"You and Elizabeth, you idiot," he chortled.
"What about Elizabeth and me?"
"You can't be serious." He laid back on the grass with a deep sigh. "I can't believe I know before you do."
Had Elizabeth said something about me? Or was she transferring schools to get away from me? I doubted that Elizabeth would make such a rash decision like that, but panic was cancelling out logic.
"Know what?" I asked again, smacking at his side.
"Oh, I don't know..." he said, rolling his head back and forth on the grass like he was debating some wild, innovative idea. His eyes were still focused on the sky, but flickered to me as his voice drifted off. "Maybe that you're totally in love with her...?"
I snapped at Tanner."What?"
He looked back at me but, kept quiet.
"No, I'm not." The idea of being in love with Elizabeth was ridiculous.
We'd grown closer while hanging out, sure, but we were just getting to know each other again. Mostly because our friends were dating.
"Elizabeth is great, but we're just friends."
Tanner nodded, but his expression told me that he didn't believe me. "Sure."
"We are!" I insisted, scratching at the back of my head. I thought about Elizabeth, with her dark hair falling over her shoulders as she read from a thick book. Every so often, she'd run her pointer finger under her nose to scratch an invisible itch. Her nose twitched like a bunny, making her glasses slip, and she promptly righted them. In my mind, she looked up from her book, saw me and smiled. It was a nice little fantasy.
Wait…
"Oh," I said finally, getting it.
"Yeah," Tanner chuckled.
12
Elizabeth
"...Andthis allows the attending physician a fuller range of motion as they ease the skin flap back into place. This greater sense of control over the skin flap also sets the physician up for a smoother connection between the original tissue and the…”
The guest lecturer continued to give his presentation on the basics of plastic surgery, but as I looked around, I realized that most of the students in the auditorium had already stopped paying attention.
I struggled as well. It had been a couple days since the drunken brawl, and Nathan had given me plenty of space to think about everything. But now, I was growing impatient. I needed to see him again, to know that we were okay.
My classmates continued to feign interest in the lecture, mostly out of politeness, but their eyes were glazed over. Guiltily, I tried to catch some of the final points, but ended up only writing down a few words that barely made sense.
He liked to lecture with big hand gestures. He'd point to the screen, and when he spoke about the main idea of a concept, he would bring his hands to the front of his chest in a circle. He would enunciate certain words as he spoke, gently bouncing as he did, so I would know to write them down and underline them. He had a slight Southern drawl that would drag out each of the longerAs in some words. It was kind of charming, but didn’t make the lecture go any faster.
"This is precisely why we would use a suspension suture here, excellent point." The next slide showed a detailed, step-by-step visualization of the suspension sutures being used to adhere the skin flap to the existing tissue of the burn victim. I watched with wide eyes as the program presented the surgical field in a new perspective, the new angle clearly showed the fine lines between the tissue planes.
Nowthiswas interesting.
"And, prepare yourselves. These are some photographs from these types of procedures. Some of these pictures are a little graphic.”
There was a collective gasp among some of the students as the lecturer flipped through the photographs of patients who had undergone this type of facial reconstruction procedure.
"Each of these physicians used this method to attach the skin flap along the hairline."
The picture changed to a dark-haired woman with a swollen face. She had a dark-purple shade along her hairline and underneath her chin as well as a few dark spots along her temples. The next picture showed her three weeks post-operation and she looked as if she'd never gone under the knife. "And, as you can see, it provides very clean lines and a smoother finish for the patient.”
He was right. It was incredible.
