EXERCISE

“I need medication,” my friend says, stepping forward to the Pick-Up Counter. 

The pharmacist, a short Asian woman with hair tied back in a no-nonsense ponytail, blinks. “Okay. What kind?” 

I nod at my friend reassuringly, before realizing I’m two steps behind and she can’t see me. She steps closer and leans over the counter. “Plan B.” 

“Generic or brand name?” It’s two minutes past nine in the morning, and I can still hear the sleep in the pharmacist’s voice. “Generic is ten bucks cheaper.”

My friend turns to me, her eyes searching. 

—

At 2:48 AM in the early hours of that morning she texted me, frantic. She had never used or needed Plan B before — for as long as I’d known her, she’d always been cautious and smart and only reckless when she knew she could laugh about it the next day. Five minutes before the pharmacy opened I had met her at the corner of the plaza, between a bank and a liquor store. She didn’t say much, looking down at her feet, mostly. 

“It’s only been, like, five hours,” she whispered, just before we walked through the automatic doors. 

“You’ll be fine.” I squeezed her shoulder. “This is so common. That’s barely any time passed at all. You’re totally fine.”

—

When I meet her eyes I shrug. “Generic works just as well. I’m pretty sure.” 

She turns back to the pharmacist, nodding. 

I nudge her boot with mine. “Hey, he gave you fifty, right? Looks like you made a profit.”

She giggles, before pushing the paper dollar bill across the counter. 

The pharmacist gives a small smile, too. “Do you want me to put it in a brown paper bag?” 

Her words make me think of Mr. Dolphus Raymond from “To Kill a Mockingbird,” who drank pop out of a paper bag to trick the town into believing his behavior was the product of alcoholism. That was the first time I realized you could manufacture the semblance of shame — and that there were things more important than shame. I watch as my friend accepts the paper bag and wonder what to her, at that moment, is more important. I wonder if she knows, even. 

It’s not until we’re walking to my apartment — it’s closer to the pharmacy than hers, and she wants to take the medicine as soon as possible — that I realize the pharmacist said next to nothing about the intake instructions. She didn’t even ask for my friend’s ID to check if she was old enough to buy the medication (in Illinois you have to be 17 or older — any younger and you’ll need more than just a paper bag). Standing in my kitchen I toss the bag to the side and take a pair of scissors to the plastic covering, which seems unnecessarily difficult to open, almost pettily so. We read the instructions, with “in 72 hours” and “soon as possible” sticking out but not in a more important way. 

“Make sure to keep track of your next period, okay?” I ask, wondering if these are the things pharmacists are supposed to tell you, and feeling a strange sense of kinship at the absence of her instructions — perhaps she knew we would have pored over the directions anyways, even if she shouldn’t have. Perhaps anything more than the paper bag would have been excessive, even though it shouldn’t have. Perhaps she was groggy with sleep, and forgot. “If it’s more than a week late, tell me,” I continue. 

She nods, and we spend the next half hour watching a reality TV dating show until her bus comes.  

PROCESS NOTES

In this assignment I wanted to explore the concept of shame and what shame is worth in the context of female reproductive healthcare. The experience of buying an emergency contraceptive pill is often shrouded in secrecy and taboo, compounding upon the already existing stigma around birth control with the notion of irresponsibility and sexual intimacy. Especially in moments where one party is more responsible for the situation– in this exercise, the friend’s partner is depicted as the responsible party given the financial burden he takes on — the experience involving dynamics of shame and information deficits are unique to the friend, a woman. I wanted to play with the notion of kinship between women in this excerpt because the notion that the pharmacist already understood that any further instructions beyond the brown paper bag would be didactic is something I wanted to explore — what is said by the unsaid, essentially. Again, I’m struggling with discussing this subject without falling into the realm of heteronormativity, and would appreciate any suggestions about how to work on that issue in my pieces.