The Opening Sky Read Online Free Page B

that had nothing to do with happiness or friendliness. His teeth were over-whitened.
    She told him she wanted to start on a contraceptive pill and he gave her a sales talk about a pill you took for three months straight without having a period.
    “Is that natural?” she asked. “For your body?”
    “Natural?” he said. “Cave women didn’t menstruate. They were either malnourished or they were pregnant or they were lactating.”
    It felt like a trick. Normally people in a doctor’s position want to make things harder for you. But the next thing she knew he had printed the prescription and was holding it out to her. “Fun, fun, fun,” he said.
    Or possibly she added that when she told her friends that night, when they were having a big conversation on Jenn’s deck.
    “Wouldn’t your mother know all about this?” a girl named Ella asked. “Isn’t this, like, her thing?”
    “My…
mother
?” Sylvie said, as if it were a word she’d never heard before.
    “Yeah, doesn’t she run a birth control clinic or something?”
    Thea started laughing like a maniac. “ PMS ! Think about the PMS you’re going to have!”
    “I saw an SNL bit,” Jenn said, suddenly remembering. “About a
twelve
-month pill. Tina Fey was in it – she was crazy with PMS , she was swinging an axe around.”
    But that actually reassured Sylvie. In the afternoon she’d googled the drug. Somebody had posted a comment:
I would wait till its been on the market longer and not let yourself be a ginny pig
. But this pill had been around a long time – since when Tina Fey was on
Saturday Night Live
. The more they talked, the more Sylvie could see that it was absolutely the most responsible thing to do. Tampons every month made a lot of garbage. And then there was the land given over to growing cotton, which is a terrible crop for the soil. Of course, Dr. Roadster was likely being bribed by the drug company. That’s not something she thought about then, though she thinks about it now.
    She reads her Evo-Devo handouts for half an hour and then takes a break and goes out to a machine in the hall to buy some pseudo-food. It’s now afternoon, only four more hours until sunset. When she was a kid, she’d made a model of the solar system, with a beach ball as the sun and a dried cranberry stuck on a crooked silver pin as Earth. THE AXIS OF THE EARTH IS JUST AN IMAGINARY LINE BETWEEN THE POLES , she wrote on the legend. But all the same, she used a protractor when she bent the silver pin, careful to get the angle right. Because Earth is a
slave
to that imaginary line: it spins at a tilt around it, which is why, minute by minute, everybody’s being carried deeper into the cold and the dark, whether they like it or not.
    Everybody. That is so North-centric, as Noah would point out right away.
Noah is coming
. She stands in the hall chewing sugary glued-together oatmeal and thinks of them wedged together on hernarrow bed. How cool would it be if they could evade their parents for a few days, hide out at Laurence Hall after Kajri leaves for the holidays. They’ll do it. Sylvie will
kidnap
him. She sees him riding down the escalator at the airport, everyone but him carrying huge shopping bags spilling over with wrapped gifts, his alert eyes scanning the crowd of families hugging hello, and here it’s
her
leaning against the back wall of the arrivals area.
    She turns back into the clinic, but before she can sit down, the receptionist calls her name and leads her into one of the examination rooms. A mirror’s been hung behind the door and she raises her upper lip and checks for bits of granola caught in her front teeth. Sleepy, scruffy, silly Sylvie, she hums, neatening her eyebrows with a finger.
    She sits down and checks her cell again. Nothing. She’s been at the clinic almost an hour. Benedictor will be done. He’ll have found it, she knows in her heart. But it’s crazy to be waiting here while she has so much work to do. I’ll just leave,