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At the computer across from Mel, Trinity let out a groan and let her head drop to the desk.
“All good?” Mel asked, tentative.
“Yep.” Trinity did not lift her forehead from the tabletop.
“Oh, cool. Because you, um, look really thrilled.”
That made Trinity roll her head to the side, her temple pressed to the corner of the mousepad, which let her peer at Mel. Her cheek squished in a way that was oddly cute. “Oh, yeah?”
Mel fought a smile. She nodded. “Mm-hmm.”
Trinity snorted. “Such a little shit.” With a sigh, she pushed herself up. “It’s my brother. Joey, the baby-est one. He got himself put back on academic probation.”
“That’s not good. What happened?”
“Snapping turtles.”
“Pardon?”
“See for yourself.” Trinity lifted her phone, and, in two pushes of her legs, rolled her chair over within viewing range.
Mel bent her neck. Onscreen posed a young man that she recognized from a photo on Trinity’s nightstand. He shared her cheeks and nose, though both his skin and eyes were light brown. He wore his wavy hair to about his chin. He was beaming, and in his hands, as advertised, he held a muddy, spiky, turtle-shaped mass.
“Whoa, aren’t those like super dangerous?”
“Only ‘if you don’t know how to handle them,’ apparently.” Her affect was drippingly sardonic. “Ugh. He’s doing field work for extra credit. I asked him how much credit he gets for losing a finger, but….” She bugged her eyes out.
“Sounds like a bona fide Steve Irwin.”
“Okay, well that guy died, so. Not helpful.”
“Oh, I’m– Sorry, that was–”
Trinity’s mouth slipped into a smirk.
“You’re very rude sometimes, you know that?”
Trinity leaned in, her eyes meeting Mel’s. Her eyebrows jumped conspiratorially. “So I’ve been told.”
This close, Mel could smell her shampoo, the one she kept in the green bottle on the corner of her bathtub. Warmth shifted in her belly, like a ladle had dipped in soup. Her eyes dropped to Trinity’s lips, and she made herself glance away, checking that no superior was impatiently waiting behind them and no patient was in imminent danger of death, then glanced back. She cleared her throat. “Alright, so did he, uh, get the turtle to take a midterm for him?”
Trinity pressed her eyes shut for a moment. “When he’s here, you’re so not allowed to talk to him. You’ll give him ideas.”
“Ooh, is he coming?”
“Yeah, that’s what he was texting about. His spring break’s coming up, and he had the choice to go home and get yelled at for a week straight, stay in his apartment with his not-boyfriend that just not-cheated on him, or finally come visit big sis in the Burgh. So, ding-ding-ding, lucky number three.” She hooked her thumb back at her chest, pumping on each ding. “Really makes a girl feel wanted.”
“That’s…sweet? Not sweet?”
“No, it is.” Trinity sat back, sighing. She looked at the photo, chin dimpling fondly, and rolled her eyes. “Just when he first asked, he conveniently left out the academic probation part. So now I have to budget in time to bully him into finishing his degree, on top of the already rigorous bullying schedule I had planned.”
“Sounds involved,” Mel considered. “But I mean, does he have to? Lots of people don’t go to college, I’m sure there’s plenty of work in the biological sciences that doesn’t require a BA.”
“Sure, yeah. But he’s in his last semester. Doofus just needs to pass, like, two classes.”
“Got it. That’s close.”
“He’s killing me. Anyway, would you wanna do dinner or something when he comes? Maybe bring Beccasaurus, too?”
“Oh?” Mel asked. She straightened her glasses innocently. “I thought I wasn’t allowed to talk to him.”
Trinity narrowed her eyes. “Obviously you’re meeting him.” The obviously, the unquestioning certainty, still made Mel’s heart skip. And her smile a little goofy. “And I think he’ll like Becca. His favorite movie growing up was the Jungle Book.”
“Mm. She is having a Jungle Book renaissance.”
“Would she be down? I mean, it’s cool if not, we can forget it if–”
“No, I think she’d like that. I can ask. What day?”
“Any. Whichever. It’s the 12th to the 19th. Text me what works and I’ll run it past his royal frogliness.”
“Frogliness?”
She flicked her fingers like she was shooing a fly. “Turtles, frogs. He has a hardon for the semiaquatic.”
Mel wrinkled her nose.
“Yeah, that was gross for me to say, too.”
“Hey, Tweedledee, Tweedledum!” called Dana, from the other side of the hub. “We’ve got a double MVC five minutes out, think you can fit it in to your morning tea time?”
“On it,” Mel said, jerking up.
“Don’t love that I was Tweedledum there,” Trinity grumbled, rolling back over to her station to save the chart she’d been halfway through.
“Oh, I’m sure she didn’t mean anything by it.”
“I’m not,” offered Perlah, heading past. She flashed Mel a grin.
Trinity called after her in Tagalog, something that read more as a grievance than an insult, and Perlah waved a peace sign over her shoulder. Trinity let her head tip back on the chair backrest, face to the ceiling.
“We should get ready,” Mel said. She closed out of the tablet and stood to leave it on the rack.
“Mm.”
“Trinity.”
Trinity looked up at her. She had double lines between her brows, and she was chewing her lip.
“He’ll be okay, you know. Joey. I’m sure he’ll figure it out.”
“Well, duh.”
Mel eyed her, unconvinced.
She scrunched her face and spun her chair so it properly faced Mel. “Okay, yeah, I know. It’s just.” She rolled her hands in the air. “You know.”
She didn’t say it like y’know, general y’—she said it like you know.
And Mel did. But before she could answer, a commotion erupted at the ambulance bay doors. Instead of replying properly, Mel grabbed Trinity’s fingers and gave them a brief, hard squeeze. Then they were both lathering their hands with sanitizer and gloving up, and then they were on.
“You’re not asleep,” Mel murmured. They lay in Mel’s bed. Trinity had her back to her, facing the door, where a dim yellow band beneath it provided the room’s only source of light. (Mel typically left a nightlight on in the living room/kitchen, for when Becca wanted to air fry French fries at three in the morning.) About two feet closer to the wall, Mel’s body traced the same curve as hers. It was in this position, as quotation marks, that they had shared most of their late-night conversations.
Trinity hooked her arm across her face, so her elbow covered her eyes and her close-clipped fingernails dug into her hair. “Stupid brain won’t stop.”
“Doing what?”
There were plenty of things to keep it going, as Mel well knew by now.
“It’s midnight, who gives a shit.”
Mel flinched, despite herself. “I do?”
There was a pause. Mel expected this.
“Sorry. Shit, sorry.” She twisted her head, searching Mel’s face in the dark.
“S’okay.” She nodded until Trinity seemed to believe her and settled again with her back to her. As she waited for the silence do its work, she took a crease of the sheets between her fingers, rubbing the layers of cotton together.
It was hardly thirty seconds when Trinity cracked. She let out a big puff of air. “I’m still thinking about Joey.”
Mel made a sound in her throat. Maybe feeling grateful was wrong, but she couldn’t help the relief that this, at least, felt within her wheelhouse. “It’s hard to turn off.”
“It’s– It’s stupid, I still feel like I need to stand in front of him. Get in between him and something.” Her back hunched as she curled tighter in on herself. “Only, there isn’t anything.”
“I mean, you’re worried about him. I get like that with Becca sometimes. Remember when she had to get her appendix out? I couldn’t focus for the whole week.”
“Yeah, but she was in legit danger. He just needs to turn in some late work.”
“I don’t think–”
“And now Huckleberry’s complaining about feeling hovered over. Which is ridiculous, I threw one salad pack at his head. I thought he was a fan of Veggie Tales. ‘Theology’ and all.”
“You threw…a salad pack at him?” This explained Whitaker’s big eyes when he’d found Mel in the stairwell and beseechingly suggested that she and Santos could benefit from a night in together.
“If that guy doesn’t get a leafy green in him, the next stiff breeze is going to blow him into a river. It’s barely March—I’m not in the mood to go swimming.”
It took Mel a second to piece all of that together. She thumbed sleep out of her eye. “Yeah, yeah. Sounds…worrying.” Never mind that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Trinity voluntarily partake in a salad pack herself.
“It’s not. Whatever.”
Mel smiled. She let her eyes roll up to the window. “Mhm.”
“God, don’t listen to me. You should be asleep.”
Mel didn’t say that the sheer confined tension from Trinity’s side of the bed would have kept her up anyway. She had no desire for her to flee to the couch. Besides, she, unlike Trinity, was off tomorrow—she’d already planned to set her alarm back a little bit to make up for this, and she had protein pancakes in the freezer that Trinity had made for them on the weekend so she didn’t have to worry about breakfast for Becca, and Trinity had cleaned the kitchen after Mel had cooked dinner, so all she really had to do in the morning was walk Becca to the Center.
Hedonistically relaxing, in her books.
So she said, “Oh no, it’s fine. Should we call him?”
“Whitaker?” Trinity rolled onto her back, now, looking at Mel out of the corner of her eye. “Are you serious?”
“No, um. Joey. Sometimes hearing Becca on the phone helps my nervous system get the memo that she’s safe.”
“Thank God. Whitaker in bed with us is not something–” At Mel’s unimpressed look, she switched gears. “If I call Joey, he’s going to think I’m on, like, death’s door.”
“Mm.”
“What?”
“I mean, you could tell him you’re not?”
Trinity frowned.
“Just an idea.”
But she could tell that her idea had landed, and after about a minute, Trinity abruptly reached for her phone where it was charging on the bedside table. She found her brother’s contact in favorites—Beast Baby 🐸🦎🐢🦖🐍🐊🧃🦠💚, which was above her other brother, CHERNOBYL 🌋💣💩🫵🏼🖤‼️—who in conversation got, among other things, Cher, No-No, and Cherry Bomb, an awareness of which made Whitaker far more resignedly amenable to Huckleberry—and hovered her finger over it.
“I need an excuse,” she said.
Do you? Mel wondered. But she supposed she wouldn’t call Becca out of the blue and say, I was worried about you. She would probably just say, Hey, I missed you, wanted to hear your voice. Which would be the truth here, too, but maybe a bit emotionally vulnerable for the type of relationship Trinity and her brothers seemed to share.
Exiting out of the phone app, Trinity went into her photos and scrolled back a few days until she found the photo of the spider that had been in the corner of the bathroom. She texted it to Beast Baby. Only then did she go back and call him.
She put him on speaker. The ringing sounded loud in the dark, quiet room.
“I just remembered it’s late,” Mel said. “Will he be–?”
“He’s in college. He’s fine.”
“Yo.”
“Hey, Frogface. I just texted you a pic of a spider in my apartment. Am I in danger of imminent death?”
“Uh…” They waited as he pulled it up. “Looks like a bold jumper. You’re not gonna die, but it’s fast. That one’s pretty. You got a nice angle.”
“Watch out,” Trinity said, louder, to the air. “It’s fast.” After a pause, she dropped her voice again, and said, “Sick, I’m making Whitaker do it. What are you doing awake?”
With a bit of a groan in his voice, he said, “What do you think?”
“Studying?”
“All day, all night.”
“Nerd.” Some of the tension left Trinity’s shoulders.
“Says the mega-nerd.”
“Whatever.” But she was smiling.
“What are you doing awake?”
“Nunya.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What’s your homework on?”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why?”
“You’re asking about my homework at…twelve oh eight.”
“I’m bored. Indulge me. Besides, explain to–”
“To retain, yeah, yeah.” They heard him shuffling papers, and then he began to go over something very specific about newt ecology with an interest Mel found endearing and resonant. As he talked, Mel watched Trinity’s eyelids start to flutter. Her own body grew heavy, sinking deeper into the mattress. He was safe; Becca was safe; Trinity was safe; and in the morning, there would be pancakes.
By the time Joey said, “Cool, right? That make sense?” both of them were sound, sound asleep.