The Red Book by Deborah Copaken Kogan

ice queens all, so either guileless, sepia-toned Clover was Bucky’s new type, in which case Addison was ready to eat her hat, or—and this seemed more plausible—Clover was an experiment.
    When the couple broke up four months later, after a disastrous Christmas with Bucky’s parents in New York, Addison finally admitted her earlier doubts about the union while driving a sobbing Clover, who was supposed to have been sitting in Bucky’s passenger seat, back up to Cambridge for January reading period. “Oh, come on, Cloves, it’s not as if we didn’t see this coming,” she said, putting on her blinker to take the exit onto Route 84.
    “Speak for yourself,” Clover said. “I didn’t see it coming at all.” She stared out the passenger window, her eyes struggling to make sense, in the fading dusk, of the bare branches, the icy air, which Addison would be escaping mere hours after her last final exam, via a week in St. Barths with a posse of old friends. We? What we ? Even though Addison had urged Clover to join her in the Caribbean (“There’s plenty of room in the house, it’s already paid for, so you’d just have to deal with airfare, and the cook is awesome . . .”), Clover didn’t have a spare twelve hundred dollars lying around to purchase a roundtrip ticket. In fact, she was already falling behind on her tuition bills, which she was paying out of her own pocket through a work study program called “dorm crew”: a deliberately vague, inoffensive, sports-team-like term for the twenty to thirty hours a week she spent scrubbing the fecal streaks off her classmates’ toilets and mopping their floors.
    Clover had once tried to describe the humiliations of dorm crew to Addison, to paint a picture of that strange paradox of feeling simultaneously invisible and publicly nude while pushing one’s shame, in the shape of a mop, bucket, and broom, through a Harvard Yard choked with central casting freshmen playing Hacky Sack. Addison, attempting to be nice, had replied, “Oh please, Clover, no one’s paying any attention to you and your mops.”
    Rummaging through her purse for a tissue, Clover found only an old tampon, barely clinging to life in its torn wrapper. Which is when it struck her that her period was nearly two weeks late. She took mental inventory of her four months with Bucky, trying to recall one sexual congress during which she had not used some form of birth control. No, they’d been safe, definitely. That new epidemic the newscasters were calling AIDS made certain of that. (“Be careful, baby,” her mother, whose phone had been shut off, had written her on a postcard. “They’re saying on NPR that you can die from sex, that it’s not just a gay men’s disease. Death from sex, I can’t even wrap my mind around that one. Love, Mom.”)
    Maybe it was the cheap condoms she bought, she thought, the ones in the half-price bin that were well past their expiration date. She was so sick of having no money, of the less than wise decisions it forced her to make. Old condoms, what was she thinking? But the question was, of course, rhetorical: She was thinking, I need birth control, and the pill is too expensive, and I can’t find my diaphragm, and if I buy these at half price, I can use the money I save to buy a few pages of next semester’s books. Ironic, really, because now, it struck her hard, she was going to have to use the money she’d saved up for books and put it toward the cost of an abortion, there being no way she’d ever ask Bucky or his family for a dime.
    “Do you have any tissues?” Clover asked.
    “Check the glove compartment,” said Addison.
    Clover opened the glove compartment, and a thick stack of parking tickets came tumbling out of its mouth. “Holy shit, Ad, these all yours?” Addison had Scotch-taped several dozen of her tickets in a brick pattern on the wall behind her desk—“Wallpaper,” she’d answer, whenever anyone pointed to the expanding enigma and asked,