said, resisting as the doctor’s thumbs worked their way up the back of his neck and scalp. “I’m fine.”
“Please, refrain from language.” The doctor was wearing the same black suit that most instructors wore every day. “By your own account, you’ve likely experienced a contusion of some sort, and may very well be concussed. If there is internal bleeding here, we will need to stop it right away.”
“It was a bump on the head. That’s it.”
“Always in such a rush, all of you students.”
Aiden pictured Emma, seated alone on the stands of the school’s outdoor basketball court, waiting for him in her oversized yellow raincoat. Tonight, she’d promised.
“I have homework,” he told the doctor.
“Sure, sure, sure.” Like several members of the administration, Dr. Simon had traces of a French accent buried under American pronunciations. “And for Mr. Napoléon, it was just a little stomach ulcer. And for Mr. Caesar, it was just a little flesh wound, nothing more. What’s that behind you in the theater, Mr. Lincoln? Just a little bump on the head?”
“What are you even talking about? Lincoln was shot—fuck!”
The doctor’s thumbs reached a pressure point on the top of his head. Aiden could feel the pain in his toes.
“Profanity,” he barked, and lifted a finger to Aiden’s face. “Look. Blood. From the top of your head.”
“One time I bled from my eyeball in a basketball game.”
“Your blood is surprisingly thin.” Behind him, it looked like Dr. Simon might have raised his glove to his mouth and smelled it. “Your file doesn’t list any condition—”
“Can you just put a Band-Aid on it or something?”
“Yes.” The doctor resumed his position over Aiden’s scalp. “But we will need to shave your hair—”
“No!”
“Stitches it is, then.”
For twenty minutes, the doctor worked, prodding and pulling at the top of his scalp. Aiden could feel the pressure at the edges of the wound as Dr. Simon cleaned it, but he hid the pain, smiling and reminding the doctor he was fine to leave.
The knot in his chest was getting tighter every minute. A maintenance sweep was about to start, probably because of the chapel, and the school would enter lockdown mode. If the staff was moving dorm to dorm, checking on every student, Emma wouldn’t wait long for him.
But it wasn’t just about tonight. There was more to the knot than that. He had felt it when they talked before mass, too, painfully tight. She was so distracted. She barely looked him in the eye, even when he told her point-blank he didn’t feel like she cared about him anymore. She’d been like this for two weeks now, avoiding him, shorting their time together, falling asleep early on nights he was supposed to come over. Tonight, he could feel himself racing to cut her off in the middle of sentences, afraid that if she reached the end, she would get all the way to breaking up with him.
“We’ll have to sit about an hour as the stitching settles,” the doctor announced.
“I’m not sitting for an hour.” Aiden stood, pulling his head out of Dr. Simon’s reach.
“Sit down! I’m not finished—it’s still bleeding!”
He looked in the mirror. A section of his hair had been pulled away for the wound, and the small scissors were hanging from a string. He took them himself and cut the string at its source. “There.” He handed them back to Dr. Simon. “Can I go?”
“At least let me wrap it,” the doctor said, exasperated. Aiden nodded, and he went to work, pulling a thick, tan cloth around Aiden’s head and knotting it at the top. As soon as the doctor removed his hands, Aiden was headed out the door.
“Mr. Mallet,” the doctor called. “You’ll need medication.”
Quickly, Aiden returned to the room and watched as the doctor opened a cabinet that covered the full width of the wall. Inside, hundreds of tiny, colorful drawers were labeled with words he didn’t recognize—hydrocodone, oxycodone, amoxicillin. As Dr. Simon bounced between them, Aiden noticed a file sitting next to his own on the counter.
“Can I ask something?”
“If you must.”
Aiden gestured to the folder. “What happened to Eddy?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Eddy.”
“Ah, that’s right. Hit his head. Same as you. He will be fine.”
“No, I mean . . . why did he do . . . that?”
“I’m sorry?”
Aiden balanced himself. “He started screaming in church—”
Dr. Simon’s hand landed on the table, covering the file. “There is something wrong with his central nervous system,” he said. “Stress-induced. We will figure it out, and we will fix it.”
Aiden watched