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“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because… a child shouldn’t have to grow up in a place like this.”
She ran a hand over the hairs on my arm, sending goosebumps strumming the surface of my skin head to toe.
“This place isn’t so bad,” Ivy said.
I gave her a look. How could she say that when she’d almost been raped a few hours ago?
“Okay,” she said. “So, it’s not the best place in the world.”
“That’s an understatement.”
“But it’s warm. It’s dry. There are worse places to grow up.”
“Not many.”
“The kid could grow up somewhere else then. Not here. Somewhere far away.”
What was she talking about? If she had a child, it would grow up here for sure. The same way I had.
“You grew up here,” she said. “You didn’t turn out so bad.”
“I had some memories to keep me going.”
“What memories?”
“A handful. Most of them are a little fuzzy and hard to recall. A waterfall with hot water that rained down on my head. A big open green field somewhere. Nature. And the sun was warm.”
“Beautiful memories.”
“I’ve never told anyone about them.”
“You know, the girls take medicine,” Ivy said. “To prevent pregnancy.”
She looked like she’d swallowed sour medicine when she said it.
Why? Because the medicine she took didn’t taste good?
“I won’t get pregnant,” she said.
I shook my head. I still didn’t like the idea of it.
“You don’t know that. Medicine doesn’t always work. Sometimes it fails.”
“Most of the time it works. None of the girls are pregnant right now, are they?”
“I guess not. It just seems like a risk we don’t need to take.”
Ivy looked disappointed.
“Okay. I can’t make you. I just thought… I don’t know. That it always feels incomplete somehow.”
Incomplete? She really thought that?
“It’s okay. It was just an idea.”
