Her hand falls away from my arm. I want to catch it and bring it back, but we’re at work and it’s not like that. She’s stuck a round Band-Aid over the scrape on her eyebrow. I like how her lips turn up at the corners. I want her to kiss me again.
Instead, she asks, “Back to triage?”
I’d wanted to swing by the fifth-floor break room, where the phlebotomists swap blood-draw horror stories, to find out what I could about the hospital’s management of blood samples. Maybe get closer to a solution that doesn’t rely on faith that Uncle Bill will turn up overnight, or that the mysterious Brian will call me back. But I can’t tell Veer any of that, so instead I tell her, “Yeah.”
“Cool.”
A nurse in Sleeping Beauty scrubs passes us, clacking hot-pink nails on her clipboard. Veer’s sneakers squeak on the tile. I wish I knew what to say to bring back whatever intimacy we had last night. But it’s gone now, maybe proof that it was never real to begin with. She’s sobered up, and this is the part where she’s nice enough to apologize for everything.
Abruptly, she stops.
“Last night was all right, yeah?” She asks it like a challenge.
“Yeah.”
“So, like. Want to do it again?”
I can’t help a laugh. “Almost start a fight and then go to a party and then I run out on you because my family’s a mess?”
Her eyebrows punch up as if to say,Oh right, that. “Okay, so not exactly the same thing. But would you, like, want to go for a drink or something? Not tomorrow, I’m going up to Reno, but maybe next week if we both have a night off?”
It’s been a while since someone’s asked me out, even longer since I’ve wanted to say yes. I want to get to know her. I want to ask her what she meant about her darkness. I want to see her in that cutoff tank top again.
“That sounds nice,” I say, and the eager flash in her eyes is like a knife in my back, “but I can’t. You know, the family stuff.”
She wouldn’t get it. She didn’t even ask if my mom’s okay.
I brace for an accusation, the kind my mom deploys when I’m too wrapped up in myself to play along. Veer only backs away, shrugs, doesn’t quite meet my eyes.
“No problem,” she says. “It’s cool. Uh, you have my number.”
My pocket vibrates. I whip out my phone, ready for my mom’s face to blare accusingly from the screen, but it’s blank. The call’s coming from my other pocket. The one with Uncle Bill’s burner phone in it.
The break room door whines shut. Veer’s gone. I pull the silver Nokia free and it buzzes across my palm, green-and-black screen blinking furiously.
Incoming Call: Brian.
I hit the green button and for a second, it’s just dead air and I’m cold with panic. Then—
“Hello?” His voice is gruff and wary, fuzzy around the edges from the ancient phone and bad reception.
“Hi,” I answer, breathless. “Is this Brian?”
“Who’s this?”
Of course. He was expecting Uncle Bill. “My name’s Ellis. I’m Bill Karsten’s niece. I—”
“How’d you get this phone?”
My feet are taking me somewhere quiet. Not the break room, a bathroom maybe, or an empty patient room. I can’t have this conversation out in the open, but I also can’t ask him to call back later and risk never hearing from him again.
“I found it.” I push past more nurses with more clipboards, past patients pacing the halls. “Have you seen him lately? He hasn’t been home and I haven’t heard from him in a couple days, and I found this old phone with your number for emergencies and I just need—”
I bite it off at the last second. I don’t know if he’s one of us.
“Bill’s niece.” He chews on each word. “His sister’s kid?”
“Yeah.” I swing into a patient room and shut the door behind me. Wind shrieks in the background of the call, filling in the space where Brian’s quiet.
