Big Ma had the bulgy face of a bulldog, but she wasn’t fat as her face would have suggested. Across her shoulders was a ladder of bones, and her boptail skirt clung to a stomach cinched inward. She had this white head wrap on top of her head, probably hiding silver hair and smooth, bald patches. A snotty-nosed boy hung on to one of her hands, and she held a Bible in the other. Nakesha shoved past like they both were mannequins, leaving me to catch the sermon. The little boy held out a smudged pink flyer with a message bordered in tiny crosses.

“Now baby,” Big Ma said, “why you wanna go in here and do this to yourself?”

“Ma’am, I’m not getting an abortion,” I told her, my shoulders flung back in pride.

“Every time you take that pill or get that shot or whatever you plan on doing up in there, you getting an abortion honey. In God’s eyes, you killing a living soul and that blood gonna be on your hands.”

“I’m sorry, but I gotta go …”

“Oh, you gotta go alright. Right into the arms of the Lord, chile.”

I was, as I knew I would be, intimidated by this soothsayer drug up from Hades. Her nose hairs stuck out like spider legs waiting to poison me, her brush-thick eyebrows hooded a face wrinkled in sympathy, her long throat divided in two by a man-size Adam’s apple. I felt her fingers cutting off my arm’s circulation before I pulled it away and rubbed off her fingerprints.

“Fornication is a sin, but Jesus is forgiving. Give up the ways of the world, and them temptations of the flesh gone fall right on away. Chile, you want to end up out here on Seventy-first selling your soul? You young, honey … don’t fall into the ways of a Jezebel….”

But it was too late for that. I already had.

WE WALKED THROUGH the heavy glass doors of 632, past a lobby packed tight with brown sugar–faced girls, arms folded like they were in the principal’s office. We thought we were going to walk out sterilized, or at least on our way to it, the exact same day. But a young Mexican nurse behind bulletproof glass told us to come back in two weeks for an “orientation” session before we had our appointments.

“Orientation on what? Sex?” Nakesha snarled.

“There are some basic things which need to be covered before we treat anyone,” the nurse answered in that tough accent all the boys liked, straining her neck to look behind us at the long line before the doors were locked for the night.

“I think we know everything we need to know. That’s why we here,” I said.

“It’s policy, miss. Now can you all please step aside …”