Page 94 of The Wild Card

“I don’t care about dinner.”

“Crew, I’m fine, really. This happens every month. I just need to—” She breaks off, squeezing her eyes shut, and I watch her face contort with what is clearly not fine.

“What helps?” The question comes out more demanding than I intend. “When this happens. What helps?”

She blinks at me. “What?”

“You’re in pain. There must be something that helps. Heat? Medication? What do you need?”

“I…” She stares at me like I’ve grown a second head. “Um. I took some ibuprofen already. And I have a heating pad somewhere, but I think it’s in a box I haven’t unpacked yet.”

“Where?”

“Crew, you don’t have to—”

“Where’s the box?”

She points vaguely toward her closet. “Maybe in there? It’s got kitchen stuff written on it, but I definitely didn’t pack it right, so—”

I’m already moving, pulling open her closet door and scanning the stack of boxes she still hasn’t fully unpacked. Kitchen stuff. I find it, pull it down, and start digging through a chaotic jumble of dish towels, a broken toaster, and what appears to be a collection of novelty spatulas.

“It might not even be in there,” she says. “I honestly can’t remember where I—”

I hold up the heating pad.

“Oh.” She almost smiles. “You found it.”

“Where do I plug this in?”

“There’s an outlet by the bed, but Crew, seriously, you don’t have to—”

I’m already plugging it in, already turning it on, already bringing it over to her. She takes it with a look of bewildered gratitude and tucks it against her stomach, sighing as the warmth hits.

“Thank you.”

“What else?”

“What?”

“What else helps?” I’m standing by her bed with my hands at my sides, feeling useless and out of my depth and desperate to fix this somehow. “There has to be something else.”

She’s quiet for a moment, studying me with an expression I can’t read. “Tea helps sometimes. The ginger one, in the cabinet above the stove.”

“Okay.”

“And there’s chocolate in the far back kitchen drawer. The good stuff, not that waxy crap.”

“Okay.”

“And sometimes…” She hesitates. “Sometimes it helps to not be alone. But you don’t have to—”

“I’ll be right back.”

I go to the kitchen, put the kettle on, and find the ginger tea—she has approximately nine thousand different varieties of tea, but the ginger is in a yellow box, easy to spot. I pull down her favorite mug, the oversized one with the cartoon cat on it that says “I do what I want.”

While the water boils, I stand in the kitchen and pull out my phone.

What helps with period cramps, I type into the search bar.