I give her a kind of grimace. “Yeah, it’s not exactly undetectable. To you, I mean,” I add quickly. “No one else will be able to tell.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” I say, and nod to the restaurant door. “Come on, wash your hands, and I’ll get you the best cure I know.”
Five minutes later,we’re sitting outside at one of the coated metal picnic tables, sipping giant fountain cokes and each digging in to our own extra-large order of fries.
“This is my go-to,” I say, after a minute of us sipping and eating in silence. “It always makes me feel better when…you know.” I cough. “That and some ibuprofen.”
I rustle in the bag and pull out the bottle, cracking it open and punching the seal to deposit one liqui-gel in my palm. She’s tiny. That’s got to be enough. “Here.”
I hand it over, and Wendy gives it a skeptical look.
“It’s just ibuprofen,” I say. “Advil.”
“I know,” she says. “I just…don’t know how to swallow pills.”
“Oh,” I say. “Um, just kind of throw it back in your mouth and then drink a bunch of Coke all at once.”
Wendy nods and gamely chucks the little blue capsule into her mouth before hustling for her straw and gulping down what’s got to be half of the Coke in a single go. My eyes go wide, and I am about to pull it away from her just as she lets go and covers her mouth with her hand.
“All good?” I ask for what seems like the fiftieth time that night.
Wendy nods. “Yeah,” she says, but the word comes out on a massive burp.
I laugh. Not on purpose, but it is kind of adorable, and for a horrible moment I worry she’ll think I’m making fun of her.
Fortunately, she laughs too. “Oops,” she adds.
It’s cool this late at night, or early in the morning, whatever, with nothing but the cone of light from a nearby parking lot lamp shining on our surroundings. The burger joint’s maybe three miles away from the shop, out of the Strip district proper, but close enough that I have, in fact, stopped in for a medicinal Coke and fries the one time I got my period prior to last week.
And it’s actually kind of nice. Late enough that even the late-night partiers have crashed, but still a little too early for anyone to be awake for an early shift. A couple cars pass now and again, tractor-trailers heading for the 303. But other than that, calm.
Wendy picks up a single fry and munches it down to nothing. She breathes out, looks at the empty road just beyond the fence, and then back at me. She gives a resigned exhale. “Sorry if this is rude, but I have so many questions,” she says matter-of-factly.
“What, about this?” I say, gesturing at the cokes and the fries. “I think it’s something about the caffeine and the salt, but maybeit’s just that I really want fast food when my period comes. I guess I figure?—”
“No,” Wendy says, half irritated, half amused, and I quit my joke. “Like…” She sighs. “How do I say this?” She taps a finger against her chin, and her suddenly serious posture makes me want to smile again. But I don’t, just in case she’s about to hit me with some fundamental birds-and-bees kind of shit that I’ll have to really think through.
Fuck me, I think, scratching the side of my head. This is not the kind of conversation I’m prepared to have. At all. Besides justbeing a girl, I’m not really qualified to teach anything here. I’m not sure anyone really taught me either, besides the internet. If there was sex ed in high school, it must have been after I stopped going, because I can’t remember anything in a classroom. And Gram…
My thoughts trail off. Well, she wasn’t about to teach me either, let’s put it that way.
I’m mentally cycling through whatever phrases I can think of, like your body is changing and you’re a woman now, all of which seem ridiculous, especially considering that the person sitting across from me is definitely a child, still, when Wendy interrupts.
“So you’ve been a girl this whole time?”
Oh, I think. I pick up my Coke, shake the ice around, and slurp some up just to kill time.
“I mean…yeah,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say. “That’s kind of how it works.”
Wendy frowns. “Are you trans?”
That, I didn’t expect. I’m almost surprised that she even knows to ask—except for no, she’s all over YouTube. I imagine she’s picked things up.
I shake my head. “No, I’m definitely a girl. Although I learned a lot about all this”—I gesture at myself—“from trans guy internet, if that counts?”
Wendy considers, picking up another fry. “But you’re a girl. Like, for sure.”
