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Red
"So, there's this guy…" and he has all the traits girls giggle and whisper over. He's smart – a computer science major at UC Davis – funny, sensitive, strong enough to carry me around, should I ever wish him to. Beautiful, with hypnotic hazel eyes that make me melt to think of. I love him. It makes my world just a bit brighter, knowing that he loves me, too.
    My world is a dark place, has been for as long as I can remember. There are things in the shadows of my mind, lurking evil histories I haven't voice to tell. And tonight, they're stalking closer to the fire. I've asked him to stay as my champion, to fight off monsters with his love. Just don't leave me alone right now, Love. Without you here, I'm afraid.
    He stays, holds me and kisses me, and I feel like I'm underwater. My eyes might be open or closed, I can't say for sure.
    Somehow, our clothing is gone. Nothing between me and this man who is saving me. And we're having sex, exactly as the world is supposed to be. This is right. Stay. Here, I'm safe.
    But it's not right. This shouldn't be happening, I realize with a jolt. There's nothing between us. No condom. I shove him away, and he pulls away, struck by the same freight-train realization. Then, we're fumbling for clothes, and he's crying and I'm crying and everything is wrong. The remainder of the night is spent in fragmented apologies and uncertain promises.
    "I didn't… I lost control. It was terrifying. Not being in control. I didn't mean to. I'm sorry. Love, I'm so sorry."
    "I am too. Don't be. Please. Don't blame yourself. It'll be alright. I promise. I should get my period soon. It'll be fine. I'm sorry."
    If we tell each other these things, it will be okay.
    By the morning, when we woke up under a red blanket on the couch in my living room, the panic had ebbed away. Julian, as he will be called for the purposes of this memoir, went back to Davis for the week. I went to school, and felt mostly normal. My emotions were a little bit exaggerated, a good indicator that I was about to get my period. Something about those weird emotions got me thinking that I wasn't really the way people saw me. I was supposed to be either hyper or depressed, never just calm and cheerful, and that wasn't true anymore. I seemed to be doing alright with my life, and so I wasn't happy with the way my friends saw me. According to a lot of the thinking I'd been doing then, the best way to get people to think of me differently was to change my name. I didn't feel like an Elizabeth, and never had. My nickname, Liz, wasn't who I wanted to be at all. It was my name, my defined self, who had all this darkness, when she'd never in her life had a reason to cling so strongly it. I was determined to live without that darkness, and the first step was to recreate myself. I asked my friends to call me Lena, as a sort of experiment.

Saturday, sitting in my close friend Rachel's cluttered, burgundy-draped room and painting dragonflies on her backpack, I feel cramped, trapped with the noise in my head getting louder every minute as I add yellow spots to a navy blue body. After a couple minutes of painting in silence, Julian joins us, sketching instead of painting, something involving a car accident. The car is personified, with a big smile as it runs over its driver. I feel like that driver, run over by something I thought I could control. Noticing my distress, Rachel saves me from my mind.
"We're going outside now. Let's go to the park."
In the doorway on the way out, I hug Julian to me. He's worried about what happened last weekend, but I tell him I'm fine. After all, all this noise in my head is a good sign that I'll get my period soon. He doesn't need to be worried about me, and I find that I really don't need him to be. That he's worried makes my own small fears hundreds of times worse. Once we're truly outside in the cold of late September, things are a little better. Sitting in a half-finished children's playground at Cedar Rose Park, I feel safe again. When we get cold, we go back into Rachel's house.
On the walk, Julian asks, "So, why the name change?"
We spend the rest of the evening in comfortable conversation about how I need to be less defined.
"So, Lena doesn't have to be anything?" Rachel asks.
"No, so she can be anything. I'm tired of being labeled and put into boxes. Lena has no labels. Lena is undefined."
Julian makes a small noise of understanding, and I'm delighted by these people in my life, by their willingness to accept me, by the fact that they understand.

Over the next week, I kept on seeing signs that my hormones were doing something out of the ordinary. I'd burst into tears at the slightest provocation. My body temperature was too low, then too high and I was constantly nauseous. I had some kind of virus, I thought, but, though I missed two days of school to sleep, I was no less exhausted by that weekend. When, the morning of Sunday the 8th of October, I still hadn't gotten my period, it became impossible to deny that I could be pregnant.
The most frightening part was that I couldn't tell anyone. I was small, lost and terrified. There was no way I could face a cashier's expression as I bought a pregnancy test. I worried about it all that day, and the next, going through the same panicked thoughts over and over again. I could tell Rachel. She wouldn't judge me, would she? And she was brave. She'd help. But she'd pity, and what if she did judge me, or if she didn't know how to help, or if she just didn't want to help me? I had no right to make my problems her responsibility. I could tell Julian. But I'd already lied to him. I'd said I was fine, and what would he think if he knew that was a lie? The whole thing made me feel so horrible about myself that I couldn't bear to have anyone who could help know. Except my mother.

Monday night, my mom gets home from work around 8. I sit at the kitchen table while she takes off her coat, hangs up her bag, and makes herself tea, trying to breathe slowly. Trying to force myself to say something. Finally, she sits down next to me, and asks me about my day.
"It was fine, but there's – there's something I need to tell you. I should have gotten my period two weeks ago and I'm – I'm really worried." My words are stifled, and so soft I'm almost afraid I'll have to say it again.
"And? Do you think you might be pregnant? Is that what you're trying to say?" She looks worried, but at least she doesn't seem angry. Up until this moment, I've had no idea how she would respond. All of a sudden, now that I know she's a safe person to tell, I'm shivering and sobbing loudly.
"Y-ye-" I can't get my voice to work at all, between choking sobs. I give a tiny nod.
She hugs me, and I move from my chair to sitting on her lap, holding on to her chest for dear life, and just crying. She doesn't ask more questions right away, just holds me and tells me it will be alright. When I've calmed down a little bit, she goes out and buys the test.
When the little plus shows up in the test window, a line in the other saying it worked right, I can actually breathe for the first time all week. Knowing almost makes things less terrifying, until I realize that now I have to deal with it. Then, I'm hyperventilating, crying again, and my mom is still there to comfort me. She puts aside her plans for the night to protect a lost, scared, child. Eventually, there are questions, what happened, why did you let it, and I explain, as much as I can. I really just don't know. And then, she asks me what I want to do about it.

In freshman Sex Ed, we spent probably a full week talking about "teen pregnancy" and "options." What you would do if your friend told you they were, why someone would choose to give their child away, and so on. I'd made a decision that I can now only think of as knee-jerk liberal, that, if I ever got pregnant, I'd have an abortion. I'd used the "I need school, not to be carrying a baby" and "It's not really murder" justifications, and, at the time, this had seemed to make a whole lot of sense. I also hadn't really believed I'd ever find myself in such a situation. I would be careful. I was a smart, wealthy, straight edged white girl. Accidental pregnancies didn't happen to my kind of person.
Being pregnant at sixteen wasn't what I'd had in mind when deciding the labels I used as Liz didn't really fit. Liz could never have dealt with this situation, since she'd long since lost the ability to adapt, but I'd never expected Lena to have to. The whole thing seemed surreal, and I found that I couldn't focus well enough to think through the decision to have an abortion. I stood by my long ago choice.
My mother was the one who found the clinic in Concord. She missed work that Tuesday to drive me there for the appropriate routine tests. I was distantly scared, horribly out of place there, but the nurses running the tests smiled, so I did my best to smile back as I filled out what seemed like hundreds of forms. Things were going to work out now. I convinced myself of that, for a while, until the test results showed I was pregnant, but no sign of the embryo. But even that wasn't something to be worried about, because it might be a tubal pregnancy, or it could just be very soon. I knew it was very soon, but by this point I expected the worst. The benefit was that they wanted me to have the abortion right away. I was to come back the next morning. I refused general anesthesia based on a  principle of my mother's—never use general anesthesia if you can avoid it—much the same way as I'd chosen to have an abortion, but they told me not to eat anything, anyway.

Wednesday morning around 11, I'm sitting in the waiting room in Concord, feeling like I'm going to faint from hunger and terror. The whole room is decorated in red, for some incomprehensible reason. The redness of the room only adds to my discomfort. At sixteen, I'm the youngest person in that room, except for the four year-old daughter of a woman in her very early twenties. Nonetheless, I feel a kind of solidarity with the other women. I feel the college student's blank misery as her mother reads some kind of housewife magazine and talks about plans for Christmas. I feel how terribly alone the Asian woman in the corner farthest from the door is. I feel all of us wishing they'd turn off the gruesome daytime television. It's  mainly red, too, and again, I don't understand it. I sit in that waiting room for probably three hours. My book can't hold my attention, and I haven't even remembered to bring my iPod, so there's nothing to do but sit there. After a while, the shock and hunger make my body feel small and distant. I'm floating. I'm a million miles away, in empty space, dizzy and alone.
Finally, they call my name. Still dizzy, still floating, I glide down a flight of stairs to the actual surgery area, and replace my comfortable, sheltering clothes with some kind of hospital gown. I don't even remember what it looked like. My clothes go in a locker, and the nurse who gave me the gown gives me a huge bright red Ibuprofen and a paper cup of water. I swallow the pill, drinking the water with relief, and throw away the paper cup. The nurse leads me down the hall.
It turns out there's another waiting room here, and thankfully, it's not red. It's gray and soft, with quiet music playing, and a fountain in the corner, and some kind of small, potted tree. I sit in a gray chair, the Asian woman already sitting in another, and there is what feels like half an hour more of waiting. My thoughts are like soap bubbles, delirious and nonsensical, but I wish my mother had been allowed to follow me down the stairs. Without her, I feel even less safe. Five minutes after the Asian woman is called, the nurse comes for me. The room she leads me to is clearly the room where the procedure will happen. I lie on my back on a table, legs strapped above my head, and ask the doctor, a tired, harried-looking man in his late thirties, to tell me what he's going to do. This will help me to deal with being conscious for it.
He gives me a brief summary, which I simply cannot parse in my incoherent state. Something about a device that removes the lining of the uterus, I gather, but I don't know more than that. I'm about to ask for details, when the pain starts. A nurse has wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my right arm. It tightens and relaxes, tightens and relaxes, over and over and over. Each time it tightens, a cramp braids my organs into knots  and searing bands of pain. I scrunch my whole face in agony, but resist the urge to cry out. It goes on like this, with brief lulls where I can feel my mind again, for I don't know how long. Longer than I think I can stand it. My gut is being torn apart. And then it's over. The blood pressure cuff is taken off, and my feet are let down.
Somehow, I get to a bed in a room full of them, at the far end of the hallway. Someone hands me a lollipop, butterscotch flavored, the first thing I've eaten all day. I ask for another, certain I won't be able to stand without more sugar. I eventually am allowed to get up and pull on my clothes, and a thick menstrual pad to catch excess blood. A nurse calls my mom over the intercom, to come pick me up. Another hands me forms for follow-up blood work. Around 2:30 that afternoon, I leave. My mother has bought me a raspberry yogurt, which I eat in the car on the way out of Concord.

The blood tests performed later showed that it hadn't been a tubal pregnancy. My ordeal was over, and I could go back to a fairly normal life. I was back at school by that Friday, hugging my friends, talking in my classes, even, I think, playing badminton. But as the next few weeks passed, I felt an increasing sense of isolation from my peers. In cheerful conversations about comics, novels and tea, I had nothing to contribute, and honestly, I didn't really care who Rachel was flirting with. I had experienced something most of them could never even imagine they might go through, and that made me different. With people who had, a month ago, felt closer than family, I was out of place.
Lena, it seemed, had no family. Lena was no braver or happier than Liz had been. And Lena had secrets Liz wouldn't have had to worry about. I was still terrified to tell my friends what had happened, and that made it almost impossible to belong among them.
In school, I spent my classes imagining how my classmates would respond if I just stood up one day and yelled "I had an abortion!" Who would pretend nothing had changed, but refuse to meet my eyes for the rest of the year. Who would pity me and think they understood. Who would look at me with disgust and call me a murderer, and were they even wrong to think that?
Sometime in the weeks following the abortion, I had developed a sense of guilt and regret about my choice. I could have kept the child and given birth to him. Even if I couldn't possibly be a good mother, my parents would probably have cared for him. With arguments such as these, I hated my ninth grade self, so full of certainty that ending a pregnancy couldn't possibly be taking a life.
I ignored my classes entirely. I'd killed my child, without a second thought. What did school matter, compared to that?

Sometime in November, just as I'd started to believe my choice did not make me a horrible person (any other options were wildly impractical and harmful to my life, my potential child, and my family) my favorite grandma died. I flew to London with my father, and together we attended the Jewish funeral that she would never have wanted. I barely slept for the three days I was in London, wishing I was home, and wishing I had someone to protect me from all this misery.
While I was there, I got my first period since having had the abortion. With it came the worst cramps I'd ever felt, short of that procedure. I hated my body, for making me go through this, on top of everything else.
I flew home, alone, the day after Thanksgiving. The plane was almost entirely empty and thus freezing cold. I sat by myself, sprawled over a row of three seats, reading a book about a man with serious drug problems and feeling like I was losing my mind. As the plane descended low over Mt. Shasta, I had a moment of clarity. I was tiny and insignificant, and the world was huge enough that I could get lost forever in it, and, the important part was, that made all the pain I felt okay. I didn't need it; it didn't matter any more than I did. I could just go on with my life.
Throughout the rest of November and most of December, that was what I tried to do. I smiled at my friends, laughed at their jokes, drank tea with them. I still struggled to deal with classes,  but I told myself it would be winter break soon enough. Underneath, though, I was still miserable. School was unbearable enough that I actually decided I was never going back at one point, but I was alive. I was alright, and that was enough. I was determined to keep on being alright until I could actually be happy, even if I couldn't watch movies with pregnant women in them and I still didn't know how to tell my friends why I was changing.

At last, winter break arrives, and I've made plans to spend the weekend with my friends in Santa Cruz. Friday night, my mom takes me to a Celtic concert in a tiny café. I know the band members, and my friends fill the audience. Ary, who happens to be in the same corner as I am, offers me tea, even though I haven't so much as spoken to her since July, and at intermission the café becomes filled with conversations in which I feel perfectly at home. For the first time, it doesn't matter that I've had an abortion. These are people who would think of me no differently if they knew. Laughing, I join in a conversation about Willow's manliness, and the extent to which it exceeds Lee's. I'm enveloped in a huge group hug within five minutes, and spend the rest of the concert sharing a pillow on the floor with three other people, only two of whom I've ever met before.
After the concert, I go home with Katherine, who is actually one of the handful of people I've told, at this point. We talk until 1 AM about our families, about books we've read, about music, about nothing, really. The conversation is just background for the trust and reconnection that is what we're really communicating.
I wake up at first light the next morning on my period again, and with another awful cramp. Standing alone in Katherine's room while she makes even more tea, I decide I don't need this cramp. There is no real reason for my menstrual cycle to be suddenly painful, and, thinking about this, I decide it isn't going to be. By midmorning, the cramp has subsided to a bearable level. I am actually able to forget about the abortion for the rest of the day, and to simply each moment, as I could never have done before the abortion.
That evening, sitting on a couch in Willow's living room, I realize that I really am no longer Liz. To Liz, this whole trip would have been a battle with shyness. That I didn't know the guitarist sitting across from me and singing a Regina Spektor song would have made it impossible for me to join in with the choruses. Sitting on a couch with a guy I'd met only once before would never have felt so safe. Throughout my life as a whole, and the last few months in particular, I'd needed someone I knew, loved and trusted beside me to feel as if I weren't about to be attacked at any second. Here, I was as safe as I had ever been, for all that I was alone. I was Lena, and I was more confident than Liz had ever been.
Only Katherine and I stayed the night at Willow's house; everyone else either lived nearby or could drive themselves home. We talked about nothing until 1 AM, again, and on the morning of December 24th, woke up early. There was tea and cold pizza for breakfast, and I was, for the first time in months, perfectly content. The lurking shadows in the back of my mind had settled down to hibernate, never, I hope, to wake again.