Her phone dings. Hey babe you’re really here?

Minutes later, she’s plodding down Mountain Street in her black cloth coat, her body still woozy and achy. It’s too warm for the coat, really, but she disappears easy in it and that feels best right now.

The guy’d said to meet him round back of the old video store. One of her old haunts, actually. Had a pool table and arcade games. In theory, doing a call there should be weird, but in practice, Gemma’s bar for weirdness was obliterated long ago. She rounds the building, crunching on shale gravel, and sees him waiting, a stocky white guy in jeans and a tan jacket. Thousands of this guy in a town of thousands.

Down a flight of stairs there’s an office crammed with movie posters, a fantastically old computer, a cot in the corner, a small window with a little curtain.

The man puts $200 in her hand and a cloudburst of serotonin crackles through her brain. She does the call with pleasant mind-lessness. The guy sucks her for forever, and then she blows him as he stands against the door.

Afterward, he falls on the cot, still naked. Gemma realizes he’s younger than she thought; he has a beard and is balding early, but shit, it’s possible that she, like, went to high school with him? Who knows? “How you like our town?” he says.

Gemma zips up her dress. Her body has severely amped up its complaining. “It’s great.”

He snorts. “Great. Sure.” He leans over and opens a mini fridge. “Great. You want a beer?”

It’s eleven in the morning, and her stomach is roiling from the T1s (plus, like, she’d swallowed …). But still, she says yes, and then they’re drinking as he sits on the cot. Gemma sips gingerly and immediately she’s dizzy. Funny life it is. Funny life.

“Sorry,” she says, sliding down to the ground against the door. “I need—I need to sit down.”

The guy laughs. “One beer drops you, huh?” It’s the thoughtless laugh of someone who’s not a bully but not exactly the nicest, either.

Gemma smiles tightly. “It’s a long story.” The cool concrete is nice on her legs. She feels for the bills inside her bag, and the solidity of the polymer is electric on her fingertips. She tilts her head back against the door, looking up at the joists in the ceiling.

For a few seconds, she’s a teenager drinking in a small-town basement again.

(Hell, for all she knows, she’s done exactly that with this very dude.)

“You want to hang out for a bit?” he says. “I got time.”

There’s that wide-eyed, casual loneliness in his eyes, the volatile loneliness of men’s eyes. Her stomach is a nest of hornets, and even through the T1 numbness, her head pulses like a swelling bruise. Her body is telling her she needs to rest. Puke first, actually, then rest. Her body is a workhorse going on strike; it is very sorry, it is telling her, but there is no way she is rising from her place on the floor; that is just not happening.