Archive of Our Own

The paramedic had a carabiner on her belt loop, and that was where it started.

Not the carabiner specifically. Javadi wasn’t an idiot; she knew a carabiner was a piece of climbing hardware and not a personality. But it was the carabiner and the white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled twice and the forearms and the undercut and the two small gold hoops in one ear and the mascara—the mascara was the part that got her, honestly, the mascara on top of everything else, like the woman had looked at the whole binary and said no thank you, I’ll take one of each—and it was the way she came through the ambulance bay doors at the head of the gurney calling out the report before anyone asked for it, sixty-two-year-old male, syncope at a Steelers watch party, BP ninety over palp on scene, and it was the way she stopped talking mid-sentence when she saw who was waiting for her in Trauma Two.

“Trin,” the paramedic said.

Javadi had been dating Santos for nineteen days.

That wasn’t the right word. Nobody had used the word. Nineteen days ago Santos had kissed her in the stairwell between three and four in a way that suggested she had been thinking about it for a while, and since then there had been the stairwell twice more, Javadi’s apartment four times, Santos’s apartment once, which had ended with Whitaker knocking on the bedroom wall and saying I can hear you, I would like you to know that I can hear you, and a great deal of texting that Javadi had not, under any circumstances, let anyone see. None of it had been named. She had drafted a text asking what it was called and deleted it eleven times. The eleventh time, Santos had texted stop typing and go to sleep, and Javadi had turned her phone face down and lain in the dark with her whole body humming.

So… 

Nineteen days. Not dating. Something.

“Nat,” Santos said, and her voice did a thing Javadi had never heard it do. It went easy. “Look at you. They finally let you drive?”

“They let me drive months ago. You just never came to see.” The paramedic—Nat—handed off the gurney to Dana without looking, the way people did when they’d spent years in the same bays. “Where do you want him?”

“Right there. Perlah, can we get a twelve-lead—thanks. Crash, get me a line and a rainbow.”

Javadi got the line. She got the rainbow. She was good at lines now; she had done maybe four hundred of them since the morning she’d fainted onto the floor of this exact room, and her hands didn’t shake anymore, and she was not going to let them start shaking because a woman with forearms had called Santos Trin like it was a word she’d worn in.

“Not bad,” Nat said, watching her tape it down. “First stick. You’re the famous Crash?”

Javadi looked up. Nat was smiling at her. It was a good smile. It was, unfortunately, a kind smile, which was worse.

“Victoria,” Javadi said. “Javadi. I’m the—I’m a fourth-year.”

“Nat Brandt. I used to date your resident.” Nat said it the way you’d say I used to live on this street, all fondness and no heat, and then she turned back to Santos, who was reading the twelve-lead with her jaw doing something complicated. “Don’t make that face. She’s gonna think I’m being weird. I’m not being weird. I’m being friendly.”

“You’re being a lot,” Santos said, not looking up. She tore the strip off the printer. “Dana, I need the amio kit. It’s not in here—” and she was gone, out the curtain and across the pod at the pace she used when she wanted the room to know she was the one moving.

Javadi watched her go.

She didn’t decide to. It was just that Santos walked away from things in a very specific way, weight forward, scrub top riding up a half-inch over the drawstring, and Javadi had spent nineteen days acquiring data on that specific way, and her eyes went where the data was. Down. And stayed. For maybe a second and a half, which in the clinical literature was not a long time, and in a trauma bay with an ex-girlfriend standing three feet away was, she would realize shortly, an eternity.

“Oh,” Nat said. “Oh, honey.”

Javadi’s head snapped up.

Nat was looking at her. Not at Santos, not at the patient—at her, and the kind smile had gone kinder, which Javadi would not have thought possible, the way you’d smile at a med student who’d just told you her first patient was going to be fine. “Okay. I see it. That’s—yeah. I get it, believe me.”

“I don’t—I was checking the—”

“You were checking her ass, kid. It’s fine. It’s a good ass. I have been there.” Nat glanced at the curtain, dropped her voice. “Look, I’m not trying to be a bitch. I’m really not. I just—she’s got a type, okay? In case nobody warned you. Always did like the ones who could carry her out of a bar. Little bit of a, you know—” Nat gestured at herself, the rolled sleeves, the undercut, the mascara, the whole one-of-each. “Futch situation. It’s a whole thing with her. I just don’t want you to get your heart stomped on by somebody who doesn’t know she’s doing it.”

Javadi did not say anything. She could not have said anything if the patient had coded.

“Sorry,” Nat said, and meant it, which was the worst part. “That was a lot. Forget I said it.” And then Santos was back through the curtain with the amio, saying, “Nat, why are you still here?” and Nat said, “Leaving, leaving, run’s not gonna finish itself,” and squeezed Santos’s shoulder on the way out. One squeeze. Her hand was bigger than Santos’s shoulder.

And then she was gone, and the patient was in AFib with RVR, and there was no time to think about anything for forty minutes, and Javadi did not think about anything for forty minutes. She was very good, now, at not thinking about things for forty minutes.

It was the forty-first minute that got her.

* * *

“So what does that mean?” Javadi said. “Clinically.”

Mohan looked at her over the top of the chart she was signing. It was a quarter past seven in the morning, and the shift had been over for fifteen minutes, and Mohan was still signing charts, because Mohan was the only resident in the building who still believed the charts mattered.

“What does what mean?”

“Futch.”

Mohan finished the signature. She capped her pen. She had the expression she got when a patient presented with something she was going to have to look up, which on Mohan was not embarrassment but a kind of pleased anticipation. “Are you asking me for a definition, or are you asking me for a differential?”

“I’m asking you—” Javadi sat down on the edge of the desk, which she never did, and Mohan’s eyebrows went up a millimeter. “There was a paramedic. Last night. She had a carabiner.”

“Many people have carabiners.”

“She had an undercut and a carabiner and mascara, and she called Santos Trin, and she caught me looking at—it doesn’t matter what she caught me looking at. She said Santos has a type. She used the word futch. She used it about herself, like it was a—like it was a credential.”

Mohan was quiet for a moment, in the way she was quiet before she said the thing that was actually true. “And you would like to know if you are the type.”

“I would like to know the criteria.”

“Victoria.”

“Because if there are criteria,” Javadi said, and heard herself speeding up and could not stop it, “then it’s a fixable problem. It’s—a presentation is a presentation. Right? People change presentations. You can’t change a personality, but you can change a haircut, that’s a completely documented—”

“Are you asking me,” Mohan said, “to help you dress like Trinity Santos’s ex-girlfriend?”

Javadi opened her mouth to say no.

What came out was, “Not like her. Adjacent to her. In the—in the region.”

Mohan looked at her for a long time. Then she opened a fresh page in the notebook she carried for things the EHR couldn’t hold, uncapped her pen, and wrote, in her small precise hand, V.J.—presentation revision—09/24.

“We’re going to need Whitaker,” she said.

“Whitaker.” Javadi actually laughed, one startled note. “Mohan. Whitaker owns a sweater vest. Whitaker says gosh. Whitaker is the single least—if you put Whitaker on a scale of butch, the scale would apologize to him.”

“Whitaker lives with her.” Mohan didn’t look up. “He has lived with her for almost a year. He knows what she eats, what she watches, who she brings home, and what those people looked like on their way out the door in the morning. He is the closest thing to a primary source you have.”

“He is a farm boy from Nebraska—”

“With three older brothers.” Mohan underlined something. “He has been living in a butch-adjacent world his entire life. He grew up in a house full of men who fix trucks and do not discuss it. He moved into an apartment with Trinity Santos, and she has dragged him to every lesbian bar in Allegheny County at least twice. He may not know the vocabulary. He knows the field.” She capped her pen. “You asked for criteria, Victoria. He’s the one who’s seen the sample.”

* * *

Whitaker did not know it.

“I don’t—okay, I want to be helpful,” he said, at nine-thirty in the morning, sitting across from them at the diner on Forbes with the syrup he had asked for and the pancakes he had not touched. “But I want to say, up top, as a person who lives with Santos, I don’t know anything. About anything. I want that on the record. I have never heard anything through a wall in my life.”

“Nobody asked you what you heard,” Javadi said.

“Good. Great. Because I didn’t.” He picked up his fork. He put it down. “Is this—am I being asked to pick out a flannel? Because I’ve got flannels. I could bring flannels. I’ve got a lot of flannels.”

“We are not doing flannel,” Mohan said. “We are doing a presentation revision. Victoria met one of Santos’s exes last night.”

“Oh, no.” Whitaker’s whole face fell. “Was it Nat? Tall Nat? With the—” he made a gesture at his own head that could have meant undercut or helmet. “Yeah. Okay. Yeah, she’s a lot.”

“You know Nat.”

“I know of Nat. Santos doesn’t—she doesn’t really talk about them. She just kind of—” He stopped. He looked at his pancakes. “I mean. I’ve seen a few of them. Leaving. In the mornings. They’re all sort of—” The gesture again, broader, taking in shoulders that were not his. “They all kind of look like they could beat me up, is what I’m saying. Which, honestly, most people could. But specifically.” And then, because Whitaker had never in his life successfully stopped a sentence before it got to the bad part: “That’s why I was so surprised. When I figured out about you two. Not that—I think it’s great, I think you’re great, it was just, from the outside, from a purely, you know, visual—”

Mohan said, “Dennis.”

“I’m done. I’m done talking.” He picked up his fork again and held it like a man who had been told to hold something.

Javadi sat very still. It was one thing to have a paramedic she’d never met say it. It was another to have Whitaker say it—Whitaker, who had a spare key, who had heard things through walls, who had known before she had and had been surprised.

Mohan turned the notebook around.

She had done a literature review. Of course she had. Javadi looked down at a page divided into three columns—Hair, Clothing, Modification—with bullet points under each and, in the margin, what appeared to be citations. One of them was a TikTok. One of them was, Javadi was almost certain, a Reddit thread.

“You made a protocol.”

“I made a plan. A protocol implies peer review.” Mohan tapped the first column. “Hair is the highest-yield intervention, so we start there. Options, in order of severity.” She read them off like a med list. “Buzz cut.”

“No.”

“Curtain mullet.”

“I don’t know what that—no.”

“Short wolf cut. Above the ear, shaggy on top. It’s the current standard.” Mohan turned her phone around. The woman on the screen had hair that ended somewhere around her jaw and a look on her face like she had never once in her life been asked to wear the blue. “There’s a place on Butler that takes walk-ins on weekdays.”

“How do you know that?”

“I called them at seven forty-five.”

Javadi looked at the phone. She was aware of her own hair, at that moment, in a way she had never been aware of it: the weight of it in the ponytail, the elastic she’d had in since six the previous morning, the way it had been below her shoulders since before she could remember and above them precisely never. She wore a ponytail to bed. She wore a ponytail in the shower, sometimes, by accident. Her mother had a photograph of her at four, in a ponytail, holding a stethoscope, and the ponytail was the part of that picture that had not changed.

Her hand had come up, without instruction, to hold the end of it.

“It’s just hair,” she said, in a voice she hoped was clinical. “It’s dead keratin. It has no nerve endings. It grows an average of half an inch a month, which means—” she did the math, and the math was bad, and she did it again—“which means it’s a very reversible intervention.”

“Eighteen months,” Mohan said. “Give or take.”

“Thank you, Mohan.”

Whitaker said, “What’s a wolf cut?” and Mohan showed him her phone, and he squinted at it and said, “Oh. Oh, that’s like—my brother Cody had that in 2009, except we called it a mistake.”

“Second column.” Mohan was undeterred. Mohan was a woman who had finished a thoracentesis during a fire alarm. “Clothing. This is where Whitaker is actually useful.”

“Thank you.”

“There’s a difference between clothing that signals masculinity and clothing that just fits a man. We want the former. Work jacket, boots, a white T-shirt that has been washed enough times to be honest. Jeans that were not marketed to her.”

“I’m sitting right here,” Javadi said.

“You are. Third column.” Mohan hesitated—the only hesitation Javadi had ever seen her make on purpose. “Piercing.”

“No.”

“It’s the fastest-onset signal in the literature.”

“The literature—Mohan, I can’t. I faint. That’s my whole—that’s the origin of the nickname. Everyone in this diner knows I faint.”

“Nobody in this diner knows that,” Whitaker said, and then, looking around, “Well. Perlah’s at the counter. So one person.”

“A helix,” Mohan said. “Not a lobe. A lobe is a starter position. A helix is a decision. It’s cartilage. It’s one needle. You’ve taken a needle to worse.”

“I’ve given needles to worse.”

“Then you know it’s quick.” She closed the notebook. “Victoria. You asked me for criteria. These are criteria. Whether you meet them is up to you.”

Javadi looked at the page. She looked at Whitaker, who was looking at her the way he looked at a patient who was about to tell him something he didn’t want to know, all open, worried farm-boy face. She thought about Nat Brandt’s hand on Santos’s shoulder, and the way Santos hadn’t moved away from it.

She thought about she’s got a type.

“Okay,” she said. “Hair first.”

Whitaker put his hand over his heart. “I’ll drive,” he said, with the solemnity of a man agreeing to be a pallbearer.

* * *

The place on Butler was called Split Ends, and it was exactly what it sounded like, and the woman who took Javadi’s walk-in was named Reggie and had a bleached buzz cut and a septum ring and the calmest hands Javadi had ever seen outside of an OR.

“So what are we doing?” Reggie asked into the mirror.

“A wolf cut,” Javadi said, and then, because Mohan was standing behind the chair holding up her phone like a defense exhibit, “A—short one. Shorter than that. Like—”

“Like you want somebody to notice.”

“Like I want somebody to—yes.”

Reggie ran her fingers through Javadi’s hair, all of it, the whole length of it, which had been past her shoulders since she was thirteen and which her mother had described, at every family event for eight years, as her best feature. “You’ve never cut this.”

“I’ve trimmed it.”

“Sweetheart. That’s not a question.” Reggie met her eyes in the mirror. “You sure?”

Javadi looked at herself. She looked, she thought, exactly like what she was: a twenty-one-year-old who had been thirteen for so long that she didn’t know how to stop. Someone whose parents still picked her dresses. Someone who a paramedic with forearms had looked at, kindly, and not seen as a threat.

“I’m sure,” she said.

Reggie picked up the scissors.

The first cut took nine inches of ponytail. It fell into Javadi’s lap in a single rope and she looked at it, and Whitaker, in the waiting chair by the window, made a noise like he had witnessed a farm accident, and Mohan said, “Dennis,” in the voice she used for medical students, and he said, “No, I’m fine, it’s fine, it’s just—it’s a lot of hair.”

It was a lot of hair. Javadi looked at it lying across her knees like something that had died there, and then she made the mistake of looking up.

Reggie was holding a section at the back of her head. Between two fingers. And the two fingers were—they were at her ear. Not below it. Not near it. Reggie’s knuckles were touching the top of her ear, and the scissors were open on the other side of them, and Javadi understood, with the speed of a bad rhythm strip, that everything past the knuckles was going.

“Wait,” she said.

Reggie waited.

“That’s—sorry. That’s the length. That’s where it’s—”

“That’s the cut you asked for, sweetheart.”

“Right. Yes. I know. I just didn’t—” In the mirror, past her own shoulder, Whitaker had both hands over the bottom half of his face like a man watching a horror movie he had paid for. Mohan, beside him, was perfectly composed, which was somehow worse. “I didn’t have the scale right. In my head. It was more—conceptual.”

Reggie lowered the scissors. “You want me to stop? I can stop. I can make this a long bob, and nobody has to know.”

A long bob and nobody has to know. She could walk out of here with a long bob. She could put it in a ponytail—a short, stupid, stubby ponytail, but a ponytail—and go home and put on the cardigan and open the door for Santos at eight, looking like a slightly edited version of a person who was not the type.

And Nat Brandt would still exist. And Whitaker would still have been surprised.

Javadi closed her eyes. She thought about the stairwell. She thought about Santos’s hand on the back of her neck the first time, the way she’d said okay? against her mouth like it was a real question, like she’d have stopped. She thought about nineteen days of a woman who didn’t stay with anyone, staying.

She’s worth it. She’s worth it. She’s worth a haircut.

“Don’t stop,” she said. “Do it. Do the—all of it. Before I—just do it.”

“Atta girl,” said Reggie, and the scissors closed, and Whitaker made a sound like a small animal, and Javadi did not look at the mirror again until Reggie said, “Okay,” and turned the chair, and there was a stranger in it.

The stranger had short hair. Short at the back, shaggy at the crown, layers falling around her face in a way that made her jaw look like something she’d decided on rather than something she’d been issued. Her neck was—there was a lot of neck. She had never really seen it before. Her ears were out. Her ears were out, and they were smaller than she’d thought, and one of them was, in about two hours, going to have a hole in it.

“Oh,” she said.

“Yeah,” said Reggie.

Behind her, very quietly, Whitaker said, “Oh, dang.” And then, “No, that’s—I mean that in a good way. That’s a good dang.”

Mohan wrote something down.

* * *

The clothes took two hours and one argument.

The argument was about the jacket. Mohan wanted the brown canvas one, the one that looked like it had been through a season of something. Whitaker wanted the black one—a cropped moto thing with a broken zipper pull—and when Mohan asked him why, he went red to the ears and said, “No reason,” and then, under the combined weight of two stares, “Okay. There was a girl. In, like, March. She had one just like it. She was in our kitchen at six a.m. making Santos eggs, and Santos was—she was letting her. Santos doesn’t let people touch her stove.” He looked at the jacket the way he might look at a chart with a bad outcome on it. “I just remember the jacket.”

Javadi wanted to leave. She was standing in the middle of a thrift store in Lawrenceville in a men’s black T-shirt she had not yet paid for, with her new neck, and a kid with green hair behind the counter had looked at her twice, and now she was going to have to think about eggs.

She got the brown one. Mohan was usually right, and she could not, she found, put on a jacket that had already been in Santos’s kitchen.

She also got: a pair of black jeans that were cut straight from the hip and made her legs look like they belonged to a person who walked places; a pair of boots with a heel she could actually stand on for twelve hours; a belt that Whitaker held up and said, gravely, “This is a real belt,” in a tone that suggested most belts were not; and, at the register, at Mohan’s insistence, a carabiner.

“No,” Javadi said.

“It costs three dollars.”

“It’s—the whole—she had one.”

“That is why it costs three dollars.” Mohan paid for it herself and clipped it, without ceremony, to Javadi’s new belt loop, and stepped back and tilted her head the way she did over an X-ray, and said, “Better.”

Javadi looked at herself in the mirror by the changing rooms. Someone had written u look great!! on it in dry-erase marker, and the exclamation points sat right over her new hair, and the person under them was—

She didn’t know. She didn’t know what the person under them was. She turned sideways. The jacket sat on her shoulders like it had been waiting for them. The boots made her two inches taller. The T-shirt was black and the kind of thin that came from three hundred washes, and it hung off her collarbones in a way that suggested, vaguely, that she had collarbones, which she had, in twenty-one years, never once had a reason to consider.

“Is it working?” she asked. “Be honest.”

Whitaker, standing behind her in the mirror with a flannel over his arm that no one had asked him to bring, looked at her for a second with an expression she couldn’t read.

He picked the sentence like it might bite him. “I think that you look like you.”

“That’s not—that’s not helpful, Whitaker, the entire point is—”

“No, I know. I know what the point is.” He shifted the flannel. “I just think you look like you in a jacket.”

Mohan wrote that down too.

* * *

She did not faint at the piercing place.

She wanted that on the record, later. She did not faint. She sat in the chair with the paper towel under her ear and Whitaker holding her hand—he had offered, and she had said no, and then the piercer had opened the needle packet and Javadi had grabbed his hand so hard he said ow in a whisper—and she looked at the ceiling and thought about the Krebs cycle, in order, and the piercer said, “Deep breath, and out,” and there was a pressure and a click and a bright hot line, and then it was over.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.” The piercer was holding up a mirror. “Helix, fourteen-gauge, titanium. Don’t sleep on it, don’t twist it, saline twice a day. It’ll be pissed at you for about a month.”

Javadi looked. There was a small, straight, silver bar through the top curve of her ear, and the skin around it was pink and outraged, and it looked—

It looked deliberate. Like a person had chosen it. Like it might belong to the kind of woman who carried other women out of bars.

“Okay,” she said, and let go of Whitaker’s hand, and he shook it out and said, “You got a grip on you, Javadi, I’ll say that,” and Mohan, from the doorway, capped her pen and closed the notebook with the quiet finality of a woman who had completed a procedure.

“Intervention complete,” she said. “Now we wait for the outcome.”

“The outcome is coming over at eight,” Javadi said, and her stomach did something she chose to classify as hunger.

* * *

The outcome texted at seven-fifteen. bringing thai. dont argue. the place on liberty w the good larb

Javadi, standing in front of her bedroom mirror in the black jeans, the boots, the black T-shirt, the belt, the carabiner, with her ear throbbing in time with her pulse, typed ok and then deleted it and typed Sounds good! and then deleted that, because Sounds good! was what a person with long hair said, and typed ok again, and sent it, and then put the phone face down on the dresser and went back to fighting her hair.

Reggie had shown her. Reggie had put some kind of paste in her hands and said just mess it up, don’t think, and Javadi had nodded like she understood, and now she was discovering that don’t think was not an instruction her body accepted. She’d pushed it back. It fell forward. She’d pushed it forward. It looked like a helmet. She’d wet it down and started over twice, and the pieces around her face kept doing something that was either exactly right or a disaster, and she had no way of knowing which, because she had never in her life had a piece of hair near her face that wasn’t on its way into an elastic.

She stood back. The jacket was on the bed. The T-shirt was thin and black, and the bar in her ear caught the lamp, and the person in the mirror looked cold.

She reached for the closet door before she’d decided anything. Second hook from the left. The purple cardigan—the soft one, the one with the pockets, the one she wore on night shifts when the ED dropped to sixty-four degrees at three a.m., and nobody else seemed to notice. Her fingers were on the wool. It would take one second. She could put it on over the T-shirt and the whole—

She’s got a type.

She let go of the cardigan. She closed the closet door. She put on the brown jacket, and zipped it halfway, and stood there in her own bedroom with her hands at her sides like a soldier.

Her apartment was clean. She had cleaned it at four, and then again at six, because there was nothing else to do with her hands. She had set out two plates and then put them away because setting out plates was presumptuous. She had put on music and turned it off. She had looked at herself in every reflective surface in the apartment—the bedroom mirror, the microwave door, the dark window over the sink—and every time the person looking back was a little more of a stranger and a little less of anything she could explain.

She’d practiced the doorway. That was the thing she couldn’t quite believe about herself, in retrospect: that she’d stood in her own hallway with the door closed and rehearsed opening it, the angle, the lean, hip against the frame, the way Santos leaned in doorways like the building had been constructed to hold her up. Javadi had done it four times, and it had never once felt like anything except a woman standing in a hallway.

At seven fifty-eight the buzzer went, sharp enough that she felt it in her back teeth, and she buzzed Santos up and stood behind the door, and did not lean, and did not do the angle, and just—opened it.

Santos was on the other side with a paper bag in one arm and her keys in her teeth, and she was in the process of saying something around the keys, and she looked up, and stopped.

The keys came out of her mouth.

She looked at the hair. She looked at the ear—Javadi watched her eyes go to it, watched them catch on the little silver bar and hold. She looked at the jacket, the T-shirt, the jeans, the boots. She looked at the carabiner.

She looked, for one long second, at Javadi’s face.

And then Santos’s mouth curved, slow, and she said, “Oh my God. Is this a bit?”

Javadi said, “What?”

“Is this—are we doing a bit? Did Whitaker put you up to this? Because I said one thing about his flannels, one thing—” She was grinning now, the whole grin, the one that turned her face into a different face, and she came in past Javadi and set the bag on the counter and turned around and put her hands on her hips and looked, top to bottom, delighted. “Where did you even get a jacket like that? That’s a good jacket. Is it Halloween? It’s September. Crash, it is September. This is very early for a costume, what are you supposed to—”

She stopped.

Javadi had not moved from the door. She was aware that she had not moved from the door. Her own mouth was losing whatever shape it had been holding, and Santos’s face changed in response, the grin going out of it a degree at a time like a monitor being turned down.

“Crash,” Santos said, in a different voice. “That’s a real piercing.”

“Yes.”

“That’s—you cut your hair. That’s not a wig. That’s your actual hair.”

“Yes.”

Santos crossed the kitchen. She stopped a foot away and reached up and touched, not the ear, but the short hair just above it, the shaggy piece that fell against Javadi’s temple, and pushed it back, and looked at the pink outraged skin around the bar. Her thumb was very gentle. Her face was not doing anything at all, which was the most frightening thing Javadi had ever seen it do.

“What did you do?” Santos asked.

“I—” Javadi swallowed. Her whole neck was exposed, and she had never in her life been this aware of a body part. “It’s a wolf cut. Short. It’s a very common—Reggie said it would grow out in—”

“Who’s Reggie?”

“On Butler. She’s—it doesn’t matter. It’s a helix, it’s fourteen-gauge, it’s titanium, so it won’t react, and the jacket’s from the—I’m fine, it’s just clothes, Santos, people change their clothes, it’s not a—”

“Victoria. Stop.”

It landed like a hand on her sternum. Javadi stopped talking. Santos was looking at her, jaw tight, mouth flat, nothing on her face Javadi could file under mad or amused, and then her eyes went to the carabiner, and Javadi saw it happen. Saw the math come together behind her face. Saw her get there.

“Nat said something,” Santos said.

Javadi’s eyes went hot.

“No,” she said. “That’s not—I mean, yes, obviously, but that’s not why—”

“Victoria...”

“She said you had a type.” It came out fast and high and awful, the way things did when they’d been sitting in her throat all day. “She said—she was so nice about it, she wasn’t even being cruel, she was just being accurate, she said you like the ones who could carry you out of a bar and then she squeezed your shoulder and her hand was—and you didn’t move, you let her, and she looked at me like I was your—like I was a student, like I was something you were being nice to, and I thought—I just thought if I could—”

Her voice broke. Right down the middle. She heard it happen and could do nothing about it, and she put her hand up to her face—the one without the bar in it, she had that much presence of mind—and the tears came anyway, hot and immediate and unbelievably humiliating, in her own kitchen, in a jacket, in boots.

“Oh, no,” she said, muffled. “No, no, I’m not—I’m fine, I’m—”

“Hey.” Santos’s hands were on her arms. Then her shoulders. Then Javadi was against her, jacket and all, and Santos’s hand was on the back of her stupid new short head, and Santos was saying, low, into the hair by her unpierced ear, “Hey. Hey. Okay. Baby, come here. Come here, you’re okay.”

Baby. She had never—not in the stairwell, not in bed, not once in nineteen days—

“I am so embarrassed.”

“I know.”

“I paid sixty dollars for the piercing.”

“I know. It’s a good piercing.”

“Whitaker held my hand.”

“That sounds right.”

“And my hair—” and that was the one that did it, that was the one that turned the crying from something she was managing into something that was managing her. “My hair, Santos, it’s gone, it’s on the floor of a place called Split Ends, I had it since I was thirteen and it’s going to take—I did the math, I did the math twice, it’s a year and a half, it’s eighteen months before I even look like—and I don’t look like me and I don’t look like her and I don’t look like anyone, I just look like somebody who got scared and did something permanent—”

“Okay. Okay.” Santos pulled back far enough to see her. Her thumbs were on Javadi’s face, wiping, not gently exactly, but thoroughly, like she was cleaning a wound. “Victoria. Look at me. Look at me, baby.”

Javadi looked at her. Her face was a disaster. She knew it was a disaster.

“The hair,” Santos said, very clearly, “looks sexy as hell.”

“You’re just—”

“I am not just anything. I don’t say things I don’t mean. You know that about me. That’s the whole problem with me.” Her thumb moved along Javadi’s cheekbone and up, into the short piece at her temple, and pushed it back. “I walked in that door and for one second before my brain caught up I thought, oh, no. In the good way. In the—Crash, I couldn’t figure out where to look. Your neck. Your whole—” She made a sound, low, frustrated with the shape of the sentence. “You did this to yourself for a bad reason, and it is still the hottest thing anyone has ever done in my general direction, and I am furious about that, and you don’t get to stand in your kitchen and tell me you don’t look like anyone. You look like you. With less hair. You look like you had a day.”

Javadi laughed—a wet, broken, humiliating thing—and Santos pulled her back in and put her chin on the top of her head. Javadi could feel her breathing, slow and deliberate, like she was setting a pace for both of them. “Can I say something now, or do you need another minute?”

Javadi made a sound into her shoulder that could have been either.

“I’m gonna go with the minute,” Santos said, “and then I’m gonna say it anyway.”

She was warm. That was the ridiculous thing. She smelled like the ED and like the Thai place and like her own apartment, that dark clean under-scent that never washed out, and her hand had not moved from the back of Javadi’s neck, and Javadi—standing in her boots, crying into a resident’s scrub top—had the humiliating realization that she felt, for the first time all day, exactly like herself.

“Okay,” Santos said, after a while. “Here’s the thing about Nat.”

Javadi went still.

“Nat is great. Nat is a great medic and a great person, and I dated Nat for four months, and I ended it because Nat, God love her, could not walk into a room without needing it to be about her. She’s got no quiet. She squeezes your shoulder in front of your—in front of people, because she wants everybody to know she can.” Santos’s thumb moved once against the nape of her neck. “And before Nat I dated a woman who looked like Nat, and before her I dated a woman who looked like both of them, and you know what they all have in common, Crash?”

Javadi said, wetly, “Forearms.”

Santos laughed. She felt it before she heard it, a shake in the chest under her face. “They’re exes. That’s the type. That’s the whole type. I have a type, and it is ‘women I do not date anymore.’”

“That’s not—”

“You wanna know what I actually like?” Santos pulled back. Not far—just enough to get a hand on either side of Javadi’s face, to make her look. Her eyes were very dark and very steady. “I like that you iron your scrubs. Nobody irons their scrubs. I like that you have, what, six lip balms in your locker—”

“Seven.”

“Seven lip balms. In a system. I like the cardigans. I like that you have a cardigan for every temperature in that building. I like that you read the entire pharmacology of a drug before you push it, every time, even when I’m standing there telling you to push it. I like—” She stopped. Something went over her face, fast, the thing Javadi could never read, the thing that always ended in a smirk, except this time it didn’t. This time it just stayed there. “I like that you looked at that twelve-lead last night before I did, and you didn’t say anything because you knew I’d get there. You let me get there. Nobody lets me get there.”

Javadi’s chest hurt.

“I don’t want you to look like anyone,” Santos said. “I don’t want you to carry me out of anything. If I wanted to be carried, I would have stayed with somebody who—” She shook her head, once, hard. “I like you. You. The way you are. The way you were last week with the ponytail and the grandma sweater, telling Ogilvie he was wrong about the potassium in front of the whole pod and then apologizing to him for tone. I like that girl. I have been—” and here her voice did something, caught, hitched, a thing Javadi had heard it do only once before, in a stairwell, nineteen days ago—“I have been losing my mind over that girl for like three months, Crash, and she is standing in front of me in a Carhartt jacket crying because she thinks I wanted somebody else, and I don’t know what to do with that except tell you my girlfriend does not have to look like a paramedic to—”

She stopped.

The kitchen was very quiet. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere in the paper bag on the counter, the larb was getting cold.

Javadi said, “Your what?”

Santos’s hands were still on her face. Her eyes had gone wide in a way Javadi had never seen—Trinity Santos, who had once told an attending to his face that his suture technique was derivative, looked, for one glorious, unrepeatable second, exactly like a person who had walked off the end of a pier.

“I didn’t—” she said.

“You said girlfriend.”

“I said a lot of things, I was making a point—”

“You said my girlfriend.” Javadi’s voice was still thick, her face was still wet, she probably looked like a drowned Carhartt ad, and she did not care. She did not care at all, because Santos was blushing. Along the tops of her cheekbones. Visibly. Clinically. “I heard you. Whitaker could have heard you through a wall. You said—”

“Okay.” Santos let go of her face. She put both hands over her own instead, just for a second, and breathed out through them, and then dropped them and looked at Javadi with an expression that was trying very hard to be annoyed and was not landing anywhere near it. “Okay. Fine. Yes. That is—apparently—that’s what I said.”

“Is that what you meant?”

“Crash.”

“I need to know if that’s what you meant. Because I have drafted a text asking you that eleven times, and you told me to go to sleep, and I went to sleep, Santos, I did what you said, I have been so good about not asking—”

“Yes,” Santos said it like she was pulling something out of her own chest. “Yes. That’s what I meant. I’ve meant it for—I don’t know. A while. I didn’t say it because you’re twenty-one and I’m your resident and I keep waiting for you to figure out you could do better, and instead you went out and got a piercing because you thought I could, so clearly neither of us is—” She waved a hand, encompassing the jacket, the hair, the crying, the entire day. “Clearly we’re both idiots. Fine. Girlfriend. Say something.”

Javadi did not say anything.

She stepped forward in her boots—which put her, for the first time, at exactly Santos’s eye level, which was information she was going to file for later—and kissed her.

It was not a stairwell kiss. It was not a nineteen-days kiss. It was the kind of kiss you could only give somebody once you’d already cried in front of them, and Santos made a sound against her mouth that was not a word, and her hands came up and found the back of Javadi’s neck again, under the short hair, and held on.

When they broke apart, Santos didn’t let go. She kept her forehead against Javadi’s, and she was breathing a little hard, and after a moment she said, roughly, “For the record, in case you didn’t hear me the first time...”

“Mm.”

“The hair’s super sexy.”

Javadi laughed. It came out of her wet and startled, and Santos smiled against her temple.

“Don’t,” she said.

“I’m just saying. The neck,” Trinity said, and then placed a kiss on the exposed skin. “I’m seeing a lot of neck… I feel like that was intentional.”

“It was Mohan.”

“It was—” Santos pulled back. “Mohan did this?”

“Mohan made a protocol.”

“Of course she did.” Santos was starting to grin again, the real one, the one that changed her face. “Oh, my God. Did she cite sources?”

“One of them was a TikTok.”

“And Whitaker held your hand.”

“Yeah. And he even brought a flannel that no one asked for. He held it the whole time. Like a—like an emotional support flannel.”

Santos put her face into Javadi’s shoulder and laughed, properly, the kind she did about once a month, and Javadi stood in her kitchen with her girlfriend—her girlfriend—shaking against her, and her ear throbbing, and her neck out, and thought, with total clinical clarity: I would do the whole day again.

“Okay,” Santos said eventually, straightening, wiping her eye with the heel of her hand. “Okay. Two things.”

“What.”

“One. I’m stealing the jacket.”

“You’re—”

“And the shirt. Both. Not tonight. I’m not a monster, but they’re coming home with me at some point, and you’re not gonna stop me.” Santos hooked a finger in the collar of the T-shirt, tugged once, let go. “That’s a good shirt. Somebody washed that shirt for a decade before you found it.”

Javadi looked down at herself. At the jacket that had been waiting for her shoulders and hadn’t, in the end, wanted them. She thought about it on Santos—the sleeves pushed up, the collar open, the whole thing sitting on her the way things sat on her, like they’d given up arguing.

“You’d look better in it than me,” she said, and found that she meant it without a single ounce of sadness. “Objectively. It would be—it’s a better use of the jacket.”

“Yeah,” Santos said, easy, like that was just true. “It is. Two.” She reached out and, very gently, unclipped the carabiner from Javadi’s belt loop and held it up between them. “This goes.”

“Mohan said—”

“Mohan doesn’t have to look at it.” Santos tossed it onto the counter, where it skidded and clinked against the Thai bag. “That one’s Nat’s. You don’t get a Nat thing. You get a you thing.”

“I don’t have a me thing.”

“You have seven lip balms in a system, Victoria. You have nothing but a you thing.” She picked up the bag. She looked at the plates that were not on the counter, and then at Javadi, and something in her face went soft and knowing. “Did you put the plates away?”

“…I didn’t want to be presumptuous.”

“Get the plates,” Santos said, “girlfriend,” and Javadi got the plates.

* * *

The helix took five weeks to stop being angry about it, which was exactly what the piercer had said, and Javadi documented it anyway.

The hair grew. Half an inch a month, on schedule, and somewhere in the second month she stopped fighting it in the mirror and started just—pushing it back, the way Reggie had said, don’t think, and found she could. By the third month she went back to Split Ends and sat in the chair, and Reggie said, “So what are we doing?” and Javadi looked at herself—the shag grown in soft around her jaw, the layers falling wherever they wanted, the back just long enough to be a problem—and said, “Keep the shape. Just—let it get long enough to pull back. For shifts.”

“So a mullet,” Reggie said.

“It is not a mullet.”

“It’s a little bit of a mullet, sweetheart,” Reggie said, and cut it anyway, and it was perfect.

The jacket lived on the hook by her door for exactly nine days, and then it lived at Santos’s, and then it lived wherever Santos was, which by December was, mostly, the hook by Javadi’s door.

And on a Thursday in late January, when a rig pulled into the bay at the top of the shift and a woman with an undercut and a carabiner came through the doors calling out a report, Javadi—in her ironed scrubs and her purple cardigan, with the front of her hair pushed back and the rest of it scraped into a short, stubborn, shaggy ponytail that Santos called the situation and would not stop touching—looked up from the chart she was holding and said, “Hey, Nat. Trauma Two,” and Nat stopped, and looked at her, and looked at the hair, and looked at the small silver bar in the top of her ear, and grinned.

“Oh, no,” Nat said. “She got you, didn’t she?”

“No,” Javadi said with an all-knowing smile. “I got her.”