Page 15 of The Change
Three men in their forties and fifties would be pressuring a twenty-two-year-old woman to take a payout in exchange for an NDA. “I want to see her first.”
The trainee had the chutzpah to smile at her. “I’ve already spoken with senior management. That won’t be possible.”
She knew then what she should have known all along. He’d been hired to keep an eye on her. “You fucking traitor,” Jo spat.
“Say what you like, but we need to leave this room. I’m very sorry for the inconvenience, sir,” the trainee told the guest.
“Don’t apologize.” The man stood up from the bed and laid an avuncular hand on the young man’s shoulder. “These poor women—they are at the mercy of their hormones. You and I are lucky to be men. I can only imagine what their suffering must be like.”
Jo later told Art that something inside her had ignited—a powder keg that had been filling for a very long time. The force of theexplosion propelled her across the room before she knew what was happening. With one hand, she grabbed hold of the VIP’s throat and slammed him into the wall. Her free arm reared back and sent her fist flying toward the man’s face. In the last millisecond, it veered to the left and hit the wall less than an inch from his ear. When her arm finally came to a stop, it was wrist-deep in the drywall. It was clear that the impact would have killed the man in her grip. Miraculously, Jo felt no pain at all.
When security dragged her backward, her heels fell off. She didn’t fight. She watched as the man slid down the wall to the floor, where a puddle of urine was growing. Around his neck was a second degree burn in the shape of her hand.
Forty-five minutes later, Jo was standing shell-shocked in front of a departures board at Grand Central Terminal, clutching the few personal belongings she’d been allowed to take from her desk. There hadn’t been an opportunity to change her tampon before she left the hotel. She suddenly sensed how heavy it had grown inside her, and all at once, she felt it slip, and knew the dam inside her had given way. As hundreds of commuters and tourists wove around her, Jo felt the warmth overwhelm the backup pad she’d stuck to her underwear that morning and begin to soak through her pants. The closest bathroom was across the main hall and down the stairs to the dining concourse. She knew she wouldn’t make it.
“I give up,” she told the universe. She’d lost the war. It had been inevitable. There was nothing she could have done to avoid this moment.
The epiphany came as the blood flowed freely down her legs. She should never have attempted to fight it.
How many years—how much energy—had she lost trying to control something that could not be controlled? How long had she feared being outed as female? How much frustration had she endured, inhabiting a world that wasn’t designed for her kind? Howlong had she prayed to be seen and accepted as more than a body? How hard had she tried to fix things that simply refused to be fixed?
So much fury had built up inside Jo. But at last she’d identified the true enemy. She’d been waging war with herself since she was fourteen years old. But the problem wasn’t her body. The problem was the companies that sold shitty sanitary pads. Otherwise reasonable adults who believed tampons stole a girl’s virginity. Doctors who didn’t bother to solve common problems. Birth control that could kill you. Boys who were told that they couldn’t control themselves. A society that couldn’t handle the fact that roughly half of all humans menstruate at some point in their lives.
The real problem was the hotel where women were being assaulted, the corporation that owned it, and the men who ran it. In a filing cabinet in her home office was a folder filled with everything Jo needed to burn the place to the ground. And in her contacts was the phone number of the reporter at theTimeswho’d called after Jo’s promotion.
Out of courtesy, Jo sat on a plastic bag on the train ride home. She didn’t bother to hide the stain on her pants.
“Ma’am, are you okay?” the female conductor whispered. “Can I get you something?”
“You don’t have to whisper,” Jo told her. “This shit happens to all of us.”
The following morning, Jo sent the hotel’s HR files to theNew York Times. Then she went for a run. For the first time in decades, Jo’s body felt like it was finally hers. She not only owned it, she fuckinglovedit. It carried her all the way across town without getting winded. On the way, she made a point of running past Ellen Goodwin’s house, just as she would at least once a week for the next five years.
The Girl in Blue
“This is a joke, right?” Jo asked, a half smile on her face as she wiped the sweat from her hairline and fanned her belly with the bottom of her tank top. She’d just come back from her morning run, and as usual, she was sopping wet.
Nessa gestured toward her car in Jo’s driveway. Sitting on the passenger side was a woman with wild hair.
Jo gasped. “Holy shit. Is that who I think it is?”
“Mmm-hmmm,” Nessa replied.
“I figured she’d gone to seed. She looks amazing.” Jo stepped back and lowered her voice even further. “So lemme see if I have this straight. You hear dead people?”
“Yes,” Nessa confirmed. She didn’t know if it was the right moment to confess that she could often see them, too.
“And you, me, and Harriett goddamn Osborne are going to go look for a corpse that’s been calling to you from beyond the grave?”
“That’s right.” Nessa was getting a bit nervous.
Jo nodded thoughtfully. “Well,” she finally said, “beats the hell out of everything else I had planned for the day. If I can get someone to teach my Spin class, I’m good. Gotta take a shower and drop the kid off at school first, though. That okay with you?”
Nessa was so relieved, she would have agreed to anything. “Take your shower. We’ll give Lucy a ride when you’re done.”
Jo peeked around the corner at Harriett and laughed. “Oh man. My kid’s gonnalovethis.”
“Who’s the lady sitting in Nessa’s car?” Lucy asked as they walked down the path to the driveway.
