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“Not there,” Minka said, scrolling through the apps until she came to a gaudy pink cartoon kitten wearing a big yellow bow and waving a paw.
Helen peered at the screen. “Is that one of those Japanese lucky cats?”
“A maneki-neko!” Natalie said, pulling up the same icon on her phone. She looked at the caption and did a double take. “You have got to be joking.”
Below the waving kitten was the word “Menopaws!” in a font that looked hand-lettered. Natalie touched the cat and it meowed and twitched its ears.
“What in the name of hormonal hell is this?” Mary Alice demanded. She opened the app and scrolled through the features. “Hot flash tracker? Last menstrual period?Vaginal dryness log?”
Helen let out a little moan of protest, and Minka reared back as if she’d been slapped. “I worked many hours on this!”
“I can tell,” Helen said, making an effort to smile.
“There’s a sex chart,” Natalie said. She hit the button to open that page and the kitten threw back its head to yowl, sending Kevin diving under the table. Soon everyone’s phone was meowing, purring, hissing, and generally making more noise than a herd of howler monkeys.
“It’s awful,” Helen said, hands clamped over her ears. I picked up her phone and closed the app, cutting the kitten off mid-screech.
“It’s perfect,” Mary Alice said, demonstrating the direct message feature. “Look here, we can communicate with each other without texting or emailing. Minka has set us each up with a profile and we’re connected already.”
She flashed her screen where the pink kitten was strolling past a blue postbox, its tail swishing as it pointed to the letters stuffed in the box.
“Oh, that is smart,” Natalie said. “Look, I made my kitten striped. It looks like a tiny ocelot now.”
“I added personalization feature,” Minka said sulkily. “Kittens can be made to look different.”
“It’s very clever, Minka,” Akiko said. She’d made her kitten white and gave it a pair of glasses.
“It’s exactly what we needed,” Mary Alice said, closing the screen on her calico and its tiny top hat.
“What about you?” Helen asked me as she added a sparkly necklace to her Siamese.
I sighed and hit a button. My kitten turned coal black with green eyes. “There. It’s a plain black cat. Now, this is how we will communicate and this is theonlyway we will communicate,” I said, giving Akiko and Mary Alice a long look. “If you need to talk, buy a burner and send the number via direct message on the app—and that is strictly for emergencies. Got it?”
Everybody made noises of agreement with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
“How in the hell did you develop something this complicated in two days?” Mary Alice asked.
“Minka is an app developer,” I told her. “She’s been workingthis up for months, and I asked her to let us have the prototype with a few tweaks.”
“It does work, though?” Helen asked, an anxious line etched between her brows.
“Oh yes,” Minka assured her. “But the STD warning is buggy and makes everything crash, so do not open.”
“Why a menopause app?” Akiko asked.
“Because security people are men,” Minka told her coolly.
“Most often,” I agreed. “And most men are terrified of periods.” I couldn’t count the number of times we’d stashed weapons in maxipads, douches, or vaginal itch creams. “We’re all traveling under false papers, and there is always a chance one of us could get stopped. If that happens, make sure the app is open, preferably to something like your flow rate or how many days it’s been since you last menstruated.”
“Every day without a period, the kitten gets bigger,” Minka added helpfully.
Natalie eyed Minka’s clear, unwrinkled skin and pert boobs. “No one is going to believe you need a menopause tracker app.”
Minka smiled and opened her phone. “Mine is Period Poodle.” An animated French poodle with a tiny beret trotted across the screen. “Bonjour! You are on day 14. Bienvenue to ovulation!”
“Oh my god,” Helen said faintly.
“I will put it on the App Store when it is finished,” Minka told her. “It will be a very big success. You will see.”
