Plan B
The condom breaks the same day our electoral systems professor is hospitalized. Audit tomorrow, people say. Coward.
The exam is in ten hours. My boyfriend buys the pill. I swallow it dry in a pharmacy doorway. He says his friend’s girlfriend puked all night on this. Cool story.
We split strawberries on a bench behind his house. One tastes like soap, one like June. The sugar stays on my fingers.
We were barely taught. I keep what I can carry: Majoritarian, Proportional, Mixed; the U.S. from school; Latin America – the professor’s favorite detour. Five I hold. Ninety I don’t. On exams, if there are three I don’t know, I draw three.
The hallway smells like printer heat. The first group comes out wrecked; even the A kids look erased. I text my supervisor: Emergency. I’m cooked.
She leaves her own exam, finds the new guy, calls me back: Go last. Be polite.
I wait and watch people fail in three styles: confident wrong, whisper wrong, please-sir wrong. The clock holds at :59, jumps to :02. My hands feel borrowed. I keep them boring. My turn.
I draw a ticket. It’s my five – Majoritarian, Proportional, Mixed, the U.S., Latin America.
I say what I actually know. He nods in the right places. ‘95A,’ he says, like a bus route.
’Thank you,’ I say, like I was taught. I leave. Outside, my phone lights up. Three messages. One from my boyfriend: both questions went fine? One from my supervisor: thumbs up. The third is spam. A sale I won’t open.
I type both, delete it, type yes. The pill stays down. No nausea. No mess. Faint sugar on my fingers. I delete ‘thank you,’ send ‘got it.’ The protection stayed where I put it.
After the exam they want the trick. I say the ticket helped. But would it, if I hadn’t texted? If I’d said no need for panic and didn’t swallow the pill? Maybe it still lands.
Maybe it doesn’t.
I didn’t wait to find out.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Iryna Somkina is a Kyiv-based writer. She is Best Small Fiction nominee; her works appear in Gone Lawn, ANMLY, Heavy Feather Review and everywhere else. She explores ambivalence of intimacy in gritty reality.
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Image: Milwaukee Public Museum November 2023 046 (Latin America).jpg
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