I know it was mostly in my mind, but I almost felt better as soon as I’d taken the Vicodin. My breathing got back to normal and I was able to look for my tampons, which would be a fuckload harder to find than the painkillers had been. I rummaged around in the drawers in my room, in my pockets, in the pockets of my bag. Finally I fished them out. The wrapping was so wrinkled it was almost destroyed, and one of them had popped open. I went back into the bathroom with them and the stupid girly underwear I have to wear to hold the pantyliners in place. I took a deep breath and put the unopened one in. As soon as the painkillers kicked in and I was able to function again, I would have a couple of hours to figure out what to do.

The first thing I did was curl up in a ball. I tried to think of a million things that weren’t what was happening in my body. I remembered health classes, talks from adults during puberty, all that fun stuff. I was super-aware of what was happening to me and how much it was absolutely against my conscious wishes for what my body was supposed to be. So the best thing to do now was put my mind somewhere else. The first thing I did was go through my mind and try to alphabetically repeat the names of drugs I’ve done. Acid, amphetamines, benzos, bath salts, crystal meth, Dilaudid, DMT, dexies, drag, ecstasy, fast, GHB, h-bombs, ice, jet fuel, ketamine, lazy, move, morphine, nexus flips, OxyContin, opium, PCP, psilocybin, Quaaludes, red light, sativa, trigger warning, trance, ugly Sam, Vicodin, waffle dust, Xanax, yellows, zero. I couldn’t always get all of them on the first try, so I went over the alphabet again and again, until I got them all. Then I repeated them until I chilled the fuck out.