Page 50 of Triplets for the Pucking Playboys
I start to sweat, a bead running from my hairline to my cheek. “Is there something wrong?” I ask, voice thin.
She doesn’t answer at first. She’s too focused on whatever she’s seeing.
“How far along did you think you might be?” she says, dead casual, not looking at me.
The question hits harder than the cold. I blink, try to recall any frame of reference. “I’m not…I mean, I’ve missed…But I’m on the pill.”
She nods, like this is the answer she expected. “Birth control’s not always a guarantee.”
She turns the screen slightly toward me. “You want to look?”
I don’t, but my head tilts anyway. The screen is a mess of static, black blobs floating in a pale sea. The tech toggles a layer, and the shapes snap into sharper relief: one, two, three little orbs, stacked like a snowman knocked sideways.
My brain refuses to process what my eyes see.
The tech points. “There’s one,” she says, the tip of her pinky on the glass, “and there’s two more, right there and there.”
She clicks, saves, then looks at me with something like awe.
I’m already lying flat, but the room sways as if I’ve been pushed off a ledge. She smiles, this time with genuine warmth. “Congrats, I guess. It’s definitely not the flu.”
I stare at the screen. Three. There are three. I should not be able to do this.
I was told once that pregnancy would be unlikely. The kind of statement they make while clicking through charts, while offering pamphlets on alternate paths and words likeassistedandmonitoring. With PCOS and irregular cycles and years of being told that my body had already made its choice, I learned to file that part of myself under impossibility. Not when my entirelife had been built on managing symptoms, suppressing side effects, choosing the practical over the fragile.
And now there are three.
The tech wipes off the gel, hands me a rough paper towel. “You okay?”
I nod, because it’s easier than explaining what’s happening in my head. I sit up, but the world is still tilted, every line slanting toward a future I never planned for. She prints a copy of the scan, hands it to me with care. “Doctor will be in soon. You can wait here.”
I hold the paper in my lap, the dark circles floating in white like planets caught in some celestial net. I press a palm to my belly, try to feel anything. There’s just the distant thrum of my own heart, wild and erratic.
Alone in the room, I stare at the printout, then at the ceiling, then back again.
I count to three. I try to breathe. This is real. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s close.
17
SAGE
Iget myself home from urgent care, and let Mia know I’m fine, it’s just stress. She texts back, asking if I need help. My answer is an immediateno.After that, I climb into bed.
There’s a ceiling fan above, the plastic kind sold at a discount hardware store, rotating in slow, unsteady arcs. I bought it because the listing saidnearly silent, and I liked the idea of something existing purely to soothe me. Now, at three in the morning, it’s the only thing keeping the air in my room moving, the only thing reminding me that I’m not dead yet. I stare at it, counting rotations, one, two, three, again, again, again, until my eyes blur and the edges of the blades seem to melt. I haven’t slept in twenty-nine hours and forty-three minutes, but who’s counting. Me. I am.
There’s a printout of an ultrasound on my nightstand. I don’t need to look at it; the image has already been sandblasted onto the inside of my eyelids. Three distinct orbs, pale against the black, lined up in a row like the world’s most condescending game of connect-the-dots. It’s not even the weirdest thing I’ve seen on a scan. I’ve seen teratomas with hair and teeth. I’veseen cysts so big they have their own zip code. I’ve never seen anything that looked at me.
My body is doing its best to reject the news. Every muscle group is locked in a different flavor of protest. There’s the dull ache behind my sternum, a constant since the moment the technician said,“You want to look?”There’s the ripple of nausea that starts deep in my gut and works upward, cresting in my esophagus like a reverse ocean tide. There’s the skin at my lower abdomen, prickling and tight, as if the cells themselves have begun an unauthorized union strike. I should move. I should eat. Instead, I flatten my palms against the blanket, squeeze until my fingers hurt, and wait for the next round of symptoms.
I’m not one for melodrama. When my first boyfriend dumped me via group text, I ate a sleeve of saltines, watched three episodes ofCSI: Miami, and then went for a run. When my mother’s thyroid tried to kill her, I learned how to give subcutaneous injections, then charted her hormone levels in Excel for fun. I am not the kind of person who lies in bed and wallows. Except tonight, when the alternative is getting up and admitting that it’s all real.
Reaching for my phone, my thumb hovers over therecent searchestab. The last five are a showcase of denial:phantom pregnancy symptoms,can ultrasound be wrong,three sacs not always triplets,PCOS mimics pregnancy,ultrasound technician error stories. I click into the first, scroll past the paywall, skim the bullet points. It’s not a match. The real punchline is that I already know. I’ve done this for years—collected other people’s pain, organized it into neat folders, told them how to manage it. The hypocrisy is not lost on me.
I swipe to the next article, something onvanishing twin syndrome, and start calculating odds. My brain offers up statistics: one in fifty for multiples, one in a hundred thousand for triplets, even less for a full-term set. I’ve never been lucky. Iwas the kid who got chicken pox after the vaccine. I was the one who missed the scholarship cutoff by a single decimal point.
My pulse is up. I can feel it in my fingertips, in the thread of veins at my wrist. I set the phone down, let the screen time out, and try breathing exercises. Four seconds in, six out, the kind they teach you in basic training for panic attacks. It doesn’t help. The only thing it does is make me aware of how shallow my breath has gotten, how every inhale tastes of last night’s mouthwash and something metallic underneath.
I push the blanket away, roll onto my side, and press my knees to my chest. Fetal position, irony noted. I rock forward and back, eyes fixed on the strip of LED light bleeding through the gap under my door. At some point, I hear the heat click on, the whine of the ancient baseboards, but it’s not enough to make the room feel less like a morgue.
