Chapter 8 Summary: Sleepover

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.

Summary

The chapter opens just before dawn. Fran wakes in the woods beside Robbie, with Beth sleeping nearby, wounded. The group breaks camp and crosses a scorched quarter-mile burn zone—land the town council deliberately torched and bulldozed—then cuts north around Governor Weare Park. As they approach downtown Seabrook, they pass an unmanned checkpoint made of repurposed traffic barriers. Near the town hall, they spot a flatbed truck marked with a large XX, a stern woman in a worn police uniform, and a teenage girl in fatigues carrying a rifle. Storm-warning sirens have been bolted to the town hall and surrounding buildings, with cables strung between them. Beth, limping badly, leads them around the square.

They reach Indi's weathered Victorian house. Indi, a heavyset woman who processes estrogen for the group, immediately takes charge of Beth. In her clean, cluttered office, she removes Beth's staples, cleans and sutures the crossbow wound on her cheek, and administers penicillin. Beth, in a haze of pain and grief, breaks down and asks Indi to have sex with her—a request Indi firmly refuses, telling her to rest. Beth's internal desperation is clear: she wants sex to feel like a girl again.

That evening, over a dinner of cold pork and flatbread, Indi reports that hundreds of TERFs have arrived in town, with more in Boston, Manchester, and Nashua. Fran suggests fleeing to Oregon or Montreal, but Indi reveals she has accepted a job as in-house doctor at Sophie Widdel's bunker near Exeter, where she would isolate estrogen and provide primary care. The bunker brat is sending a van the next day, and Indi offers Fran and Beth a place there.

Later, Fran and Indi talk over beers. Indi diagnoses Robbie's behavior: he's afraid of Fran, afraid of closeness, having been isolated for so long. She advises Fran to take care of him if she wants him to stay. Fran goes outside and finds Robbie preparing to leave. She kisses him, tells him she doesn't want him to go, and they have sex in the yard.

The next morning, Beth wakes to a TERF broadcast crackling over the towers. The voice declares the New Womyn's Commonwealth, denouncing men and those who