“Eve!” I stumble into the wall. “Fuck!I’m the one with the injury—calm down!”
“How can I calm down?!” Eve screeches. “You want to have children one day!”
Her words are muffled by the towel still over my head. I can’t let go of the—area—or else the world will end. My head feels strange and light.
“Call Dr. Appa—I think I need stitches.” I stagger into her. “Please, Eve. Need you to becalm.”
“Okay, okay, this is okay,” Eve says far too loudly as she holds me up. “I’m gonna wrap your—”
“—area.”
“—area,” Eve agrees, “with this towel.”
“Don’t make me move my hands,” I mewl. I’m the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, except this is taking all my fingers, and I’m theoretically straight.
Eve grabs the towel and wraps it around my lower half. It’s big enough for the edges to meet but not fold over, so she holds them shut as we shuffle pathetically to her car.
“How did this happen?!”
“You! You happened! Your car’s out front—I thought you were upstairs, asleep!” Eve and I share an old Craftsman bungalow split into two extremely non-regulation apartments that her Uncle Dimitri rents to us super cheap. Thereasonit’s so cheap is that the only way to reach the upstairs apartment is by walking through the downstairs apartment to the one stairwell. This isn’t the first time Eve’s terrified me by barging in, but it’s definitely the bloodiest.
“I was at Graham’s because it’s too hot to bake upstairs right now. We perfected the new recipe for the pot scones, by the way. The key waspomegranate—can you believe it? The tart sweet blends with the cannabis just right, and I was so excited, I couldn’t wait to show you!” Eve, ourfuture dispensary’s ultra-talented baker, stops chattering to gag a little at my bloody leg, then guides me into the front seat and buckles me in. “Do you want one?”
“No!”
“You sure? You know how scones dry out. They won’t keep for tomorrow—”
“Eve, drive!” I blink against the bleary weight of the drugs already in my system. “Wait,canyou drive? Are you high right now?”
“No.” She glances at my toweled lap and laughs nervously. “Not yet at least. Scones haven’t hit.”
“Scones?Plural?!”
“Experimentation requires sacrifice, Nomi!”
Eve speeds through the streets of Sparrow Nook, our quaint town located halfway between Philadelphia and the long, sandy strip of the Jersey Shore. So help me God, Eve better not get us pulled over for speeding. Lil Dom got dumped a month ago, and speeding tickets in Sparrow Nook have tripled since. There was an article about it in the paper and everything.
“Was it the big flap?” Eve’s eyes flick from the road to me.
“Huh?”
“You know, the big flap. Every woman has one big flap.”
“What? No, they don’t.”
“Hate to pull the lesbian card, but I’ve seenquitea few flaps, and—”
“Eve!Just park!”
Eve jerks into a spot in front of the old Strange Drugs Pharmacy. Thecoming soon: for leasesign in its window winks at me as Eve pulls me from the car. I moan, not wanting my dream location for our dispensary to see me like this. We waddle past it—me in front, Eve holding my towel from behind—one door down to the clinic run by Sparrow Nook’s beloved Dr. Srinivasan, better known as Dr. Appa. Sparrow Nook doesn’thave its own hospital or emergency room—you’d have to drive half an hour for that—but we do have Dr. Appa. During the day, he runs a family practice, and at night, he has on-call urgent-care hours.
And tonight, I need poor, elderly Dr. Appa to urgently care for myarea.
“You called ahead, right?” I pant as Eve readjusts my towel.
“Yeah, Dr. Appa said the new guy’s working tonight.”
“Newguy?” I wail, a wave of dizziness crashing over me. “I don’t want anewguy! I want Dr. Appa!”
