trash can next to the bed before an acid liquid was spewing out my mouth, my nose, dripping down my chin.
    When I was emptied out, I reached for the unopened bottle of Evian on the nightstand. I drank, desperately thirsty. The water calmed me down. Someone, I realized, had left it for me. The trashcan, too. A sexual predator worrying about his victim waking up dehydrated or making a mess on the rug? I hadn’t been raped. And everything I was wearing the night before I was still wearing now except for the wig. I hadn’t had sex either.
    That I’d put myself in the position where such things were possible, though, was appalling, borderline grotesque. No more prescription drugs mixed with alcohol for me. No more prescription drugs period. This time I’d escaped with a few cuts and bruises, a minor sprain. Nasty injuries, to be sure, and painful, but nothing that wouldn’t heal. I’d gotten lucky.

    Two months later I found out just how lucky. I’d already been at Williams for a week. Not for classes, which hadn’t begun yet, but for preseason, to try out for the tennis team. I’d won three out of five of my challenge matches and the coach had pulled me aside, told me she’d be taking me on as an alternate. She couldn’t, she’d said, allow me to officially join up, though, until I underwent a full physical. School policy.
    Making the Williams tennis team as a walk-on was the first sign that the dark days were behind me, that quitting the benzos cold turkey had been worth the pain and trauma, the shakes and cramps and nights without sleep. My life, it seemed, was turning around, was going back, at least a little bit, to the way it was before Nica died. I’d wanted to tell Dad the good news in person. I’d also wanted to visit the Chandler Health Center, open year-round, though at reduced hours during summer break, which it still was for another week, to see Dr. Simons, my doctor since I was a kid. So I’d jumped in my car and headed down to Hartford for the day.
    That afternoon, Dr. Simons informed me I was pregnant. Eight weeks was his rough estimation.

Chapter 5
    I’m vomiting before I’m awake, my eyes still closed when my stomach seizes and acid floods my throat. I jackknife, lurching forward to open the door of my car but don’t quite make it in time, and a pale brown mixture of Diet Coke and low-sodium Saltines splatters out of me in a series of long convulsions. After the last one, I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, sit all the way up.
    I hadn’t intended to fall asleep. The house I’d