shay easterday / d5 / fin

If you don't need me, you don't have to know who I am. It's easy for me to fade into the background of things, just another teenage girl trying to stay alive. Nobody sees the pieces of paper that slip from my fingers, scraps torn out of textbooks and newspaper, their printed surfaces scribbled with pseudonyms and addresses. Nobody notices me walking a few steps ahead of a "friend" toward a house neither of us have been in before.

If you know me through that, you call me by a different name. I probably don't know yours either. It's inconvenient, but it keeps us safe. We're both doing things we aren't supposed to be doing.

I don't really know much about abortion, I just know the law says my mom's not supposed to do them, but she does them anyway because people could get really hurt otherwise. She's a doctor, owns her own practice in the poorest part of town. Throughout the years, before I was even born, she helped create this network that helped people get safe abortions. She didn't want me to help, but I'm too stubborn. I would have just started to help anyway.

Mom says the consequences for this are serious. Like, detention center, execution serious. Whatever happens, I'm ready for it. If you're content to stay quiet and let people get hurt, that's your business, but I'm not about that. I want to be like my mom and help people, no matter what happens to me.