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she’s detoxing,” Petula said casually. “I won’t have a baby with a baby bump.”

The Wendys were surprised that Petula, in her own way, cared so much about her baby, at least about how she looked anyway. It opened the door to a discussion they’d been having.

“Funny you should mention the whole baby fat thing,” Wendy Anderson added.

“We were thinking that the next big trend could be baby lipo,” Wendy Thomas continued. “We could collect the lard and then use it as a renewable biofuel for cars and buses.”

“It addresses both our foreign oil dependency and epidemic childhood obesity,” Wendy Anderson added. “It’s eco-friendly too.”

Petula was unfazed by The Wendys’ industriousness; in fact, she was barely even listening to them. She was too distracted by the sight of a homeless woman lingering over a Dumpster behind the organic supermarket. Rather than speed away, Petula slowed down and eyed the vagrant as an archer does a bull’s-eye. The Wendys readied to ridicule. If Petula was going to take the time to acknowledge her existence, both girls surmised, they’d better be prepared to mock.

“That’s horrible,” Petula said.

“It rots,” Wendy Thomas said, using all of the protein-bar derived energy she could muster to stop her gagging reflex.

“At least she’s trying to eat healthy,” Wendy Anderson giggled cruelly.

“Shut it!” Petula commanded, pulling over even closer to the depressing scene. “You two couldn’t walk an inch in her shoes.”

“What shoes?” came the clueless query from Wendy Thomas, which was met by stony silence from Petula.

The Wendys locked eyes conspiratorially. The truth was, Petula had been acting very different since she “came back” from her near-death experience, and they were growing increasingly wary of her, even before this outburst. They expected some changes, but they were thinking more along the lines of a semi-dead accent or a more svelte figure thanks to the liquid-only IV diet that coma patients were lucky enough to require, not these wild mood swings, which weren’t obvious to a layman, but to Petula-acolytes like them were huge.

Still, they mostly chalked it all up to something she picked up while she was away, odd conduct that was most likely a direct result of her pseudo-passing. Besides, Petula didn’t talk about the whole experience much. They weren’t sure if it was because she didn’t remember anything or because it was part of a “what happens in the afterlife stays in the afterlife” pact.

Alternatively, it could just be P.P.D.—pre-prom delirium. The Wendys thought that was a more acceptable “diagnosis,”and they were confident that the few weeks they spent in and out of the hospital when Petula was a patient medically qualified them to come to such a conclusion.

Petula stopped the car, spritzed some sugary body spray on the bottom of her shirt, and pulled it up over her glossed lips like a surgical mask to defend against the smell of urine. She got out and approached the woman. The Wendys were amazed. They’d kept the windows rolled up tightly to keep the heat in and the stench out, so the brief chat was impossible to overhear. But the fact that Petula was talking to this person at all was really the issue. Evidence was mounting. Her condition was worsening.

“What is she doing?” Wendy Thomas asked.

“You know, when they diagnosed my grandmother with Alzheimer’s, all her other medical stuff disappeared. The doctor said that sometimes people forget they’re sick and so things resolve,” Wendy Anderson said.

“What are you talking about?” Wendy Thomas asked, quickly losing her patience. “What do you know about anything?”

“I know lots of things… like, there is a stunningly high suicide rate tied to reality TV show contestants, oh, and, you can wallpaper an entire room with the tissue of just one lung…,” Wendy Anderson spouted off proudly. “And, I know that my grandmother had