“Becca, you seem great. I’m sure you’re wonderful at your job. This is a me thing, not a you thing. I will pay you to let me leave this room so I can start to forget that pain.”
Harper rifled through her wallet and pulled out a fat tip for Becca. She all but threw the money at her as she rushed out of the room and onto the street.
Fifteen minutes later, her friends emerged from their own torture appointments, shooting her knowing smiles.
“Sooooo,” Lizzie drawled, looping an arm around Harper. “Do you love it? Do you feel sexy?”
“I couldn’t let her finish,” Harper said, staring at her friends. “How could you set me up for that? That hurt so fucking bad.”
“What do you mean you didn’t let her finish?” Indira said, looking scandalized.
“She ripped off one strip and I swear my life passed before my eyes, it hurt that badly. I made her stop.”
They all stared at her in silence before Thu cut in. “Okay, two things. One: You want to pull out people’s teeth for a living. You don’t have room to talk. Two: Are you telling me you’re sporting a half bush right now?”
Harper opened her mouth to say something, but sighed and gave a defeated shrug, nodding.
“Oh my God, can I see?” Lizzie shrieked with glee.
“What? No!”
“Well … that will certainly, uh, be a surprise for Dental Dan,” Indira said, trying and failing to hold back giggles.
“I can promise you, Dan won’t be seeing it.” Harper turned, and they all started moving down the street.
“You ready for tonight?” Indira asked.
“Now that I can’t walk? Yeah, I feel super ready for the dance,” Harper said, trying to ignore the anxiety lazily pulsing through her stomach. She’d been doing her best to push away thoughts about the dance and crowds of bodies pressing around her, but the harder she tried not to think about it, the more her anxious brain latched on to the idea, twirling it over and over in her mind in a panic-inducing swirl.
“Dan’s gonna choke when he sees you in that dress,” Thu said, thumbing through her phone.
As soon as they’d heard Dan was taking Harper to Filling Groovy, Harper’s friends shoved her on the next trolley to Center City for a dress.
“Yeah? What’s Alex gonna do when he sees you in yours?” Harper asked.
“We get it, you both have automatic dong opportunities tonight. Spare us, please,” Indira teased.
“You guys are still coming to the pregame at our place, right?” Lizzie asked, draping an arm around Indira.
“Yeah. Is it just us, or did you invite anyone else?” Harper asked.
“Just us? Oh sweetie,” Indira said, touching a hand to her heart. “Our pregame is legendary. Open invite.”
Harper swallowed. “Isn’t your place kind of … small?”
“We make it work,” Indira said with a shrug. “Why? What’s wrong? You’re all sweaty.”
Harper waved Indira off, pretending to read something on her phone, while adrenaline pumped through her heart in vicious squirts, trickling like acid from her chest all the way down to her fingers and toes.
The conversation turned to how they would do their （head） hair and what shoes they were going to wear, but Harper didn’t hear anything over the blood pounding in her ears and the ragged sounds of her breaths.
Open invite meant crowds. A small apartment meant nowhere to escape. Harper had never told her friends about her claustrophobia. It was one more thing that made her feel separated from everyone, and pretending it wasn’t real was easier than having to explain the panic that instantly gripped at her joints and made her want to bolt on the spot.
Excuses swirled through her mind—anything to avoid the night ahead. It had to be good. Convincing.
Harper was deciding between a stomach bug and period cramps when Indira said her name. Harper’s head snapped to her friend.
“Sorry, what did you say?”
“I said, ‘We’re really, really excited you’re coming tonight.’ It means a lot to us that we finally get to do this with you.”
The earnestness in her friends’ smiles punched the air from her already deprived lungs. She didn’t want to let them down, ruin their fun. She didn’t want to be chained to her apartment by the iron restraints of anxiety. She wanted to feel like a normal fucking woman doing a normal fucking thing. Not this shameful, unstable bundle of nerves that controlled her every step.
So she’d go.