First World Problems

Chapter 5

At least there, I’d had Britt to hold my hair back. Even though I hated the ditzy bitch, she did help me out. Sometimes.

“Bathroom,” I managed to squeak out before I launched myself off the bench, leaving it to rattle on uneven legs in the dining room.

“To your right,” Arielle said, leaning away from me. I ran to the same room Callum had just left, feeling relief when the glimpse of a simple sink told me I was in the right place. The toilet wasn’t freestanding, it was more like a long wood bench with a hole for the seat situated in the middle. It didn’t matter whether it was a wooden or a porcelain god—all I cared about was having a chance to purge the green scaly beast-meat from my body. I fell to my knees, an unfortunate reminder of the suitcase-cramming activities of that morning, and retched the entire contents of my stomach into the toilet.

They landed with a sick-sounding splat much farther down than anything would land in a typical toilet.

A delicate touch smoothed up and down my back. “Shit,” Lena’s voice squeaked. “Are you okay?”

I gasped, trying to recover and speak in a normal voice, even though the acid in my mouth invaded every corner and made me want to vomit again. “I’ll be fine.” I sat upright and tried to ignore my aching, spinning head. “I am fine. I’ll be fine. I’ll just, uh… Do you have something to clean up?

“Yeah,” Lena said, reaching back into a box beneath the sink and handing me a few squares of nearly see-through toilet paper.

The exhaustion of travel and throwing up in all one day translated into an uncontrollable shaking in my thighs and upper arms. “Would you mind flushing for me?” I managed as I wiped around my mouth, wondering how much I’d messed up my makeup, how much got stuck in my hair. When and where I could take a shower.

“Oh! Oh,” Lena said, looking at me with sad eyes. “I…I can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?”

She flinched as a touch of nastiness infected my tone. “It’s a latrine. There’s no indoor plumbing here. This is actually a pretty nice one. Can you hear the fan? It helps cut down the smell. Callum rigged it a few months ago—it made such a difference.” She sounded like she was ready to award him the fucking Nobel hygiene prize. “You just sprinkle some of that sand into it when you’re done.” She gestured to an industrial five-gallon bucket with a coconut-shell scoop in the corner. “Or, I mean, I’ll do it for you. Since you’re sick.”

“Wait. Just…wait a minute. You’re telling me I just stuck my face into a cesspool of shit?” I was practically snarling now.

“Well…it is about six feet down. So not really.”

My stomach bunched and twisted again. It was the last thing I ever wanted to do, but it had to be done. I stuck my face in the most disgusting of all disgusting holes and threw up again.

This time, Lena caught my hair. It was long enough not to have fallen in the path of puke the first time, but by now the shortest of my long layers had escaped from behind my shoulder and hung far too close to my mouth. There wasn’t much left in my stomach this time—I’d puked out all the iguana on the first round. After a few horrible retching seconds where I swore my stomach muscles were trying to turn themselves inside out, Lena rubbed my back again, stronger this time. I heard her murmur “thanks” to Arielle.

Something sloshed behind me, and the sound almost made me vomit again. But I swallowed hard and managed to turn around on the fractured laminate floor with my back to the latrine. This was the kind of thing crack-snorting partying teen socialite whores were supposed to be doing, sitting on strange floors and puking into gross toilets. I was a socialite and I partied, but I never—well, almost never—drank more than I could handle, and I’d never, ever done drugs. Certainly nothing that made me too sick to function.