H20: Chapter 2 Preview...

Not to be outdone from yesterday's preview, today I would like to present you with a peek into Chapter 2 of H2O the Novel

Chapter Two

“Ninety-nine percent effective when used properly. Detects pregnancy as early as one day after a missed period.” I read the instructions a dozen times the next morning, desperate to learn the result, yet scared to peel open the package. I’d walked this path twelve years ago. I had no desire to walk it again.

I paged through my iPhone, opening calendar appointments from my seat on the toilet, mentally reliving each day for the past month as I sought some clue as to when I started my last cycle.

Searching for some event that would trigger the memory, prove to me I hadn’t missed something. But it was pointless. The calendar didn’t lie. Tomorrow was “patch change day.” I never missed that event, listed in bold red on my digital calendar. If the patch worked—as it had for years—I had another week to go until cramps.

I tore into the package, ripping through the blue wrapper, desperate to get this over with. Wet it, wait, read it. Three minutes crawled by as my eyes burned text into the damp strip. Letters began to emerge slowly from the background of the saturated material, and I could feel that telltale nausea grip me like it had when I’d been a scared teenager. I closed my eyes, wishing the magic color onto the stick.

I held my breath and opened my eyes, then looked up at the ceiling and walked my gaze down the wall to the floor, across tiles to the base of the toilet and up my calves to the test strip in my hand. My fingers ached from their tight grip on the tiny device.

“No change,” I sighed aloud. “Not pregnant.”

***

An hour after the home test, I was on the road. I celebrated freedom, racing along dark predawn highways while I hugged the backbone of my second obsession—a Suzuki Hayabusa—the world’s fastest motorcycle. I loathe mediocrity.

My father grounded me once for riding around Manhattan on the back of Spike LoFaso’s chopper. I recalled those two months of lockdown misery with a perverse sense of justice every morning when my chrome-and-blue beauty growled to life. Xavier calls riding the Hayabusa my “guilty pleasure” aboard “a two-wheeled mortgage.” Mother says that riding the bike is “improper, something a true lady would never do.” I think it’s quite proper. I’m the only woman in Seattle who can go from zero to sixty in only three seconds. I proved it again this morning.

Ironically, I can thank my slug of a father for this obsession with speed. He never got his internal speedometer off zero the whole time I lived at home, stuck to his easy chair like a human slipcover. He never budged, yet I intended to move very fast. The faster you move, approaching the speed of light, the slower you age. Beat that, Oil of Olay.
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