About a thousand mostly out-of-town protesters came to the city to try to shut down Delta Women’s Clinic the week after July Fourth. In response, pro-choice people like Melissa defended the clinic, helping to keep it open and protect the women who wanted to get abortions. It got a little violent—nothing major, just some pushing and shoving, but the cops put up a fence between the protesters and the clinic defenders. Lots of people got arrested, and it made national news.
As I’d watched the national news from my mom’s couch, Melissa, with her wavy bright purple hair blazing in the July sun, was clearly visible on the inside of the giant chain-link fence, leading girls into the clinic with her arm hooked in theirs. She’d sent me more than a dozen long letters, each in her perfectly stylized handwriting, detailing the month of July.
I didn’t know how she’d had time to write, with all that was going on. In one, she told me about the preacher who’d tried to grab her and pray the sin out of her as she covered the license plates of cars entering the parking lot so the protesters couldn’t track the women down and harass them later. Another featured a lengthy description of the swarms of television crews who had descended on the clinic after the protester count reached nine hundred. And in still another, she detailed how she’d seen a group of girls from our school drive slowly by, giving her a thumbs-up and waving, but clearly too afraid to get out of their car. She couldn’t decide if they were hypocrites or just saner than she was.
When we saw the protests on TV, Helen wanted to head home to get in on the action—but on the opposite side. Last year, she was president of her middle school’s pro-life club, and as an incoming freshman, she wanted to impress the powers that be at our high school with some pro-life summer activities. Mom, as liberal and pro-choice as they come, took Helen aside for an afternoon talk about reproductive rights and the long legacy of coat-hanger abortions. It didn’t sink in, but, then again, Mom wasn’t the best at being human. Her heart-to-heart with Helen was more like a lecture that also included some references to feminist theories of the body, and anyone would have tuned out at that point. After that, Mom ignored Helen’s pleas to go home and worked some more on her book.
In any case, I was glad she hadn’t let Helen come back. I didn’t need a clash between Melissa and Helen about abortion rights. Not again.
But right now, I didn’t have time to hang out, talk about abortion rights, or discuss the cute guy I met outside school. I had exactly five minutes between first and second period to get to religion class, and no way was I going to make it, because my next class was all the way on the opposite side of the school. I shuffled impatiently on the checkered bathroom tile and waited for Melissa to reveal whatever it was that she apparently thought was worth nearly tearing my arm off for.
Melissa took a hard pack of Camel Lights from her backpack and smacked it against the heel of her hand three times. The extra time she took unwrapping the box, the careful selection of the cigarette, and the exaggerated first drag all seemed to be part of her plan of taking for-e-ver to tell me. She knew I hated the smell of smoke and thought smoking was a terrible idea, but I’d long since given up on calling her out on it. Her casual slowness made me painfully aware of how the smoke would cling to me, and also manage to waft through the crack below the door frame. Both could incriminate me for a crime I didn’t commit.
“I have a present for you,” Melissa said, clenching the cigarette between her eggplant-colored lips. She rifled through her backpack and pulled out a small rectangle wrapped in purple foil paper and tied with a silver ribbon that formed curlicues. She handed it to me gently. Melissa was usually more of a casually-tossed-present kind of girl, so this was unusual.
So was the fact that she was giving me a present for no real reason.
“What’s this for?” It looked like a credit card. That made no sense. Melissa wouldn’t have gotten me a credit card.
“It’s in honor of your dad finally letting you leave the house on Friday and Saturday nights.” Her smoker’s boredom switched to an eager, nodding anticipation. I felt her staring at me, like I should already know what was hidden in the foil. I didn’t.
I ripped open the paper. Inside was a perfect fake ID, complete with my own learner’s permit photo, the fancy Louisiana seal, the little reflective bit, the lamination, and a believable name—“Allison Moore.” The birth date made me nineteen years old as of this past Monday. In Louisiana, that was old enough to get into bars, but not old enough to drink. In other words, I could finally—finally—see some good bands.
Melissa looked at me expectantly, her eyebrows raised halfway up her forehead. She’d forgotten all about her cigarette, which rested heavy with a stack of granny ashes on the edge of the sink.
“Will it actually work?” As always, I had my doubts about Melissa’s plans. They usually seemed to go fine for her, but somehow I always ended up getting grounded. Sure, Dad was planning to extend my curfew to eleven o’clock on weekends, but I’d get in a load of trouble for trying to use a fake ID.
“My ID always works,” she responded reassuringly.
“It’s your cousin’s ID. It’s real, even if it isn’t you.”
“I cede you a point, madam. A slight family resemblance and the idea that Asians all look alike goes a long way.”
It was true, not to mention kind of racist. None of the bouncers in the bars, clubs, and music venues around Louisiana State University seemed to notice the difference between half Cajun, half Vietnamese Melissa and her all-Vietnamese cousin. They barely even looked alike. Melissa had her Cajun dad’s wavy hair and hazel eyes, though her facial features were more like her mom’s.
“Don’t you want to know how I got it?” she asked gleefully. “And how it got to be so awesome?”
Melissa launched into an animated monologue complete with hand gestures, clearly delighted by the devious means she’d had to employ in order to obtain my permit photo from my room by lying to my dad. And then she had to tell me about discovering the perfect forger, a guy named Erik who’d dropped out of our school last year and now worked at Kinko’s.
I only half listened as she rambled on. I kept thinking that I was about three minutes and fifty-five seconds into the five-minute break between classes. Even if the ID was so awesome that it would get me in anywhere, Mrs. Bonnecaze might send me straight to the dean of discipline’s office if I showed up late to religion. It wasn’t a good way to start the year.
“And that’s why it’s going to be perfect when we go out—”
The bathroom door slammed open, and I froze. Melissa quickly washed the cigarette down the drain, scooping water around the rim of the sink to wash away the ashes, and I slipped the fake ID into my backpack.
“Girls, aren’t you running late for class?” I knew that voice. Mrs. Turner, the guidance counselor, stood behind me, sniffing the air through her upturned nose. I hoped I hadn’t gotten close enough to Melissa to smell like cigarettes.