The night before Lucy and Natasha submitted the play to the student theatre, Natasha had a dream that her mother rang her up out of the blue. The phone she answered was not her own. She was in a long hallway with a lot of different rooms. She had no idea which room the call was coming from. When she told her mother she hadn’t had an absolutely brilliant childhood, her mother laughed and said, ‘Your father could have been better, yes.’ When she awoke, she felt sure it was a sign that the play was going to be a tremendous success. That morning, she and Lucy walked to the college together. Lucy wore a pair of huge sunglasses and kept bumping into things and apologising. They had to cross the campus to the theatre. It was the longest walk ever.

‘Let me go up,’ Lucy said, as they stood at the bottom of the stairs. ‘I’m charming.’

‘I can be charming.’

Lucy stood on the bottom step. ‘But I’m more so. Today, I’m more so.’ She walked up.

She re-appeared five minutes later. ‘He said no. It’s over.’

‘How much did he read?’

‘The first page.’

Lucy sighed. She kicked a small pot containing a dying shrub. ‘Maybe it’s enough.’

Natasha took the pages out of her hand. ‘It’s not enough.’

Upstairs, in the low-ceilinged room, sat a boy, thumbing through a novel.

‘You’re right,’ Natasha said. ‘It’s bad.’

He didn’t look up.

‘But I don’t care,’ Natasha continued. ‘Give us one night.’

‘The acting troupe are in there for the next two weeks,’ he said, and continued lazily turning the pages, ‘and then college is over.’

Natasha thought of the starchy graduation robes. The rushed and formal ceremony that she would not be welcome at anyway. Only the boy’s presence kept her from vomiting.

‘One night,’ she said.

‘The acting troupe are in there for the next two weeks. You will have to fight them for it.’ He looked her up and down. ‘Are you willing to do that?’

Natasha took the book out of his hand and cleared herself a space at the edge of his desk. She knocked over several papers and pens. ‘I know you want me to go away,’ she said.

The boy looked scared.

‘But let me tell you about where I grew up.’

A week later the chalkboard at the front of the theatre read:

Abortion, A Love Story: One Night Only.

*

In the hour before the show, Natasha and Lucy sat in the changing room, sharing a cake. They divided the cake into thin slices, which Natasha didn’t touch. A bottle of Lucy’s beloved fizzy drink also remained sweating on the table.

‘I feel like I’m being smothered,’ Natasha said.

‘It’s just nerves,’ Lucy replied.

‘I think somebody has cut off my oxygen supply.’

‘Nerves. You’re nervous.’

‘I’m not.’