“Thank you, boys,” she says with a nod that doesn’t detract from the wary, all-too-knowing look in her eye as she looks over my companions. “You may leave.”
They glance at each other, then at me. Beck shrugs and turns on his heel to walk out. Heath, however, stays a moment.
“So … is he gonna be all right?”
“He will be if you let me work on him,” she snaps, her patience finally reaching its limit.
Heath nods and hurries out of the infirmary. I feel my eyelids blinking slowly. Moments seem to be skipping. One minute, I’m just laying my head down on the pillow and letting out a breath as my eyes alight on the exposed beams overhead. The next, the nurse is reaching down toward the hem of my uniform shirt—and I realize my mistake.
“No,” I say, sluggishly moving my arm to keep my shirt firmly in place. It feels like my arm weighs a thousand tons.
“I have to look at your injuries,” she says curtly.
I eye her a little more carefully, or at least as carefully as my swimming vision will allow.
She’s young to be in charge of an entire school’s medical facilities. She barely has any wrinkles at all, just some crow’s feet framing her dark eyes.
“Don’t be so self-conscious.”
“No,” I protest again, but she’s easily able to move my hands away. I guess to her, they’re just arms, not great big heavy elephant’s trunks.
“There’s nothing I haven’t seen.” She pulls my shirt up and cold air hits my chest, and she pauses. “Well.”
I’m keenly aware of how constricting the two sports bras I’m wearing are. They dig into my sides, making it difficult to breathe. They stab into me, aching.
Or maybe that’s a dislocated rib.
Either way, it doesn’t matter. I’m finished.
I’m found out.
The nurse goes quiet, but she doesn’t stop undressing me. The only thing that changes is that, unless I imagine it in my delirious state, she goes to the door and turns the key so it clicks locked.
I don’t protest when she comes back to my side with a pair of scissors and starts cutting away the double-layered bras. In return, she doesn’t comment at my exposed female form. It’s easier, somehow, the rest of the undressing. Now that she knows I’ve got breasts, there’s no look of shock on her face when she discovers I have no dick either.
I sneak a peek at her face, but her expression is blank. That is, until she presses two fingers to a blossoming bruise on my side and I nearly pass out from the excruciating pain.
Only then does she purse her lips, her gaze briefly flickering over my body with a mixture of pity and—unless I’m mistaken—disapproval. But that is it. She gets to work.
I don’t know when I fall asleep. All I know is that when I wake, the sunlight coming through the tiny window next to my bed definitely isn’t the sort of pale white you see in the morning. From the looks of it, it must be somewhere around noon.
My limbs feel stiff. There’s a bandage around my head and some sort of pressure on my chest.
I try to sit up, but my ribs hurt so bad that I hiss in pain. Best to stay immobile, then.
A flood of broken memories wash over me all at once. The party. The stairs. Blinding pain, the long hike through the forest, and then the look on the nurse’s face when …
A jolt runs through me. I’m so done.
The curtain around my bed rips back and I flinch, which hurts more than my revelation that all this has been for nothing.
The nurse from last night stands over me with an inscrutable expression. She gets straight to the point.
“Alex,” she says. “Very unisex name.”
I don’t reply. She leans forward and gently prods my ribs, a gesture that makes me cry out in pain. She sighs as she straightens.
“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” she asks. There’s no questioning what she means by that.