Late in June, I spent the night with an asshole in Reno who kicked me out with no shower. He insisted we do it on the carpet because he didn’t want to sleep in a dirty bed afterward. I left him buck-naked on his clean sheets and found myself waiting for a bus before dawn. His dried-up cum was peeling off my skin, crispy as doughnut glaze in my belly button.

It got hot fast, soon as the sun rose. I was sweating all over the bus seat, thighs smearing the rubber like buttered toast. I could smell my own cunt, which I liked because it was mine. I thought about that man’s face—the way his cheeks shook back and forth, all wobbling and red—and it made me so sick I ran up the aisle. The driver was a big guy with a visor, sipping a Slurpee. I tapped his shoulder and told him to stop, swallowing as hard as I could. I pointed at my stomach in case he didn’t get it.

He said, “Lady, we’re on the highway.”

I said, “You want this happening on the bus or off it?”

He pulled onto the shoulder, and I bent over the tar. The heat burned my knees when I knelt. I got the mess of vomit all over my teeth. It was pudding made of fever. What if someone drove by and thought I was praying?

I got back on the bus, and everyone was shooting me dirty looks. I was just another slut with a hangover. But the driver turned out to be a decent guy. He gave me some melted gum from his pocket and a little bell off the dashboard. “Next time you need a stop,” he said, “just ring it.”

One time I’d gotten sick and Lucy gave me a little metal chime shaped like a triangle. “Ring it anytime,” she said. “I don’t want you getting up.”

I only chimed it once.

“What do you need?” she said. She smoothed my hair. “You want some ice?”

I shook my head. I just wanted her to stay.

I stopped at the bathroom in the Lovelock bus depot, full of the clotted smell of week-old urine. The walls were covered with phone numbers and scraps of slang. Some I couldn’t even understand: Jenny Razormouthed My Squad Car. I’d felt my period on the bus, a warm wet seeping. Lucy claimed that all the women in our family knew it deep down before they started bleeding, but she never said “bleeding,” only “it” or “that way.”