So instead she made vague promises about how she could crash at her mom’s place until she found a studio in Alphabet City, and she lied and told Ezra that she’d mailed her résumé in to Atlantic Records, where she had some old contacts. She did, indeed, mail her résumé in to Atlantic Records, but to their LA office, along with Universal and Sony. In fact, the very day she later found herself in the bowels of Steinway, hiding from Ezra, she’d just gotten a call in her dorm room from a friend of a friend of her dad’s at Sony requesting an interview, which was the only reason she untacked her wall calendar (cute kitties wearing bow ties—she’d hung it ironically) and realized that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d gotten her period. Frankie had been on the pill for a solid year now, which meant that she really didn’t give her period too much thought: it showed up when she took her week’s worth of pink sugar pills and disappeared when she took the green ones that prevented her from growing a human in her uterus.

She flipped the months—April and May—back and forth. Maybe she was just being ridiculous. If she couldn’t remember getting her period last month, it was likely because it was so ordinary, so normal that she just hadn’t tracked it. But part of her knew this wasn’t true. She’d gotten up from her desk and retrieved her current month’s pills, then counted backward with her finger alongside the calendar. In fact, she’d gone home the week of the sugar pills. Her mother had called because her grandfather had a heart attack playing golf in Sagaponack, and her mom, who had said only loathsome, terrible things about her grandfather when Frankie was growing up, pleaded for her to come say goodbye. Frankie took the train down to the city and bought some flowers at a deli outside Grand Central Station but discovered, once she was buzzed up to her grandparents’ apartment three blocks south of her mother’s, that her grandfather was going to live after all. She thought this was good news, though after she handed her grandmother the bouquet and kissed her grandfather’s waxy cheek, she found her mother in the library nursing a whiskey, where she said, “I swear to God, that man will outlive us all.”

So Frankie thought she’d remember having her period that weekend. She’d have run to Duane Reade for tampons, have rooted around her mother’s medicine cabinet for something strong to ward off cramps. (Also just to root around her mother’s medicine cabinet because every turn was a surprise.)

She didn’t trust student health with her privacy, so she left the calendar abandoned on her desk and ran, shaky with the anticipation of a truth she already knew was coming, to the dinky drugstore by Lemonhead. She paid in cash, and because Burton Library was closer than her dorm, she scuttled into the restroom, locked the door behind her, and waited the three minutes until the stupid stick told her that she was destined to repeat the mistakes of her parents. Pregnant at twenty-two. She was such a fucking cliché that she would have laughed if she hadn’t been weeping, there by herself, in the back stall of the school library, where squares of toilet paper littered the floor and floral air freshener made a pitiful attempt to mask the wayward scent of too many students who had too many cups of coffee.