“Did you tell the dean?” I ask.
“No.”
“Is the
re anyone else in here?”
“No. Just us,” she says. She sits in the chair next to my bed and crosses her legs. She’s wearing scrubs now. They make her look older, somehow.
I sigh. “I’m pretending to be a boy so I could come to this school.”
“That’s not what I’m asking,” she replies, waving her hand. “I want to know if you really fell down those stairs.”
Now that surprises me.
“What?” I ask.
“Did you fall down stairs, or did you get beaten up?”
I’m taken aback. So far, no one’s even acknowledged the abuse. I mean, at least not where The Brotherhood is concerned. I know I’ve only been here a couple weeks, but every one of my professors has witnessed some form of bullying … and so far no one’s even batted an eyelid.
Crazy how quickly that sort of thing, that sort of expectation, just becomes normal.
I flounder for words for a moment, trying to think of how I’m supposed to respond.
“Even if I didn’t just fall … if I told the dean those three were involved … would it really make a difference?” The look on the nurse’s face tells me what I needed to know.
Still, I frown up at her, confused about something else entirely. “So, you really don’t care that I’m a girl?”
She shrugs. “It’s not my business. Plus, it wasn’t even clear if you were a girl.”
I frown. “But I have—you saw—”
“You could be trans, for all I know,” she interrupts, though I know from her expression that she knows that isn’t the case. That fact only serves to make what she says next even more surprising. “Your genitalia isn’t my business unless there’s something wrong down there.” She sighs and folds her hands in her lap.
As I struggle to find the words to reply again, she surprises me even further.
“I wanted to be a doctor, you know.”
I just shake my head, trying to clear it. This must be some kind of fevered dream. A wasted hope. Any minute now I’m going to wake up and the dean is going to be standing over me, ready to tell me I’m expelled.
But for now, I might as well play along.
“A doctor?” I say, trying to sit up and wincing again. The nurse offers me a gentle but sturdy hand up. She doesn’t stop when she sees my face grimace.
“You’ve got to be tough to survive in a place like this,” she says. “But it’ll be worth it.”
More evidence that this is just a dream. That doesn’t stop me from looking at her out of the corner of my eye.
“What do you mean?”
I blink at her, confused. She brushes some dirt off her pants leg.
“Men still get a lot more opportunities than women. This is an elite school. Bleakwood is the kind of place that opens doors nowhere else will.”
I want to turn to look at her better, but another stab of pain at my side makes this whole fever dream a little less convincing.
“I should have gone to Grandview.”