Page 46 of Total Lunar Eclipse
I might strangle the bastard.
I can hear Uranus laughing in my head over his antics.
“Hope you’re enjoying fucking Maitland talk out of his ass!”I snark to my twin.
“Not as much as you’re enjoying Zahra talk out of hers!”He rejoins.
I really don’t have a rebuttal to that and turn my attention back to the train wreck unfolding before me.
i.e. Zahra talking.
“So I did some research and learned that in the olden days, women would make tampons out of cotton. Smart, right? Unfortunately, I didn’t have access to freshly-grown cotton. I’m from Minnesota, remember? So I substituted. . .”
Zahra trailing off is never a good thing.
“I’m sure you came up with a clever replacement,” Merc praises.
“Yeah, I used cotton balls. I mean, it has the word right in it.”
“Brilliant.”
I can’t tell who is crazier between the two of them.
“Then what?” I ask, despite myself.
“Well, I still needed to make the product ‘natural’, ya know? I decided to bind the cotton balls together with vines and shit.”
“Even more brilliant!” Mercury cheers.
Zahra is eating up his words, but I’m still wondering what the devil is up to.
“Thanks,” she acknowledges to Merc. “One of the popular girls was going through an ‘all organic’ phase and once she bought one, the rest sold like hotcakes. Since it was a novelty item, I charge $5 bucks a tampon. Rather pricey when you consider you can buy a box of commercial ones for the same price. I had twenty and made $100 and really was only out the $2 bag of cotton balls I bought and some time to harvest the vines and make the things.”
“I’m going to guess by your desperate need for a job that the idea didn’t take off?” I ask dryly.
She turns her face from me, but I catch a side view of her lips moving, as she mutters under her breath about what a dick I am.
“So what did happen?” Merc asks when Zahra doesn’t continue.
She heaves a sigh.
“A frickin’ disaster that nearly got me suspended,” she responds with a matching dramatic arm shrug.
Of course, to be fair, I highly doubt she’s embellishing. This story had frickin’ disaster written all over the moment she first mentioned it.
“So a handful of girls who were menstruating at the time decided to give ‘em a go. . . and a few teachers as well.”
I bow my head and groan; even Merc looks uncertain now.
“Well, it turns out that the, ah, “vines” I used were actually poison ivy.”
“No!” Mercury breathes in horror.
“Yeah. And it also turns out that the “vine strings” I made were not nearly as sturdy as I had originally thought. . . so when the girls starting itching and tried yanking my homemade tampons out, the vine snapped.”
I shudder at the picture she’s painting.
“So then, everyone had todigthem out. The girl’s bathroom looked like a massacre happened. I mean, it sounded like women were getting slaughtered as they screamed- from the itching and burning. And of course, they were bleeding, so their hands were bloody messes trying to dislodge my, ah, creations.”
