“Totally. Just a little UTI situation.” A passerby gawks at me. Clearly, I’ve forgotten I’m not in NYC, where people don’t bat an eye at TMI cell phone conversations on the street.
“Millie. Didn’t your mother ever tell you to pee after sex?” Her voice is so loud I have to adjust my phone’s volume.
“I know, I know. I never fall asleep after sex. It’s just that?—”
“He fucked you six ways till Sunday with that bedazzled monster cock?”
“Something like that. Where are you? I wasn’t sure you’d answer.”
“We’re in LA.”
“Fun. Tell Aunt Elin I say hi.”
“Actually,” she says. “We’re not here to see my mom.”
“Oh?”
“Do you remember my very first writing friend, Brooks?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer, though I remember him well. “He works for a production company now and got me a meeting to discuss turning my book into…I don’t know… something,” she squeals. “A series or a film, I don’t know yet.”
“Shut the fuck up.” My heart floats in my chest. “That’s amazing. I’m so happy for you.”
“Thanks. I don’t want to get my hopes up, but we’ll see.”
“They’re gonna love you,” I say as I approach the urgent care building.
Thankfully, I’m seen right away, and the physician’s assistant checks my vitals while waiting for my urinalysis. “What’s the date of your last menstrual period?” she asks.
“Oh, um…” I rack my brain for a date. While performing inThe Proposal, I skipped the sugar pills in the birth control packets so I wouldn’t have to deal with my period while on tour, meaning it started when I finished my last pack around the time of my last performance. “It would have been”—I pull up my calendar app and scroll back to check the date of the party we attended to celebrate the end of the run—“two months ago?”
“You haven’t had a period since?” she asks.
My chest tightens as I try to decipher her masked expression. “No.”
She looks at me, then at a piece of paper and back again, her eyes widening for an instant before she gains control again.
“So do I have a UTI?” I ask, the hair on my arms standing.
“Nope.”
Ezra
“If you make aForgetting Sarah Marshallreference, I will ditch you out here,” Kane calls from his surfboard.
“What do you know aboutForgetting Sarah Marshall? You’re too young to know that movie.”
“I don’t really believe in age or numbers…” he says, quoting Paul Rudd’s character.
“You little shit,” I laugh. All it takes is one knowing look between the two of us, and we both sing, “Oh, the weather outside is weather.”
I sweep my foot through the water and splash him in the face.
“My mom’s out here,” he says quietly. “Her ashes, I mean.”
“Oh yeah?” He rarely talks about his mom’s death, and I haven’t pushed him on it; that’s what his therapist is for.
“Yeah. We had a whole traditional paddling out ceremony, where everyone gets on surfboards and tosses flowers and leis, but I snuck my board out the night before and scattered them. Iwanted her all to myself for a little longer. It was selfish of me, but?—”
“Not selfish,” I interrupt, the salt from my tears mixing with the salt of the ocean. “You were a kid, and you’d just lost your mom.”
