A tear rolls down her face as she sits on the toilet seat clutching the weight of the world in her hands. Three minutes feels like an eternity.

Her mind floods with thoughts. She is only fifteen. It had been her first time. This can’t be happening.

It is three-thirty. Her parents will be home in at six. She has two and a half hours to come to terms with this situation –if there even is a situation. If so, she still has two and a half minutes until she will have to come to terms with that.

Her parents will kill her. Premarital sex is not something you do in this family. She lets out a half-hearted laugh at that euphemism –do. Been there, done that. There’s another one. God, stop it. No wait, God? Maybe she should pray. Pray that she isn’t, ugh, she can’t even think the word. Maybe it’s a little late for regrets.

But does she regret it? Would she regret it? She hears stories all the time about women who have children as teenagers, and they don’t regret having them. Hey, maybe it could be like the “Gilmore Girls.”

Stupid. Another tear falls down her flushed cheeks. Two minutes.

There is so much she wants to do in life. She wants to go to college, spend a summer in Paris, go backpacking through Europe, get married –not make construction paper collages, summer school, baby backpacks, have a shotgun wedding, change millions of diapers. Diapers? She doesn’t even know how to change a diaper.

She doesn’t even have a job so she can make the money to buy the diapers. She isn’t even old enough to have a job. How is she going to provide for a child? She can’t drive. She can’t …

Why did she have to buy the cheap test? A minute and a half feels like an eternity.

God, please! She can’t do this. Another half-hearted laugh. Should have thought about that before, right? Another tear falls. Tears? How are they going to help?

What will he think? What will he do? He’s only sixteen. But, it hadn’t been his first time. But, they both knew the consequences. They had the same classes in school. They watched the same movies, the same ‘special episodes’ on television. They both knew the consequences. There are no excuses. There is no room for tears.

Thirty seconds. It was the same amount of time for a diaper commercial to run on the tv. It was the same amount of time for a radio commercial for a local college to run. The same amount of time for her fate to be decided. Isn’t it ironic that those two commercials would play at just this moment? Yeah, ironic.

A tear rolls down her face as she sits on the toilet seat cradling the small pen-like instrument in her hands. Three minutes felt like an eternity. A smile unfolds from her mouth as walks to her bedroom, stuffs the test in the box, and hides it within her trash can. No one would need to know. She would live to see another day, her parents would not kill her, and she definitely would not be having sex again for a long time. Perhaps, she would become a nun, because God knows she did not need another scare like this.