"And there's lights. The pharmacy has lights, and the laundromat has lights, and there's the streetlight. You can see the door. You can see the whole way."
Her mother put her elbows on the table and her face in her hands. When she took her face out again it was pale and there was a shine of sweat along her hairline that Ruthie did not like.
"They might not give it to you," her mother said. "You're ten. Some pharmacies won't hand anything to a kid."
"Is it the kind that's locked up?"
"No. It's insulin. It's not a controlled — it's not the locked-up kind." Her mother almost smiled. "You know too much."
"So they can give it to me."
"They're allowed to. It's up to them. Mr. Stimson would. Mr. Stimson's known me since I was twelve. But Mr. Stimson's in Myrtle Beach till the twentieth, there's a fill-in pharmacist, I don't know her." Her mother rubbed her eyes. "She might not."
"Then we have to make her," Ruthie said.
Her mother looked at her, and for the first time all evening there was something in her face besides tired.
"Make her how?"
Ruthie had already been thinking about it. She had been thinking about it since five-fifteen, when she heard her mother say Stimson Drug on Front Street, the one across from my apartment. She had been thinking about it the way she thought about things for Teddy: what could go wrong, and what you needed in your hand before it did.
"A note," she said. "From you. With your signature, like on a field trip form, so they can match it to your license."