“Five minutes,” Tara said. “I got you to the car and left ASAP, drove a couple miles away, and once we’d cleared the scene and I’d called in the situation, I pulled over to try to wake you up.” She paused and handed me a bottle of somethingthat looked like body splash. I smelled it and my eyes immediately began tearing.
“It’s good for bringing people back,” she said. “Don’t ask what’s in it.”
I accepted her advice.
“You going to be okay to ride the rest of the way to the emergency room?”
I stared at Tara. “Emergency room?”
“Protocol.”
“Yeah, we already covered that, but I just figured … I mean, don’t we have our own doctor? Or some kind of top-secret medical base or something?”
“Absolutely,” Tara said, arching an eyebrow at me. “It’s under a volcano and run by a mad scientist.”
I gave her a look. “We have a helipad,” I told her. “I don’t think a med center is that much more ridiculous.”
She shrugged, conceding the point. “We have somewhere we can go if things are serious. If not, we hit up the ER.”
My super spy senses told me that I wasn’t going to get any more information out of her about the top-secret place we could go for “serious” injuries, and I didn’t really feel compelled to dwell on the fact that my current injuries could have easily been more severe.
“So,” I said. “About that emergency room.”
Ten minutes later, we arrived at the Bayport Hospital ER.
The woman at the front desk asked me the nature of my injury. Tara responded before I had the chance. “We dropped her.”
The woman clucked her tongue. “You girls,” she said. “I swear, you’re in here more than the football players.”
It took every ounce of subtlety I had to refrain from gawking at Tara’s audacity. She was trying to pass off my near-concussion as the result of a cheer injury?
“Well, cheerleading is the second most dangerous sport in America,” Tara said.
The woman smiled. “Right after polo,” she said. Clearly, she’d somehow heard this spiel often enough that she’d come to believe it was true. I sincerely hoped that my health was not in any way in her hands.
“You girls sit down,” the woman said. “I’ll sneak you in just as soon as a room opens up.”
“Thanks, Nora,” Tara said. Then she hooked her arm through mine and prodded me toward the waiting room.
“Second most dangerous sport in America?” I asked under my breath, my tone incredulous. “Where do you guys get this stuff?”
“Oh,” Tara said as we sat down. “That’s actually true.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Seriously,” Tara said. “Cheerleaders sustain more debilitating injuries than almost any other kind of athlete.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it again, completely unsure how to respond to Tara’s claim.
“Really, Toby. Everyone on the Squad has gotten to know Nora really well, and it’s not because of ourextracurricularactivities. It’s because cheerleading is hard on your body. People get dropped. Ankles get twisted. Teeth get knocked out. It happens.”
“And when something ‘happens’—” I made liberal use of air quotes.
“We come here,” Tara finished for me.
“And so when something …extracurricularhappens …”
Tara nodded. “We come here.”
