Your mother notices when you don’t wear blush or when your teeth aren’t white enough, but not when your clothes are falling off or when your hair comes out in fistfuls. She doesn’t notice until you faint and she can’t wake you up. 

You hear the doctor say you’ll die if you carry this baby, and then you’re in your parents’ car, on the way to New York, and you feel her move. You imagine her doing somersaults and flips, and when you feel that flutter again, you think maybe she’ll be a gymnast or a dancer, and you hope your mother will change her mind and beg your father to turn around, but he keeps driving. 

You walk into the hospital expecting your mother to stay, but she leaves you with a nurse and you don’t see her again until it’s over. When the social worker tries to explain what’s about to happen, you don’t hear a word she says because you feel the baby move again and you try to ignore it because you know in a little while she’ll be dead.

When the contractions start, the nurse puts something in your IV but whatever it is isn’t enough because you feel her slide out of you into a basin and you don’t understand why you feel a wave of relief. So you start screaming and they give you more drugs and a moment later you’re floating in space, and you wish you could stay there forever. 

When you start coming back to your body, you fight it as hard as you can because you don’t want to be here.

You can’t be here.

But you are here. And prom’s next week, and you think about the burgundy gown, your hair styled in loose curls, how all you want is to feel beautiful again.

Then it hits you—she must have felt pain or struggled for breath. You think about how you weren’t there to hold her, to tell her she mattered. And you know what that feels like because your mother won’t talk to you. And you need your father to hug you—to be Daddy, the man who can fix anything, even a dead baby.

But he won’t even look at you.