Walking into the bathroom, Arnessa reached into her pocket and pulled out a Durex condom. She ripped open the wrapper with her teeth, slid the condom over the balloons, and tied a neat little knot at the end of the rubber. After lubricating the condom with K-Y Jelly, Arnessa pulled her pants down and squatted. Slowly, she pushed the package into her vaginal opening. Her inner walls were unusually tight due to her sexual inactivity. Boofing heroin was not one of Arnessa’s hustles; as a matter of fact, she hated it. Even with the lubricant, the hardness of the package made the ordeal slightly painful. I’ma fuck Tash fat ass up for this one.

Tasha was Arnessa’s favorite boofer and technically her only. The girl could put almost three hundred grams at one time in her oversized vagina, which was always wide open because she’d been the biggest broke whore uptown. She and Arnessa had met through a mutual friend two years earlier. At the time Tasha had been eighteen, with four kids, four different deadbeat baby daddies, and no viable income. Initially, Arnessa thought Tasha was the slut of all sluts.

As the two spent more time around each other, Arnessa began to understand that Tasha was a victim of her environment. Arnessa loved Tasha’s realness and the fact that no matter what anyone thought of her, Tasha was always herself. About six months after they were introduced, Arnessa and Tasha had forged a bulletproof bond. Helping Tasha the only way she knew how, Arnessa gave her a job bagging up. A year and a half later, when Arnessa started selling heroin to a few dudes out in Baltimore and D.C., Tasha went from bagger to professional boofer.

It didn’t matter how tight they were at the moment, Tasha was at the top of Arnessa’s shit list. Small beads of sweat began forming on Arnessa’s nose as she continued to struggle with the dope. Her phone conversation with Tasha the previous night replayed in her head. “Why in the fuck would you make an abortion appointment for tomorrow when you know Wednesday is a B-more day?” Arnessa asked angrily.

“That’s the first available appointment that they had.”

“Can’t you go on Thursday?”

“No.”

“And why not?”

“’Cause Thursday will be the first day of my second trimester, and you know they don’t do abortions past three months no more.”

Becoming more irritated than she already was, Arnessa said, “Let me ask you this, if you knew all along that you were not having the baby, what sense did it make to wait all the way till the third month.”

“Nessa, you know in the beginning that nigga was saying he wanted me to have it. I didn’t even decide to have one until he started tripping two weeks ago.”

“How about from now on you use condoms so you won’t find yourself back up on the chopping block again? Isn’t this like your eighth abortion anyway? You better stop using that shit as birth control before they be taking your ass out that clinic in a body bag,” Arnessa said unapologetically before slamming the phone closed.