Checked (23 page)

DABLAKE: Oh, is she going somewhere?

CALISTAROYCE: She is going to go visit her boyfriend in Pittsburgh on Friday.

DABLAKE: So no Girls’ Night on Friday?

CALISTAROYCE: Nope. Not this week.

DABLAKE: Couldn’t you do it tomorrow night?

CALISTAROYCE: Nah. Melanie is leaving town tomorrow. And Mandy goes out every Thursday night.

DABLAKE: Oh.

DABLAKE: And you?

CALISTAROYCE: And I have therapy after class, right?

DABLAKE: Right. But I would’ve postponed for Girls’ Night…

CALISTAROYCE: No big deal.

DABLAKE: Okay. Back to tonight’s therapy.

DABLAKE: Why did that test make you so mad?

CALISTAROYCE: Because of Tony, I guess.

CALISTAROYCE: We weren’t even dating at that point, but I couldn’t get the whole thing off of my mind.

DABLAKE: What “whole thing”?

CALISTAROYCE: The relationship. The weight thing. The arguments. The breakup.

DABLAKE: Arguments about?

CALISTAROYCE: Sex mainly.

DABLAKE: Okay…

CALISTAROYCE: He wanted to have sex, obviously. I mean, he was a 19-year-old male. We’d been dating for a long time. And we were in college. It wasn’t really a farfetched idea. For most people.

DABLAKE: But…

CALISTAROYCE: But I wasn’t every other college girl. I’ve never been every other girl. Obviously.

Or we wouldn’t have had to conduct this unconventional late night therapy chat session.

DABLAKE: And Tony thought you could be?

CALISTAROYCE: No…I don’t think so. I think he thought he could change me. Or “fix” me, as I said before.

CALISTAROYCE: When that didn’t work, he tried to manipulate me. Especially near the end.

DABLAKE: How?

CALISTAROYCE: He used my feelings for him. Tried to twist them around for his own benefit.

DABLAKE: How?

You already used that question, Doctor.

CALISTAROYCE: He talked about having a future together. He told me he thought that he was looking at the rest of his life when he was with me. I knew I didn’t feel the same way.

CALISTAROYCE: I also knew he was lying.

DABLAKE: You didn’t feel the same way?

CALISTAROYCE: Not really. I mean, I thought I loved him, and I was terrified of the idea of him breaking up with me. But I didn’t trust him at all.

CALISTAROYCE: And I couldn’t see how I would ever be able to share a home and have a family with someone who refused to understand the OCD thing, someone who antagonized me about it.

You used the word “share,” Callie. Way to sound like a tool.

CALISTAROYCE: Oh, and the weight thing. After the nachos, I couldn’t even have him touch me without cringing. That couldn’t be the rest of my life. It couldn’t.

DABLAKE: How did he react to the whole cringing thing?

CALISTAROYCE: I doubt he even noticed. And if he did, he would’ve just blamed it on the OCD. Never on himself.

DABLAKE: All right, so you just kept saying no to him about furthering the relationship physically?

I was right. He does spell “all right” correctly.
Figures.
The chefs on television have just plated their Beef Wellington. My stomach growls.
{Jimmy Buffett takes that as a cue to sing
“Cheeseburger in Paradise.”
}
Stop, Callie.
Back to reading.

CALISTAROYCE: Well, kind of. I did try to come around.

DABLAKE: How?

CALISTAROYCE: Well, I told him my conditions.

DABLAKE: Conditions?

CALISTAROYCE: Yes. Obviously, I was pretty worried about a couple of things. Pregnancy. Diseases.

DABLAKE: Pregnancy, I understand. But diseases? Weren’t you two together even in high school? I had the feeling that you guys hadn’t really dated seriously before each other.

CALISTAROYCE: We hadn’t. But remember, I didn’t trust him. What if he had slept with some other girl when he was out with his new obnoxious friends? What if he started doing drugs with those friends and shared a needle or something?

CALISTAROYCE: The numbers started to add up in my head. If he had slept with one girl, and she had slept with two other guys, and if they had each slept with three people…

CALISTAROYCE: Or…if he had shared some sort of needle with two other people, and they had each shared one with five other people…you can see how fast this all added up—just like in the old public service announcements about sex.

CALISTAROYCE: By the end of my calculations, he had approximately every single contagious and sexually transmitted disease.

CALISTAROYCE: And soon I would too.

DABLAKE: But you weren’t going to let that happen.

CALISTAROYCE: Of course not. I got the most heavy duty looking condoms I could find after going on the pill.

DABLAKE: And he didn’t agree to using a condom? Seriously?

CALISTAROYCE: No, he did. But I wasn’t done yet.

CALISTAROYCE: I wanted him to get tested for Hepatitis, AIDS, everything.

DABLAKE: Oh.

DABLAKE: And he wouldn’t do it?

CALISTAROYCE: Well, he fought it for a while. He told me that I was ridiculous and paranoid.

CALISTAROYCE: And I was, of course. But I still needed him to go through with it.

CALISTAROYCE: So eventually he did.

DABLAKE: Well, good. What happened?

CALISTAROYCE: According to the tests, he didn’t have any diseases.

CALISTAROYCE: So we planned to spend the first weekend together when break ended and I went back to school.

DABLAKE: So he came out to Pierce that weekend?

CALISTAROYCE: He did. For the last time.

DABLAKE: You broke up?

CALISTAROYCE: Yes, he ended it after I didn’t really sleep with him.

DABLAKE: Didn’t really?

CALISTAROYCE: Well, we were pretty close. Clothes off. Me feeling like a whale. Condom on, lights off, and him just closing in. And me pushing him away just in time.

DABLAKE: Why?

CALISTAROYCE: It had been over a week since his blood test and I couldn’t stop wondering if he had slept with someone or done something since then.

CALISTAROYCE: He just wasn’t clean to me.

DABLAKE: Mom always used that phrase—people that were and were not “clean to her.”

CALISTAROYCE: I guess the terminology just comes with the disease. Like a package deal.

DABLAKE: I guess so…

DABLAKE: So he wasn’t clean to you?

CALISTAROYCE: No.

DABLAKE: Was he ever?

CALISTAROYCE: I don’t know. I guess it seemed so at first when our relationship was young and I thought I knew him. But once college started, and he had his new friends and new ideas, that all changed. Or became more clear maybe.

DABLAKE: So what happened next? After you pushed him away?

CALISTAROYCE: He exploded. About everything. He said that he was done trying to put up with me, that he couldn’t “fix” me. So he left. And that was it.

CALISTAROYCE: I haven’t seen him since.

DABLAKE: Wow. I’m sorry.

CALISTAROYCE: Don’t be. I’m not anymore.

DABLAKE: But you were in the moment?

CALISTAROYCE: Of course. But not like you’d think.

CALISTAROYCE: Even though we didn’t really do anything, I, of course, figured I was pregnant and diseased.

CALISTAROYCE: So I spent the next month taking over-the-counter pregnancy tests and trying to get myself to schedule a blood test for STDs.

CALISTAROYCE: Obviously, I wasn’t pregnant. No immaculate conception for me. I did do some weird jumping up and down routines and some hitting of my abdomen to make sure no imaginary sperm somehow entered my body through a cut on my hand or something and managed to work its way through my body to impregnate me weeks later. Then I spent days feeling guilty about that. And I never did get myself to the doctor for a blood test.

DABLAKE: You realized you couldn’t possibly have gotten an STD?

CALISTAROYCE: No. I still have to convince myself of that on bad days.

CALISTAROYCE: But I couldn’t force myself to go to a doctor’s office. I couldn’t let someone stick a needle into me. Too many what ifs.

DABLAKE: What ifs?

CALISTAROYCE:  What if the needle was dirty? What if the person who sat in the chair before me had a serious disease? What if the person bled on my chair?

CALISTAROYCE:  What if I ended up getting a disease during the test? What if the test came back positive?

CALISTAROYCE:  To name a few…

DABLAKE: Gotcha.

DABLAKE: So you were already pretty convinced that you weren’t pregnant by that appointment in February?

CALISTAROYCE:  Yeah. And I knew what I was (or wasn’t) eating. I figured I was somehow causing what was happening to me.