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Frankie steps out of the bathroom with a nervous smile on her face and a bandage applied lopsidedly by her navel. “...I’m out,” she announces.
Andi doesn’t look up from her debugger. A cascading wall of red text tells her that multiple sections of her unit tests have failed. “I had to move the cotton rounds to the other side of the cupboard. Sorry for not telling you.”
“Not those. Not syringes. My girl juice.” Frankie presents an empty vial, as if she would have any reason to lie to Andi about something like this. The absent ‘juice’ is a barely viscous suspension of estradiol valerate in a translucent carrier oil. Frankie has feelings about it; she treats her injection sites like puncture wounds, like the kid who found a hole in the dike, pressing for minutes longer than necessary to “keep every last drop in.” It's irrational. It's a little childish. It’s an exercise of control in a world where she doesn't have much.
“Then use mine for now.” Andi tilts her head towards the shelf above the sink, where a disorganized box of patches sits open like a cartoon treasure chest, minus the glint of jewels and gold.
“Andrea,” Frankie wields her government name with flabbergasted dismay. “I can’t do that. Those are yours.”
Andi compiles her code and glances up. “And the adhesive gives you a rash.”
“And the adhesive gives me a rash. Ugh!” Frankie shakes the vial like a strange maraca. It gets the feeling out through her wrists. “What do I do?”
“Get on my insurance,” comes almost instantly. Andi’s decisive look is almost a glare.
“Don’t make me Andrea you again... really, I’d feel so bad.”
It costs a pretty Parkpenny to get on insurance, and Frankie knows they’re already pinching Parkpennies. Andi had bartered away her dental and vision coverage for an extra couple thousand Parkcoin a month. She thinks Frankie doesn’t know this, but Frankie had seen it. Andi had fallen asleep and Frankie got up to piss in the middle of the night. (“They’re called the wee hours for a reason,” she would have said if Andi was awake.) Andi was slumped over in her chair and the paperwork was scattered around her like a snowdrift, the finality of her signature in red at the center of it all.
Andi has other ideas. “You wouldn’t go back to Sparky’s hook-up after last time, right? Fool you once, shame on them. Fool you twice, shame on you, that.”
“Ah, but third time’s the charm,” Frankie parries, deflated. Andi is right. Because of Sparky’s hook-up, she had injected herself with nothing but sunflower oil not once but twice.
“So get on my insurance. It’s not the option we want, but it’s the option we have. You’re not going off E again. It messes you up.”
“I found some in the garbage once, maybe a dozen trashfalls ago, still a third of the stuff left. Sure, there were some rubber bits in it, but I still have it somewhere…”
“Frankie, ew. You are not using garbage estrogen.”
“I know, I know, sketch-strogen and sharing needles are both off limits. So that leaves your ParkPlan coverage.” Frankie breathes out more than it feels like ought to fit in her chest. “I would feel so guilty. For starters, we’d be lying. I’m not really your family member, and as Space Princess Gwen’s number two said, those who deceive will meet the business end of my blaster gun!” She laughs nostalgically. “She was so cool.”
“So, marry me then.” The suggestion flows naturally, the way water seeks lower ground.
“Oh.”
Frankie knew this was a possibility, but she was shocked it came up so soon. She wants to know why. Had Andi thought about marriage, or had it just presented itself as the only way out of a burning building? Frankie stuffs the question down. If Andi is thinking about intimacy with anyone or anything, it’s with the terms and conditions of her ParkPlan coverage and her Park Planet employment, not with her.
Frankie, for her part, figured they’d be together forever, someway and somehow. Theirs is an ionic bond at the hip maintained by time, necessity, and more than a little bit of mutual attraction they have extensive practice ignoring.
Andi’s silence is a testament to her seriousness. Frankie starts to understand. This really was a proposal.
“Okay, uhh,” Frankie’s brain short-circuits a little, “say we get married. That's a qualifying life event. Talk me through it.”
“I, or we, ahem, would stay in the Bismuth tier. We can’t afford Osmium.” ParkPlan’s coversge eschews the traditional ranking metals for those that glint and glitter. “It’ll cost us three meals a week to get you on the Bis, but we can stretch if we have to. Oz is out of the question.”
“You don’t eat enough as it is, bag-o-bones. I know, I’ll beg Sparky for extra shifts!”
Andi smiles, but it stops at her cheeks. If Frankie was able to follow through each time she suggested this, if Sparky let her do it, she would already be working days and nights, eight days a week. “Okay, sure. Yeah.”
Maybe Frankie noticed she already didn’t eat dinner today. The brown sauce on her rations is coagulating in the cubic chill of the refrigerator beneath a reused square of cling wrap, a sleeping beauty ready to be revived by the microwave’s warming embrace in the morning.
“So it’s settled then! Okay.” Frankie smiles with her lips pressed together, unsure how much to celebrate when the cost is so clear. “Y’know, when we were kids I thought I might marry you one day, but not like this. I mean, I was hoping for a Park-Park marriage, and then… you know.” She wants to ask, have you ever thought that way about me? She doesn’t.
“Maybe I would have had time to consider marriage in a world where I could breathe…” Andi doesn’t finish the thought. Her unit tests have come back positive. The reptile parts of her brain have learned to associate the bright green of a unit test sweep as a precursor to being able to sleep. Her eyelids take on new weight. She folds her arms on the table and puts her head down on them. “I’ll print the documents at work tomorrow. Go to bed.”
“G’night, my old ball and chain!” Frankie rasps, doing her impression of a man maybe a decade younger than Sparky who hates both his wife and children on his lawn in equal amounts.
“Night,” Andi gargles, forehead against her forearm.
From the bedroom, Frankie calls from her upper bunk, “Wait, important question! Are we keeping our last names?”
Andi turns her head like a swimmer taking a breath, yelling back, “Unless you’ve got money to change them hiding in your pillowcase.”
“Nope, there’s just porn in there!”
“Then no, but maybe someday,” Andi’s mouth silently forms the shape of the words. She smiles to herself as she pushes down the tickle in her throat that means a blue-phlegmed cough is coming.