Jeanie held my hand all the way to the bridge. It’s raining, it was raining. It looks endless. We’re freezing, huddled together in our soaking hospital gowns. My drains are soaked through; the glue is going to get soggy and the drains will be exposed. I should have waited for the doctor to remove them.
Too late now.
We can hear the cars crossing the bridge, feel the flowing water of the open drainpipe beside us. The water from the bridge pours down over the edges, an eternal shower.
How did I get here?
What have I done?
Everything happened too fast. We were outside before I could even think. We came out a back door, where the trucks pull in to unload the supplies and take away the medical waste.
It smelled like sour garbage and gas.
I couldn’t breathe.
Jeanie took my hand, said, Keep low, and then we were running, soaked in moments.
Kept waiting for alarms, for sirens, for foghorns blaring and voices shouting, Stop! Criminals, halt!
Keep going, Jeanie shouted through the rain.
There were people on the streets. The wrong kind of people. Not doctors and nurses and medical staff. Homeless men and women, drunks and druggies looking to score, men who leered and said, Hello, lovies, as we slipped past them.
My jaws rattled, my mouth ached, my stomach contracted, and when Jeanie shoved me beneath the low bridge, I vomited and passed out.
We’ve moved. There are dingy council estates all around us with pregnant teens smoking spliffs on the street corners, drinking vodka out of two-liter 7UP bottles. They swear when they see me looking. What ya lookin’ at, you fucking fag? See anyfink you like? Yeah move along!
But they nod when they see Jeanie. She’s one of them. Somehow, they recognize her as one of their own.
A greasy girl with dirty-blond hair holds out the bottle to her; Jeanie drinks and then kisses the girl on the mouth. Something changes hands, and then we’re off again. The girl blows me a kiss as I pass.
I don’t think I can walk anymore. My feet are swollen in these slippers that never dry. Jeanie is wearing boots. When did that happen?
Get rid of that, Jeanie says. She’s talking about this notebook, the one around my neck.
I shake my head. I can’t. This is for Kaitlyn. I have to write. I can’t stop. I can’t leave her alone again. I can’t betray her.
I will write it all. Like I promised.
I have no choice.
She’s with me every second.
Where are we going? Naida, what’s the plan?
You asked me to get you out. Now what? Naida?
Jeanie likes her words a lot.
Daytime.
Night.
Morning.
Sunset.
The sky is orange. No stars in London.
Everything stinks.
When did we eat last? I can’t remember.
This pen is getting heavy.
A parking lot.
Jeanie is watching a woman. She is drunk. Depressed. Red heels, tight dress. She got stood up, Jeanie says. She laughs. Easy pickings. She is blurry around the edges, and I frown.
Wait right here, she says, but it’s not really Jeanie talking. It’s a mermaid. Gray skin with slashes for gills on the sides of her face. She is skeletal and ugly. She wants to eat me.
I think I lost my pen.
We are sitting on the side of the highway. Twenty or thirty feet back. If we get closer, the coppers will show. Jeanie pointed to the cameras earlier.
Eyes everywhere.
She gave me a burger a little while back from a service station, I think. Rubbery, from McDonald’s. I ate it, but then I vomited it up again.
Here, Jeanie said. Drink, she said.
Milk shake. I kept that down better, but I still lost some.
Jeanie is getting blurrier.
We should get them things changed, she said, looking at my face.
I can’t feel it. My face.
I think I lost my pen.
Jeanie couldn’t wake me this morning. She said my lips were going purple and that the skin around the drain bandages is turning a weird shade of pink. You’re cold, she told me. I shake my head. No, I’m hot. I’m so hot.
I write that I’m fine, that I know where we need to go.
We got a ride farther north from an old man in an old Mercedes. He told us about how he got it, about his wife, his kids, her death, their successes. He sounded lonely.
I passed out fell asleep partway through his story, which made me sad. I never got to hear about him. About him now: him alone, him desperate. Desperate enough to help out two girls who look like trouble, for the sake of conversation.
I don’t remember leaving the car. Only that, all of a sudden, I was on a grassy bank outside a gas station and he was gone. Jeanie was looking away, smoking a cigarette (did we always have cigarettes or did she steal them?) and watching the cars on the highway. The flickering white neon lights of the station turned her into a yellow-skinned girl with a boyish build. She was beautiful.
I reached up to touch her cheek, and she looked down at me.
“You look like shit.”
I smiled up at her—I think. My face was gone. My hands were tingling.
“You need food.”
I shrugged.
“No tongue or not. We gotta get that fucking tube out of your nose.”
I touched my NG tube with surprise. I’d forgotten it was in there. I hadn’t had a nutrition bag in… how long?
I mimed a burger in between my hands. Tried to stick out my tongue.
Jeanie flinched. “Jesus.” One word.
I closed my lips around the stump and mouthed the word. Bur-ger. Brrr-grrrr.
I guess I dreamed that.
I closed my eyes and leaned closer to Jeanie.
I heard her take a final drag and toss the cigarette. I imagined the station exploding around us, engulfing us in a petroleum bubble of heat and fire and oblivion.
She peeled the medical tape from under my nose, which tickled so much that it vaguely hurt. Then she was pulling. I felt it in my stomach, and I coughed and retched. On and on, she pulled it out of me, and I gagged and choked until at last, with a string of white bile, it was out of me.
She threw it away.