Read Chloe Doe for Free Online Page B

was likely to bleed to death.
    “If you can have an at-home birth,” she said, “there’s no reason you can’t have an at-home abortion.”
    She did it just fine.
    “I’m a pioneer in birth control methods. They’ll write a book about me. Write me into
historia.
”

Little Niña
    I have a roommate. Her name is Mary Christine. She is not like the rest of us, who have done it for a place to live, for groceries, for makeup and a pair of tall boots. Mary Christine slept with her brother.
    “He’s in prison now,” she says. But not for the sex, which started when Mary Christine was nine and her brother thirteen; when her brother changed his name to Jesus and convinced the little Niña they were saving the world. Mary Christine’s brother killed their father. “He’ll be there for a long time.”
    Mary Christine’s real name is Tammy. In group, at lunch, passing in the hallways, we have to call her Tammy, but alone in our room she asks me to call her Mary Christine; she still believes everything her brother told her. I pretend I’m Switzerland and make up my own name for her. She is young, fourteen, and too innocent for us. Still a girl, really.
    The little Niña is the only one of us with a regular visitor who isn’t our social worker or shrink. Her mother visits every Tuesday. She arrives at exactly nine a.m. and stays until they ask her to leave.
    She walks into our room like she’s returning from the market: “Mom’s here!”
    The little Niña, sitting on her bed, turns a page in her magazine. She pulls her knees up to her chest and hums. Not a song, but the buzz of a housefly, of a jet engine.
    “Now is that any way to say hello to your mom?” Mrs. Jacobs swats the Niña’s leg with a leather glove. She wears them driving. She has a toy dog, too. She sometimes brings him, shut up in her purse. “I brought you something special today,” she tells the Niña. “And don’t let them take it away from you this time.” Her white, white hand is stuffed in her purse, hunting.
    Staff doesn’t throw away the things her mother brings; the little Niña does it. She tears them up, even if it’s a pillow or a favorite shirt, and flushes the pieces down the toilet.
    “I can’t believe I found this,” her mother says. “It was inside a book, on the desk in your bedroom.”
    The special something is a baby picture of Mary Christine, only the photo has been cut. In it Mary Christine is wearing a blue, fluffy dress, her hair is lighter, almost blond, and curly. In front of her folded legs is a third foot, larger, laced into a brown boot. Mrs. Jacobs lets the photo slip from her fingers onto the magazine and into Mary Christine’s lap.
    Mary Christine picks up the photo and brings it close to her face.
    “Where is he?” the Niña shrieks. “What did you do to him?”
    “Who?” Mrs. Jacobs asks. She has forgotten her only son. Shut him out of her heart when she woke from the gunshot blast and found herself soaked in her husband’s blood. “What are you talking about?”
    “My brother.”
    “You don’t have a brother, Tammy,” Mrs. Jacobs says, her face as closed as a door. “It’s just me and you.”
    “No. No. No.” Mary Christine holds the photograph against her face and cries.
    Mrs. Jacobs picks up her purse. She slips her hands into her gloves. “I don’t know what I’ll bring next week,” she says. She’s slowly moving Mary Christine’s belongings out of their tidy home in the Hollywood Hills. “How about your yearbook? You don’t want to forget your friends.”
    Later, the Niña tells me she feels like a dirty dish towel her mother twists, twists, wringing out the only part of her that matters.
    She won’t tell me her brother’s real name. Mary Christine writes
Hey-Zeus
letters staff won’t mail. Instead, the Niña tucks them into her diary, where no one, not even staff, is allowed to go. She writes him a letter telling him they don’t want her to have the baby. The doctors are