The Girls I've Been(57)

“I told you, it’s not gonna happen.”

“Do you know how much liquid a menstrual cup holds? If it overflows, blood will be everywhere.”

“Not my problem.”

She shakes the watercolor-squiggled skirt of her dress at him. “This is a 1950s Jeanne Durrell dress!”

He rolls his eyes. “I don’t care about your dress.”

She looks like she’s seconds away from stomping her foot. “You should, because if you don’t let me empty my cup, forty milliliters of menstrual blood is going to cover my dress and run down my legs and the deputies out there are going to think you shot me.”

He frowns.

“I just need ten or fifteen minutes in the bathroom, and my purse.”

“I’m not leaving her alone with him,” he says, jerking his thumb at me.

“Well, good, because I need her help in the bathroom,” she says, and it makes him frown further.

“No way.”

She bristles. “Do I have to go through the entire cleansing and disposal process with you?” she asks, and her voice trembles so delicately. “This is embarrassing! You’re making me beg you to let me change the modern version of a tampon. Why do you have to do this to me?” And then, to top it off, tears begin to form in her eyes. I have no doubt they’re real. She’s in a lot of pain on a normal day, but especially when she’s on her period, and none of this can be helping. I’d be curled up in a ball on the ground right now if I had cramps as bad as she gets.

“Why do you need her?” he asks.

“Like I said, do you need me to go through the entire process with you?” Iris asks, her eyes wide and so innocently outraged that I’m reeling. She is good at this. “Don’t you have the internet? Sisters? A girlfriend? Or are you one of those guys who thinks periods are gross?” She’s shooting questions at him rapid-fire and he doesn’t like it, his confusion and embarrassment over her talking about menstrual blood reddening his face.

We’re more alike than you know. She’d said that to me once. I’d tucked the knowledge inside me like I was a locket and she was a secret message written on a slip of paper. I’d turned it over and over in my mind like another girl would fiddle with jewelry, wondering if it was truth.

And here is the truth playing out in front of me: Iris Moulton is a natural.

Because the next thing I know, out of sheer discomfort and the desire for her to stop saying menstrual blood over and over, Iris’s purse gets shoved in her hands after he searches it one more time, and then we’re in the women’s restroom in the back of the bank.

“You lock this door, I will shoot the doorknob off,” he tells her.

“We’ll be fast,” Iris promises with a shaky smile.

“No heroics,” he says to me. “No tricks. I’m blocking you in. Bang on the door when you’re done.”

The door closes and Iris swings toward me, and finally, agonizingly, we are alone. There is not enough time and there is so much to say and explain and ask forgiveness for and there is too much to do and we need to move, we need a plan, I need—

She kisses me. She pushes me right up against the bathroom door and cradles the unhurt side of my face against her palm and kisses me like she thought she wouldn’t get to again, and I kiss her back like a last kiss is an impossibility.

Her fingers curl in the short hair at the nape of my neck, restless little circles as she pulls away just far enough to rest her forehead against mine.

“I am so mad at you,” she whispers.

My eyes close against the hurt in her voice and in me. “I know.”

“Is your plan working?”

I shake my head.

She lets out a breath. “Okay,” she says. “Then we’re going with mine.”





— 44 —


    Ashley: How It Begins


You can’t con a con artist. Isn’t that what they always say?

Once, I thought it was true. Absorbed it with all of her other teachings and my baby food. But I’ve proved the adage wrong, haven’t I?

I learned from the best. No—not her.

Him.

Seven Years Ago

After Washington, after I have to snap out of Katie but have no new girl to step into yet, everything is rushed and weighty. We bolt—we’ve never had to before, and she’s furious. I can feel it in her silence, in what she’s not saying, in the few words she does. It’s this persistent pulse inside me: This is your fault, you shouldn’t have done anything, you should’ve just dealt with it.

When we arrive in Florida and she doesn’t give me a new name or a new hairstyle, it feels like punishment instead of a reprieve. Like she’s taken something from me, because what’s left if I’m not one of them or preparing to be one? I hate the feeling; a knife’s edge that’s cutting shallow into my neck as she leaves me in the hotel room for long stretches.

Katie is gone, but what happened isn’t, and I don’t know what to do with that except try to put it all in a box somewhere deep inside me. I want to cry all the time, but I can’t, because . . . am I a girl who cries? I don’t know. I don’t know who I’m supposed to be. She’s given me nothing to grasp—no comforting hairstyle, no orderly trio of traits, no carefully chosen clothes, no mark’s insecurities to build a girl to cater to.