“Try me,” she warns with a smirk.
I don’t say anything. What could this girl possibly do? Zo is tiny compared to me, plus she’s a girl. I stretch my arm propping it into position and ready to wrestle when she grabs my forearm and twists the skin until it burns.
“Ow! What the fuck? Let go,” I bark.
“Admit I’m right?”
“Fine, you’re right.”
With a satisfied smile, she lets go. The little bitch left red marks on my skin, and the burn is still stinging like crazy. I rub the skin on my arm to soothe the pain.
Raising my voice at her again and irritated by the persistent sting, “Fucking hell that hurt.”
I’m still reeling in pain while she turns her attention back to her ‘Jerk’ book acting as if nothing happened. I sit on the edge of her bed in silence until she utters, “So what time does your shift start?”
“Got to leave in an hour. And listen,” I tell her. “Kristy just broke up with her boyfriend and let’s just say he makes Jess look like an angel. I’m not hooking up with her, she just needed someone.”
She puts the book down and focuses her attention back on me. Her face softens, the compassion evident in the way her eyes glaze over. “Is she all right? I mean, you know. Does she need any help?”
“To be honest? She puts on a good front, and I can’t divulge the rest.”
It was last Wednesday when I’d learned of Kristy’s relationship with her boyfriend of five years. I was grabbing some supplies off the shelf when I accidentally knocked into her side. She instantly recoiled and winced in pain. At first, she said she was fine, but I’d seen enough in the hospital to realize something was wrong. She eventually showed me the extent of her injuries, and boy did I see red. She admitted to her family that he’d been abusing her and finally put a restraining order on him. I’m glad she finally sought help, but she wasn’t the first person I had encountered who was suffering in silence. They all had their own stories to tell and their reasons for why they stuck it out so long.
This is one of the pitfalls of working in the hospital. Emotionally, I had to harden up. It’s a tough job, but one I fought so hard for. I just never expected it to be this difficult. I considered myself a good listener, yet when it comes to offering advice, I’m not a psychologist. I know only what I know and what I think is the right thing to do.
“Drew,” Zoey says softly. “I admire you for following your dream. I can’t even begin to imagine how difficult your line of work is.”
Difficult is an understatement. I could have chosen any career path, but deep inside I knew I chose this path because of what happened to my mother. My parents divorced when I was only three, and my mother died shortly after. She had suffered from a nasty virus, and because she lived in a rural town in Australia, they didn’t have the resources to medically attend to her, sending her home with a fever they thought painkillers could manage. I was only four when it happened, and because I had been back and forth between my dad’s and my mom’s, my memories of her were foggy. To me, she was just
a woman who cared for me on the weekends. It was my dad who raised me.
“You do what you have to do, Zo.”
“I know, but you could have chosen to do anything. I understand how great the reward is, but why choose a career that defines who you are as a person?” she questions seriously.
“I just want to help people,” I half admit. “As much as Dad wanted me to be a mechanic, I felt like I needed to be someone who made an impact in people’s lives. Helped them. Maybe because I felt so helpless in my own life back then, and all I wanted was to feel important. Like I mattered.”
“Whatever you choose to do, you will matter to someone,” she tells me.
“Well, growing up, I felt the opposite.”
She shifts her body closer to mine and places her hand on my arm. The warmth of her touch comforts me—it always has a way of doing that. “I get it, you only had your dad, plus you were awkward looking.”
I turn to face her, amused by her comment. “Gee, thanks for the uplifting compliment, Zo.”
“But you turned out hot. Just like Tom Cruise.”
“You’re comparing me to Tom Cruise?”
“Brad Pitt, George Clooney, you name it. They all had their I-wouldn’t-touch-them-with-a-ten-foot-pole awkward phases.”
“And I guess you never had that? You’ve just been a goddess your whole life?”
She shakes her head and jumps off the bed moving to her shelf where she pulls out an album. It’s fluorescent pink with stickers scattered all over the cover. Placing it in front of me, she opens a page. The pages look worn and fragile, the background tinged with yellow. The binder is barely holding the album together, the spiraling metal bent out of shape. There’s a photo of her with a couple of girls. She is dressed in a cheerleading outfit.
“You were a cheerleader?” I ask, eyes fixated on the photo.
She looks gorgeous. Well, she is gorgeous. The kind of girl I would have fantasized about in high school yet never gone near for fear of being laughed at and given a wedgie by the cool crowd.