“I know, I know,” mom says with a sigh, flopping down next to me on her stomach. “I am willing to wait. And if you decide you don’t want kids, Ariel, that’s fine too – I’ll badger Rafe and Junie and Mark, because one of you will have to give in. I just…” she shrugs, and I look over at her seriously as I clutch the contraceptive tonic to my chest, “I want you to be in charge of your choices. I want you to decide when and if you have kids. And that,” she says, pointing to the tonic, “helps with that.”
I consider my mom seriously for a moment, and then the tonic in my hands, and then I sit up with a new curiosity burning in me. “Well, does it like, change anything?” I ask curiously. “Will my period be different? What does it taste like?”
Mom laughs, and begins to tell me everything, and it’
