Free The Cloud of Unknowing by Mimi Lipson

request:
    â€œPeachappleDutchapplecherryblueberrypecanstrawberryrhubarbpumpkinbananacreamBostoncreamlemonmeringue.”
    â€œWhat was that third one?” Conrad would ask, winking at Kitty across a table of half-eaten food.
    It was Conrad who suggested she move into the Westinghouse when the room next to his opened up. The first night he stayed with her, and the next night he didn’t. The night after that, he still wasn’t home when she finally fell asleep. It bothered her, but she kept it to herself. After all, he had never said they were a couple. “It’ll be convenient” was all he’d said. A few times she crept abjectly into his room without being invited. She craved him, but she always left him still craving.
    Kitty turned her recriminations inward when she came home and found Conrad on the living room couch with someone on his lap—a girl named Holly, who’d hitchhiked up from Eugene in her bare feet. Later that night, after Kitty sneaked downstairs and confirmed that Holly was not sleeping on the couch, she lay awake in her room and imagined them on the other side of the wall: Conrad’s hand moving over Holly’s shoulder and into the dip of her waist, across her belly, between her legs.
    Holly did not leave the next day, as had been her plan. She stayed for weeks. Kitty’s pride dictated that she be nonchalant. She, Holly, and Conrad went together to Sodium Beach, and to the diner with the gingham-wearing waitresses. She let Holly pull her hair into a French braid and walked around campus with her and was bitterly relieved when she moved on.
    One day, Kitty woke feeling sick and decided to skip her morning lecture. It was afternoon when she got up again, and she was hungry and lightheaded, so she took some Spaghetti-Osoff Conrad’s shelf and ate them out of the can. A sudden thirst for orange juice came over her. She put a coat on over her flannel nightgown and walked to the Thriftway, where the bright lights and the muzak hit her like a wave. Before she felt it coming, she’d vomited Spaghetti-Os all over the waxed linoleum tiles.
    When Conrad found her in bed later that afternoon, she told him about the Spaghetti-Os, and throwing up at Thriftway. “Feel my forehead,” she said. “Am I hot?”
    â€œNo,” he said, climbing in next to her. He reached under her quilt for a breast.
    â€œOw.”
    â€œThat hurts?”
    â€œYeah. Ow, don’t touch them.”
    â€œHmm. You didn’t miss your period, did you?”
    â€œI don’t know,” she said. “I don’t really keep track.” She considered for a moment. “I don’t remember having one last month.”
    â€œWell, there you go,” he said. “C’mon. You can’t get any more pregnant.” He pulled her nightgown up. “Don’t worry—I won’t touch your tits.”
    It was the last time she had sex with Conrad. She woke the next day and found she couldn’t stand him anymore. She didn’t tell him when she confirmed her condition. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing something so consequential had come of their adventures.
    Kitty skipped the last lecture of the semester and took a bus to the clinic. A small group of protesters lined the sidewalk outside, but they didn’t look at her or even pick up their signs as she walked past them. Inside, she changed into a gown and accepted a Valium from the nurse. She worried that it wouldn’t work, that somehow all the DMT and LSD and MDA she’d taken in the last few months would neutralize it, but after afew minutes a drowsy feeling came over her. The rest she met calmly: the donut of fluorescent light, the stirrups, the doctor with the port wine birthmark on his cheek, the sucking sound of his machine and the cramping pain. She tried to think about what was happening but she couldn’t hold it in her mind.
    She told her roommates they