Page 23 of Under Story

“Would you, though?” asks Nita.

The red roof of the hospital has lightened, over years, to cheery fuchsia. Inside, a nurse hands out tests. The bathroom has two stalls. When Laurel enters with Nita, she suddenly wishes that she were alone. She hears the tinny sound of Nita peeing. A moment later, the toilet flushes, and Nita walks out to the sink.

“Spawnless,” she says. “Want me to wait?”

Laurel shifts in discomfort. Her bladder has seemingly latched shut.

“No need,” she says. “Go ahead.”

Having a child, her mother once said, is the one thing you can never take back. The last time Laurel opened a pregnancy test, she thought of the fulcrum in a seesaw. Her life would change forever in an instant—or, just as surely, it wouldn’t. If there was a blob of embryonic cells inside her, life before that child would be as unthinkable, one day, as life after them was then. It was like meeting a major character halfway through a novel: she would feel astonished, decades later, that she’d gone so long without them.

Her urine comes in spurts: a trickle at first, then fast and warm in the cold. Pink dye flushes over the test strip, and a single line appears.

—

Nita applies baby-blue eye shadow; Louis lines his eyes like Prince. Stewie Prom is the last hurrah of the season, and this year, the theme is the nineties.

Skua was good to them: Laurel found a flannel shirt, and Charlie cut an orange tank into a tube top. An industrious steward takes requests for tissue paper corsages. While getting ready, nearly everyone props their door open, and Boyz II Men competes with the Lauryn Hill that wafts from Nita’s computer.

When they leave for Gallagher’s, Nita and Charlie take the lead.

“Don’t mind if we make a pit stop, do you?” asks Louis, pulling Laurel in the opposite direction. He stops in front of a discarded shipping container, hung with Christmas lights and packed to the gills with bodies. In the back, Matty bends over a flame. Miles is licking rolling papers. Laurel has never seen them interact with Louis, but they nod as though they’ve met here before.

Louis hands Miles a crumpled bill. “This should cover both of us.”

Matty passes him a joint. Louis takes a drag, and then he offers it to Laurel. She tries not to show her hesitation: in college, weed led to a sore throat and paranoid insomnia.

“Is this the stuff that chills you out?” she asks.

“No, sweetheart.” Miles laughs, coarse. “This is the shit that makes you do your taxes.”

“Roll her something a little more mellow,” Louis says.

Miles takes his grinder out and prepares a new joint. He holds the tip over a lighter, rotating it slowly, before he hands it to Laurel. She coughs out the smoke.

“You don’t know how to inhale,” says Miles, watching her.

Laurel reddens. “Yeah, I never got the hang of that part.”

“No, I mean”—his gaze is serious—“you don’t really inhale, do you? In general.” He points to her shoulders, hunched in self-protection. “You don’t take very deep breaths.”

Flustered, Laurel laughs. “I don’t know.”

“Shake your head,” says Miles. “Let your shoulders go. Breathe from your stomach, not your throat.”

“Miles gets bossy when he’s high,” Louis says. But he’s watching her curiously.

Laurel lets her head drift from side to side, like a flower on a stem. She drops her shoulders. When the joint comes back around, she inhales differently. This time, the smoke travels down.

—

Gallagher’s has transformed. Cardboard stars hang from the ceiling, and confetti covers the floor. Savage Garden’s “Truly Madly Deeply” plays as Louis and Laurel join the line for the bar. Ahead of them are two production cooks. The first gestures to her black, knee-high socks.

“They’re Doc Martens, asshole,” she says. “Use your imagination!”

Nita slow-dances with Sam; Charlie whispers to Diego, the pastry chef. As “Linger” segues into “No Diggity,” a helium sensation comes over Laurel. Her skin tingles; she feels weightless and warm, filled with an urge to giggle at nothing in particular—and how good it feels to laugh, like punching through something lifelike to life itself.

“You’re high,” says Louis. In a pink spotlight, he is radiant. He wears a women’s blouse and a pair of fingerless gloves. They rock back and forth to TLC’s “Unpretty,” and when “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” starts, they jump until their corsages fall off. There’s a photo station against the wall, a piece of cardboard painted the precise slate of prom backdrops everywhere, and they squeeze everyone in, Louis kneeling in front with his arms out like a jester.