“Stitches?” Mebel gasps. “But I’m wearing Cartier,” she says weakly.
Instead of being understanding, Chef Clarke gives her a stern look and says, “You really should have taken all those rings off. We went over this in the food sanitation lecture. Right, come on. And put pressure on that cut.”
And, in a daze, her right hand clamped around her left, Mebel totters after him. Everyone watches her leave. Mebel has always believed in the power of a good exit, which requires (a) everyone’s attention, and (b) memorable parting words. And so as she steps out of the kitchen, she pauses, turns around, and says, “Maybe don’t put my potatoes in the mashed potato bowl. There is blood on them.” With that, she turns and leaves the school.
Chapter 8
Chef Clarke takes Mebel tothe Temple Cowley Health Centre, where she is ushered to the Minor Injuries Unit and asked to sit down and wait for the next available doctor on duty. Mebel does so. Chef Clarke walks up and down the hallway, talking on his phone. She is sure he’s talking about her, probably trying to get her kicked out of the school for disrupting his class. She can’t blame him. Fifteen minutes pass by. People come and go. A boy with a badly scalded arm is seen to. A woman with an alarmingly huge, swollen insect bite is seen to. Nurses bustle past, barely sparing her a glance. Another fifteen minutes crawl by. Mebel’s finger throbs with irritating persistence. She can’t even use her phone because she’s too scared to unwrap her right hand from her left in case blood starts gushing out and she dies of a hemorrhage here.
After what seems like an hour, Mebel is finally seen to, but her relief is short-lived as the attending doctor tries to unwrapthe towel. The blood has dried around her finger and the towel is now stuck to it, and when the doctor gives the barest hint of a tug, the pain is so sharp and so alarming that Mebel gives a most unladylike squawk. She snatches her hand back.
“I think maybe we leave towel there?” she pleads.
“I’m sorry, Mebel, but we do need to take it off so I can see if you need stitches or not. And we really should sanitize the wound.”
There’s that cursed word again: “sanitize.” Mebel is so sick of it. Prior to today, she has never had to so much as think about sanitation, and now all of a sudden, she can’t seem to escape the concept of it.
“I’m going to lubricate the towel with some warm saline solution,” the doctor says, gently pulling Mebel’s hand back. She places a kidney-shaped bowl under Mebel’s hand and takes out a bottle of saline solution.
Mebel holds her breath, her toes curling in anticipation of the pain as the doctor begins pouring the solution over the towel. It stings, but it isn’t as bad as she’d feared, and soon enough, the towel is thankfully off. The doctor continues to squirt saline solution all over Mebel’s finger, turning her hand this way and that and studying the wound. As the dried blood is washed away, the wound starts oozing once more.
Dear god, Mebel prays, please do not let me need stitches. My hands were built for Chopard watches and Cartier rings, not for knife scars.
“I think we can get away with gluing the wound shut,” the doctor says.
“Oh, thank god.”
“It will scar though,” the doctor says.
Mebel’s shoulders sag. So much for maintaining beautiful, pristine hands. She watches glumly as the doctor—ugh—sanitizes the wound and then applies a layer of medical glue over it. Once the glue dries, the doctor covers up the wound with some gauze, tells Mebel not to get it wet, and finally, finally she is released. She comes out of the room to find Chef Clarke still talking on the phone. He spots her and ends the call, then hurries over to her.
“All right then?” he says.
She holds up her bandaged finger.
“Stitches?”
Mebel shakes her head. “They use glue. Very high tech.”
“Oh, good! That’s really good news. Right, it’s way past dinner time—”
Mebel brightens up. The mention of dinner serves as a reminder of how hungry she is. She didn’t have much to eat for lunch, and she is now starving. She could really use a good meal and good company. Though perhaps expecting good company from Chef Clarke is asking for too much, but at least he’d be somewhat better to talk to than an empty chair.
But then he says, “I have to run. My family is waiting for me.” He gives a quick pat on Mebel’s shoulder and says, “I’m glad you’re okay, Mebel. I’ll see you in class tomorrow.”
With that, he turns and walks away, his steps just shy of breaking into a jog, as though he can’t bear another second in this medical center with her. To be fair, he probably can’t. He’s already gone above and beyond his duty to accompany her here, and Mebel should be grateful that he took the time and effort to do that. But right now, watching Chef Clarke leave, Mebel feels the acute pain of loneliness stabbing into her heart. It’sworse than the pain of slicing into her own finger. Well, actually, it’s less bad than the pain of trying to take the towel off the wound, so there’s that, at least.
Mebel makes her way out of the building and looks around her. She has no idea where she is. She sighs. Chef Clarke could’ve at least dropped her off at the school building on his way home, she thinks petulantly. But, no, she mustn’t think that way. She’s trained herself over the years to never expect more than what others can give her. With a deep breath, Mebel slips her phone out of her handbag and orders an Uber back to the school. The driver doesn’t bother with much chitchat, which is just as well. Mebel can’t remember the last time she has felt so forlorn, so spent. Oh, right, that would be the day before, when she found out that she was in the wrong school and had to leave Paris for Cowley.
By the time Mebel arrives back at the school, she is so dejected and glum that she half wonders if she should skip dinner altogether and just go to bed. But her stomach gives a loud growl at this. Just as she pulls open the front door, it swings open, very nearly hitting her in the face. Five people spill out, laughing and chattering, and she recognizes them as students from her class. One of them, a boy she believes is named Adam, spots her and says, “All right, Mebel? How’s your finger?”
“Oh!” Mebel says, caught off guard by the fact that he’s talking to her. “It’s okay. They glue it shut.” She holds up her bandaged finger.
“All right, good to know you didn’t need stitches,” Adam says. “Have a good ’un.” He turns his attention back to the others, as though Mebel has immediately ceased to exist. She watches as the group walks down the street, talking good-naturedly. She hears snatches of conversation, enough to know that they’re headed into town for dinner.
Silence descends as their voices fade into the night air, and a cold weight settles over Mebel. It’s nearly impossible for her to keep her head high, and she walks into the school building drooping like a wilted flower. The dining hall is only a third full of students, and everyone is sitting with someone and caught up in what seems to her like very interesting, very animated conversations. Mebel takes one look at the scene and walks back out into the hallway. She’s lost her appetite for dinner. What she needs right now is a hot shower, preferably hot enough to scald every memory of this cursed day away.
But it seems that the day isn’t done with torturing her yet. In the shower, Mebel learns that keeping her injury dry is a lot tougher than it seems. For one thing, she can’t use both hands to lather her shampoo. For another, water keeps spraying onto her left hand. In the end, Mebel has to shower while holding her whole arm straight up as though she is saluting some demented army general. Back inside her room, Mebel finally finds some comfort. Dressed in her cozy pajamas and fuzzy socks, she flops onto the bed. And only then does she acknowledge her utter exhaustion. She can’t remember the last time her body has hurt so much. Every part of her aches. Her feet are begging for a foot rub, her calves feel like they’ve run a marathon, her back is stiff, and every movement makes it twinge, and her neck refuses to bend at all. And her hands! Her poor, stiff hands! God, she is miserable. She is not cut out to be a cook. What had she been thinking, leaving her life of luxury behind and coming all the way to this awful place?
