The Pink Scrub

The phone buzzing on the nightstand woke me out of a dream I was already losing. It was 12:04 in the morning, which is a time nobody should be receiving texts, and the screen said Justine. Three years of living next door to her had taught me that a text from Justine at a normal hour was bad and a text at midnight was worse.

The message said, "Debt time. Kingsbury. Now."

I stared at it for a good minute, hoping it would change into something else. It didn't. I typed back, "It's midnight. What debt?" and she replied with a single photo, which was the passenger door of her Civic and the long white scratch down it that my recycling bin had put there two weeks ago when the wind grabbed it. I had offered to pay for it. She had said no, she wanted a favor, and she'd call it in when she felt like it. Apparently she felt like it on a Tuesday at midnight.

I'm Marty, by the way. I'm forty-four, I teach medieval literature at the community college, and my life is quiet enough that a scratch on a neighbor's car counts as my biggest ongoing crisis. Never married, never even came close. The last serious relationship ended when I was thirty-two and she took a job in another state and I did the whole "long distance will work" thing that never works. Since then it's been me, a house with too many books, and a garbage can with a grudge against wind.

Kingsbury Animal Hospital sits in the strip mall on Fenton Road, between a nail place and a liquor store, and it's open twenty-four hours because pets don't respect business hours. I drove over in jeans and a hoodie with the hood up, half convinced this was some kind of prank and I'd show up and she'd laugh and tell me to go home. The parking lot was empty except for her Civic and a van that said KINGSBURY EMERGENCY VET on the side, which bothered me the whole drive over, the missing Y. Somebody painted that van wrong and nobody ever fixed it. That's the kind of thing I notice. It's a curse.

The reception area was lit by the glow of the computer screen behind the desk and one flickering fluorescent tube down the hall. Justine was sitting at the desk with her boots up on the counter, drinking coffee out of a mug that said LIVE LAUGH SPADE. She's thirty-nine, a veterinary surgeon, built like somebody who lifts large dogs for a living, and she had the smuggest expression I have ever seen on a human face.

"Well, look who showed up!" she said. "And here I thought you'd take the coward's way out and just pay me eight hundred dollars."

"You told me no when I offered money," I said. "Two weeks ago. In your driveway. I offered actual cash."

"And I said I wanted a favor, and now I want to cash it in. Congratulations, Marty, you're my volunteer for the night shift. My receptionist called out sick and I've got charts piling up and paperwork due Friday and I cannot do it all solo and stay sane." She hopped off the counter and went to a cabinet. "I even got you a uniform!"

She tossed a folded pile at me and I caught it against my chest, because my hands were full of nothing else. It was scrubs. It was pink scrubs. Not even a dignified hospital pink, but a bright, bubblegum, positively aggressive pink, and there was a lot less fabric in the pile than I felt comfortable with.

"There's been a mistake," I said. "These look like they're missing a size."

"Nope, that's your size, I checked your coat pocket when you left your jacket at the neighborhood meeting in June. The clinic has a no-civvies policy for volunteers, it's on the door, it's very official. Staff and volunteers wear clinic scrubs. Those are the clinic scrubs. The good news is we were out of men's cuts, so you get the women's, which honestly looks like it'll fit you better anyway since you're built like a coat rack."

"Justine."

"Marty." She took a long sip of coffee. "You owe me a scratch on my car and three years of your garbage cans blocking my driveway every single trash day. I have photos. I have timestamps. I have a binder, Marty, I'm not joking about the binder."

I believed her about the binder. I had once seen her label a drawer of syringes with a label maker at a level of precision that frightened me. She was also, I want to note, completely sober and completely clear about what she was asking, which was me, wearing pink, filing her paperwork until six in the morning. It was humiliating and it was also, technically, fair. The recycling bin thing was on me. I hadn't weighted the lid. A man my age should know better.

"Where do I change?" I asked, and she beamed like I'd handed her a present.

"Staff bathroom, down the hall, second door. Leave your hoodie out here, I'll guard it with my life."

The bathroom smelled like bleach and something faintly like wet dog, which I suppose is just vet clinic air. I changed out of my hoodie and jeans and into the scrubs, and that's when I got the full education on what a women's cut meant. The top had a V-neck that went down about four inches further than any shirt I have owned in my life, and the fabric sat tight across my shoulders in a way that made every breath feel like a public statement. The pants were not pants. They were a skirt, a short little scrub skirt with a tiny slit in the side, and it barely reached my knees, and when I bent over to pick up my jeans there was a draft involved that I chose not to think about.

I looked in the mirror. A forty-four-year-old man with a gray-flecked beard stared back at me in bubblegum pink, the V-neck exposing a scandalous amount of upper chest for a person whose chest had never once been scandalous. The worst part was that it actually fit. She had gotten my size right. Somewhere in that clinic was a binder with my measurements in it, I just knew it.

I stood there a while, working up the nerve, and then I heard her voice through the door. "You alive in there? Do you need help with the zipper? There's no zipper. It's a top. It just goes on."

"I'm coming out," I called back. "I want you to know I'm doing this under protest and I will remember it."

"Noted and filed," she said, and I could hear the grin in it.

I walked out. The fluorescent tube flickered overhead like it was applauding. Justine looked me up and down, put her hand over her heart, and said, "Gorgeous. Ten out of ten. The patients are gonna love you."

"Nobody else is here," I pointed out. "It's after midnight. There are no patients to love me."

"The phone can ring at any time. And there's always a chance of a walk-in emergency, so stand up straight." She pointed at the desk chair, then pointed at the floor beside it. "Actually, no, stand. Volunteers stand. House rule. I just made it."

I stood. The skirt swayed. She pretended to arrange papers on the desk so she'd have an excuse to make me walk to the filing cabinet, then walk back, then walk to the cabinet again for a chart she absolutely did not need, and each time she found a reason. Bring me the blue folder. Bring me the tan folder. Is there a tan folder? Check. Every trip was another lap in the skirt and she sipped her coffee and watched like it was the best show on cable.

"You're enjoying this way too much," I said on my fourth lap.

"Correct. It's called being even, Marty. Three years of driveway rage, redeemed in one night of watching you do laps in a skirt. Honestly it's the best trade I've ever made and I once traded a horse trailer for a jet ski."

"You have a jet ski?"

"I have a jet ski. Focus on the folders."

So I focused on the folders. The desk phone had a sticky note on it with her instructions: answer with "Kingsbury Animal Hospital, this is..." and then my name, which she had left blank with a smiley face, meaning she wanted me to say my own name in this outfit, out loud, to strangers. Behind me she kept making small, satisfied noises, and every time the fluorescent flickered the pink on my chest seemed to glow brighter, and somewhere out in the dark strip mall parking lot my hoodie sat folded on the reception counter like a witness to my crimes.

It was going to be a long six hours, and I had a bad feeling this was only the first night of it.

She kept me standing until almost one, and then she finally relented and pointed at the desk chair. "Okay, sit. Time for the computer part. This is where you earn your forgiveness."

"I thought the skirt was earning my forgiveness."

"The skirt is the down payment. The computer is the interest." She dragged the chair out and held it with one hand while I sat, which was a whole procedure in a short skirt on a plastic chair, and I did the thing where you sit down and immediately tug the hem toward your knees. She watched me do it and made no