When security dragged her backward, her heels fell off. She didn’t fight. She watched as the man slid down the wall to the floor, where a puddle of urine was growing. Around his neck was a second degree burn in the shape of her hand.
Forty-five minutes later, Jo was standing shell-shocked in front of a departures board at Grand Central Terminal, clutching the few personal belongings she’d been allowed to take from her desk. There hadn’t been an opportunity to change her tampon before she left the hotel. She suddenly sensed how heavy it had grown inside her, and all at once, she felt it slip, and knew the dam inside her had given way. As hundreds of commuters and tourists wove around her, Jo felt the warmth overwhelm the backup pad she’d stuck to her underwear that morning and begin to soak through her pants. The closest bathroom was across the main hall and down the stairs to the dining concourse. She knew she wouldn’t make it.
“I give up,” she told the universe. She’d lost the war. It had been inevitable. There was nothing she could have done to avoid this moment.
The epiphany came as the blood flowed freely down her legs. She should never have attempted to fight it.
How many years—how much energy—had she lost trying to control something that could not be controlled? How long had she feared being outed as female? How much frustration had she endured, inhabiting a world that wasn’t designed for her kind? How long had she prayed to be seen and accepted as more than a body? How hard had she tried to fix things that simply refused to be fixed?
So much fury had built up inside Jo. But at last she’d identified the true enemy. She’d been waging war with herself since she was fourteen years old. But the problem wasn’t her body. The problem was the companies that sold shitty sanitary pads. Otherwise reasonable adults who believed tampons stole a girl’s virginity. Doctors who didn’t bother to solve common problems. Birth control that could kill you. Boys who were told that they couldn’t control themselves. A society that couldn’t handle the fact that roughly half of all humans menstruate at some point in their lives.
The real problem was the hotel where women were being assaulted, the corporation that owned it, and the men who ran it. In a filing cabinet in her home office was a folder filled with everything Jo needed to burn the place to the ground. And in her contacts was the phone number of the reporter at the Times who’d called after Jo’s promotion.
Out of courtesy, Jo sat on a plastic bag on the train ride home. She didn’t bother to hide the stain on her pants.
“Ma’am, are you okay?” the female conductor whispered. “Can I get you something?”
“You don’t have to whisper,” Jo told her. “This shit happens to all of us.”
The following morning, Jo sent the hotel’s HR files to the New York Times. Then she went for a run. For the first time in decades, Jo’s body felt like it was finally hers. She not only owned it, she fucking loved it. It carried her all the way across town without getting winded. On the way, she made a point of running past Ellen Goodwin’s house, just as she would at least once a week for the next five years.
The Girl in Blue
“This is a joke, right?” Jo asked, a half smile on her face as she wiped the sweat from her hairline and fanned her belly with the bottom of her tank top. She’d just come back from her morning run, and as usual, she was sopping wet.
Nessa gestured toward her car in Jo’s driveway. Sitting on the passenger side was a woman with wild hair.
Jo gasped. “Holy shit. Is that who I think it is?”
“Mmm-hmmm,” Nessa replied.
“I figured she’d gone to seed. She looks amazing.” Jo stepped back and lowered her voice even further. “So lemme see if I have this straight. You hear dead people?”
“Yes,” Nessa confirmed. She didn’t know if it was the right moment to confess that she could often see them, too.
“And you, me, and Harriett goddamn Osborne are going to go look for a corpse that’s been calling to you from beyond the grave?”
“That’s right.” Nessa was getting a bit nervous.
Jo nodded thoughtfully. “Well,” she finally said, “beats the hell out of everything else I had planned for the day. If I can get someone to teach my Spin class, I’m good. Gotta take a shower and drop the kid off at school first, though. That okay with you?”
Nessa was so relieved, she would have agreed to anything. “Take your shower. We’ll give Lucy a ride when you’re done.”
Jo peeked around the corner at Harriett and laughed. “Oh man. My kid’s gonna love this.”
“Who’s the lady sitting in Nessa’s car?” Lucy asked as they walked down the path to the driveway.
“A very special guest,” Jo whispered. “I’d hate to ruin the surprise.”
She opened a door to the back seat and let Lucy scramble in first before her.
“Hi there. I’m Jo Levison.” She thrust a hand between the front seats. “And this is my daughter, Lucy.”
“Harriett Osborne.” The woman took Jo’s hand, but didn’t let go. Instead, she turned it over, examined both sides, and traced Jo’s life line with her index finger. “Fascinating,” she said. “How long have you been like this?”
“Been like what?” Lucy asked, craning her neck for a look at her mother’s hand.
“A few years,” Jo said.
“It will get stronger,” Harriett predicted. “You’ll have great power, but it won’t last forever. Don’t wait to make use of it.”
“How do you know all of that?” Jo asked.
Harriett shrugged. “Does it matter? We both know it’s true.”
“Hold on a sec,” Lucy interrupted. As an only child, she’d spent too much time in the company of adults to be properly intimidated by them. “Did you just say your name is Harriett Osborne?”
“I did,” Harriett confirmed. Then she turned back to Jo. “Someday she’ll be one of us, too.”
“The Harriett Osborne?” Lucy asked skeptically. Kids at school whispered about her at recess. One of the boys who lived across the street from Harriett claimed to have seen her dead body, half eaten by cats.
“Will you believe me if I pull up my pant legs and show you all the cat bites on my shins?”
Lucy’s eyes nearly popped out of her head.
“She’s pulling your leg, baby,” Jo assured her. “I think.”
“I am,” Harriett confirmed with a wide, toothy smile that managed to be both attractive and unsettling. “When animals eat a person, they don’t go for the legs first. They generally eat the nose, lips, and anus. Apparently, those are the tastiest bits.”