Abortion travel

I need to say first that this is not my medical story, which is a weird way to start an essay for a class, but Mr. Padilla said write about a public issue as if it happened on your street, and it did, it happened in my Civic with the dent from the Coronado parking garage, and if I make it mine I am stealing. It is Elena's — not her real name, she would kill me, she still might. She borrowed the car on a Thursday and told her mom she had a project at UNM. She had a project. The project was a clinic.

New Mexico is the place people drive to. I knew that in the abstract, the way you know the Bosque floods, the way you know the State Fair will be hot. I did not know the abstract had a playlist. She put on Bad Bunny and then she couldn't stand lyrics, so it was just air and the I-25 sound. I went with her because she asked, and because I am a person who says yes when I should ask one more question. I asked the questions in the waiting room, too late.

Dobbs, in my house, is an argument my tía has with my dad while the posole is on. My dad says the states, the voters, the babies. My tía says the girls, the money, the men who vanish. They both think they are talking about love. They are talking about Elena in a chair with a form. I sat there and I thought: none of you are in this linoleum.

I used to be the kind of Catholic school leftover who said "I would never" like it was a personality. I still don't think I would, which is easy to say in a body that is not pregnant. Watching her, I did not convert to a slogan. I converted to not being a coward about the drive. The drive is the policy. Everything else is a podium.

She was eight weeks, maybe nine, she wasn't sure, because her period is a rumor even when she isn't scared. The people who write six-week laws have never been 17 in a house where you hide wrappers. I am not saying that to be shocking for a college packet. I am saying the law is written like bodies are clocks, and they are not, they are girls who play soccer and forget.

The other argument, the one my dad would want me to put in so I look fair, is that a life is a life. I can feel that. I felt it in the room when they did the ultrasound she didn't want to look at. I looked, because I am nosy, and it was a blob that the tech treated like a fact. Facts can be sacred to one person and a crisis to another. I hated that both could be true. I still hate it. Hating it did not stop the appointment.

Clinics here are booked because other states decided we would be the overflow parking. The staff were kind in a thin way, like they had used up the thick kindness on Tuesday. A protester outside called Elena a name that was not even accurate. I told him to get a job. Very brave, Camille, from a moving car. He had a job, probably, the job of being there. I don't think he was a demon. I think he was a man with a sign who had never been the friend with the keys.

After, she slept on the drive south and I watched the speedometer like a cop was going to pull me for the crime of being useful. She bled more than she thought she would. I Googled in the Target parking lot in a way I will never put on a college essay that my counselor sees. Then I bought her a heating pad and a Gatorade and I thought about how this is what "access" looks like when you are not an op-ed. It looks like a receipt.

I am going to college in Colorado. I picked it for the mountains and for a program, not for the statute, but I would be lying if I said the statute didn't sit there in the back of my head like an extra major. Some of my friends in Texas talk about campus like it's a medical plan. That is insane. It is also rational. We should not have a generation of girls picking tuition based on a speculum. We do.

Do I think abortion is sad. Yes. I am not going to do the internet thing where sadness is a betrayal of the team. She cried in my car and then she ate a burrito and then she cried again because the salsa was too hot, which was funny in a mean way, and we laughed, and the laugh did not cancel anything. People who need it to cancel something are not talking about Elena. They are talking about a flag.

If Dobbs was about democracy, democracy should have to look at a Honda Civic's back seat. Democracy should have to hear a girl practice her lie about UNM. I am not sure the justices would change a vote. I am sure they should have to sit in the smell of the heating pad. That is not a legal standard. I know. I am 18. Legal standards are what you learn after you have already been the driver.

My mom found the gas receipt a week later because she is a detective of glove boxes. I told her a version. She closed her eyes. She did not tell Elena's mom. That silence is a whole politics. It is not in the party platforms. It is in kitchens.

I don't have a clean ending. She is fine, mostly. She still borrows my charger. She does not talk about Thursday. I talk about it here because Mr. Padilla asked, and because I am sick of adults saying "complex" like the word is a blanket. It is not a blanket. It is a car, a lie, a clinic, a dad who would have paid for a baby and still not been the one in the chair. I am on her side. I am also not going to spit on my dad in public to prove it. He would have driven too, I think, if she were me. That is the part that wrecks the slogans. The slogans don't have nieces.

Keep the receipt, I told myself, like it was evidence. Evidence of what. That we did a thing the country cannot agree is a thing. I kept it anyway. It is still in there, faded, under a hair tie and a parking ticket from Central. That is my whole file on Dobbs.