“Scoot forward,” she said. I moved and the phone moved with me. She reached inside. “Nice and small.” She held up a copper T, tall as a razor blade. “Paragard insertion is a pinch, over in a pinch,” she said. “Here’s my hand, here’s the device.”

Pain grasped my low back, fist tight. Beneath me, my phone vibrated notifications, story replies, I counted every buzz. I focused on the hum of all that love and tried not to cry about the rest.

“All done,” the doctor said, but the hurt still squeezed.

After, for a treat and a distraction, Ella and I took Jake’s credit card to a hair salon where she had her curls relaxed and I dyed my mushroom-brown hair a rich espresso, Jake’s idea. “Get a color all your own,” he’d suggested, neither Kardashian black, nor platinum Playboy blond. Ella and I sat side by side, eyes on our phones, hair wrapped in foil, and she talked about her game plan, how she wanted to become a manager like Jake, travel the world, maybe start a podcast production company to promote her clients. “You need a next thing,” she said, “for when you get older like me.” I shrugged, tried to imagine aging. I tried to imagine 100,000 followers, 320,000 followers, the products I’d sell them, the trips I’d take, all expenses paid. But I couldn’t picture what travel abroad looked like beyond vague images ripped from magazines in doctors’ offices. Azure water, white and pink stucco, wreaths of marigolds. I wanted to see it for myself. “You ever get paid to go places?” I asked. Ella snorted. “All the time. The most amazing parties.” I tried to imagine those, too.

AFTER THE SALON, we posed our blowouts in front of a pink wall on Melrose Avenue. Ella said it was famous. “Everyone gets a selfie here,” she said. “It’s like, an initiation.” I leaned against the wall, flipped my hair. “Snatched,” she said, and “MOM,” and “gorg.” I took her place behind the camera, eager to say the same for her, eager to be initiated. As we worked, I could feel myself bleeding from the procedure. That was normal, the doctor had said. But I looked pale in the pictures, wrung out against the bright backdrop. Jake said so too. “My little vampire,” he said when I got back to his place and showed him. He said the pink wall was played out anyway and didn’t mention my hair. I deleted the images, lowered my phone.

“I feel like garbage,” I said and touched my free hand to my belly, where the pain was. “But Ella was so supportive, and she’s so pretty.” I lifted my phone again, looked at its face, pretending there was something there. I meant for Jake to compare us and say I was the hot one.

“Right?” he said. “Open up.” He placed a white circle on my tongue.