I grab for my phone. 3:02 a.m. Not even the next morning yet.
“Uh, yeah,” I croak, after a moment. “I’m here. What’s up?”
“Can I…come in?”
There’s something I’ve never heard in Wendy’s voice before. A tremble, kind of like fear. Like she might be about to cry.
“Yeah, sure,” I say, more alert now. “Hang on.”
In the dark of my room, I kick off all the bedclothes, my heart in my throat, and yank on a T-shirt over my sports bra just before I throw open the door. “What’s?—”
But I can’t even finish my sentence when I see the look on her face. She’s pale as a goddamn ghost, her mouth and forehead screwed up like she’s fighting back a wail.
“I think I’m dying,” she says. “I think…I think I maybe need to go to the hospital.”
“What?” Panic spikes in me, my sleepy, half-awake state cut through with adrenaline and my mind spinning withpossibilities. A tattoo needle, a piercing gun. An actual gun. A knife. Some dumbass left all his weed gummies out and she thought they were regular candy…
But then I see. Her hands, streaked with red on the fingers, and a matching stain on her Wyld-N-Tru pajama bottoms, copper-colored and unmistakable, flooding through the bright colors of the fabric, and my heart falls into my ass.
Oh god. Wendy got her period.
Whatever I am feeling—and I have no idea what the fuck it is—must show on my face because Wendy’s threatens to burst into sobs, crest over.
“I don’t want to die,” she says. “I don’t.”
“Wendy,” I say, my voice an urgent, tight whisper, “you’re not dying. You’re not.” I sound so harsh, my pulse is going at two hundred beats a minute and the calculus in my brain going faster than I can even recognize. I have to… but if she doesn’t realize… fuck, she has no idea. And I can’t just… shit, shit, shit.
The reality of what I have to do sinks over me like lead. Like a weight I don’t want to carry but something I can’t just throw on the ground. I suck in a deep breath and look at her, this kid, this girl who for all the world thinks she’s about to bleed out in the middle of a bachelor pad above a tattoo parlor in a part of town she’s barely even heard of before now.
And I can make it better. I can take care of her. I can see her through this crisis. I am the only one who can, here or maybe anywhere on Earth. And I am going to have to do the worst possible thing.
A tear slides down Wendy’s cheek and it breaks my fucking heart.
“You’re not dying,” I say and clear my throat. “You’re not dying,” I repeat, but in my real voice. My normal, ordinary, not-pitched-down-like-I’ve-smoked-two-packs-a-day voice. “I’ve got you. I can help you, but…I have to tell you something first.” Isuck in a deep breath. “And you absolutely, positively, cannot tellanyoneelse.”
CHAPTER 28
TINK
I leanagainst the brown and beige checkered tiles of this Attaburger’s bathroom wall, eyes on the locked stall door in front of me. Rustling sounds, a bonk of what sounds like an elbow against divider. Nothing else except for whatever music from the eighties, nineties, and today they’ve chosen to pipe in at just after four in the morning.
God, I don’t remember the last time I was in a women’s room.
“You okay in there?” I say after a minute.
It’s still so strange hearing my voice like this. It sounds different in my head even. I glance at my reflection in the greasy-looking mirror across the way. If I don’t slouch and keep my limbs all loose, I do look alittlegirly, maybe, especially with the voice. And I’m now standing next to a tampon machine, so no one who comes in is going to be too suspicious unless they’re a real asshole about gender presentation.
If anyone comes in at all, that is. Because itisfour-fifteen in the morning.
“I’m fine,” comes Wendy’s voice, with what sounds like more confidence than she’s feeling. “Just…hang on a sec.”
I hear the slap of the metal lid of the trash can in the bathroom—another feature that I haven’t seen in months—and the toilet flush as she unlatches the door and steps out.
“You good?” I ask.
Wendy shifts from foot to foot, her expression tight and uncertain. “It’s not really comfortable,” she says. “Is that okay?”
She changed outfits, obviously. I lent her a pair of basketball shorts that I’ve got for some reason—I guess ‘cause all guys need one—and cinched it pretty tight. In the bag I am holding from Discount Drug, besides the multipack of Primrose Brand Maxi Pads and some ibuprofen, is a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, which we can attempt to use to get the stains out of her Wyld-N-Tru pajama pants later.
