“Yaya.”

“I’ll squeeze you in.” The doctor scribbled across the clipboard. “If you can wait.”

Yaya peered at the clipboard. Her row’s physician column now said Dr.

Ruby Kaur. Yaya settled back from the desk, and the squirming heat shrank to some deep place inside her.

“I can wait a little,” she said, her voice shrinking too. She wanted to run to the restroom and find out what the hell her downstairs teeth were doing, but their inner tantrum had taken the fight out of her.

Ruby called up a man from the waiting room, and Yaya took his seat. The others patients shuffled as if she’d disturbed a body of water, but no one spoke.

A flat TV clung to the back wall, the news droning at low volume about the stock market, set against a graph full of squiggly lines. Yaya wondered if those same lines now curled through her guts.

Heat stroked her side, someone leaning past his seat and toward hers. She glanced left, where a white thirty-something with a blunt chestnut beard tried a reassuring smile.

“It’s okay,” he said. Wavy hair fell over his forehead.

Yaya kept staring, her brow creasing.

His smile widened. “No shame in showing up here. Everyone needs help with one thing or another.” He extended a hand. “Bryant Peters.”

Yaya looked to his hand and then back to his bearded face. “Free tip, Bryant? Fertility clinic—not the dating hotspot it’s cracked up to be.”

Bryant grinned, all hair and teeth, and held up his hands in surrender.

“Yowzah, right to the bone. Got it, message received, loud and clear.” He leaned into his seat and looked to his phone, probably to tell his friends about the psycho he’d met while cruising for a date. Weirdo.

Yaya tried to clear her mind, but her internal radio’s every AM/FM channel seemed tuned to one distracting song on loop. Teeth, teeth, teeth. The beat was decent, but the lyrics needed work, their subtext unpleasant: She could look like a woman without teeth downstairs, but that didn’t help how she felt or what she thought.

~

Two hours passed before Ruby said, “Ms. Betancourt, follow me.”

Yaya’s joints cried as she stood. She had been to the restroom twice to switch pads. Ruby led through a door past reception, across a short hall, and into a stark examining room. From what Yaya had seen on TV, she guessed this was normal for non-chimeras.

But the pale light and long blue table reminded her of a morgue. She sat on crinkly paper.

“Is it serious?” Ruby asked. She didn’t shut the door.

Yaya shrugged. “Nobody on their period would come to a gyno if it wasn’t serious, right?”

“So, you’re menstruating.” Ruby scribbled at a notepad. “And you’re concerned about a sexually transmitted disease. Are you sexually active?”

“Wouldn’t that be a given?”

“Are you going to answer every question with a question?” Ruby tapped pen against paper. “If you’re going to be combative, the door’s behind you.”