Something of a Kind - By Miranda Wheeler Page 0,68
shoot in every direction, dense and pounding in the center. The sight was nauseating, triggering a painful shutter. Noah stuttered, “I-I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Aly whispered, eyes wide. Though she sounded horrified, her voice held no accusation. “I guess,” he paused, queasy and baffled, “I don’t think I noticed.”
Miraculously, she managed to wedge more concern into her expression. “Noah, your shoulder looks completely dislocated. You don’t just not noticesomething like that.”
“I’ll be fine,” he sighed, aware his perplexed inflection was unconvincing.
She offered an incredulous stare. “You need to see a doctor.”
He hesitated, evaluating the discomfort before nodding. Noah watched as she stood, careful not to bump him. Aly stared at her hands, as if seeing the camera for the first time, and muttered something about a dying battery. Shoving it into the bag at her side, she retrieved her phone, holding it into the air for a signal. Reluctant, she ran down the steps, looking back and forth for persons unknown. Having recovered nothing, she disappeared around the sides, possibly looking for a way into the building.
When she resurfaced, Noah said, “I think we’re only a little ways down the road from my truck. We don’t have a hospital or anything, but there’s a clinic in town. They can reset it, I guess. The only thing I can think of is that wewere so freaked…”
With a loose arm around his waist, Aly helped him to the curb. From there, she grabbed his keys and disappeared down the road. He waited, eyes closed, until she drove his truck up.
“Yeah,” Aly agreed, “It must have been shock or something.”
~
Noah had offered various directions to the clinic. It wasn’t until they reached one of the few four-ways in Ashland that he decided to brave the main road, directly through town. Neither spoke under the pressure of tension, but her silence never felt aggressive. He often felt her blue eyes fleeting to the side, analyzing with concern.
The pain came and went, intense on both ends. Despite arduous efforts to appear alert and otherwise unscathed, Noah found himself distracted. He had difficulty concentrating on one thing or another. Though indecipherable, his thoughts raced. Worst-case scenarios and panic plagued his subconscious. He didn’t even want to know what Aly would expect him to testify for or against over whatever that thing was they saw – or worse, how Lee or Greg could prevent them from ever seeing each other again, nonetheless be together.
Images erected beneath his eyelids every time he blinked – of Lee’s inevitable freak out, Sarah’s guilt trip, the repercussions of disobeying the elders. The price of medical care was an entire other issue, but he couldn’t bring himself to think about the damage done to his arm. It pulsed, his discomforting getting worse with the wait, but he felt detached.
As they passed Yazzie’s, Noah expected to see Lee standing outside with the look of death on his face. It was like the man had a radar that specialized in always being in the wrong place at the worst time. He was always over Noah’s shoulder, waiting for the slightest antagonism for all hell to break loose.
The flashing attachment on the public safety officer’s Ford, he didn’t anticipate. From what Noah could remember, there’d never been so many locals mulling around the area. They looked on to a scene he couldn’t see. With sobered expressions, they crossed their arms as though it was ten degrees below zero.
Did he seriously call the police because I wasn’t home?
No, he realized, it would be because he wasn’t home and he was with Aly. From the assembly though, it seemed like something more serious than boy meets girl, boy takes girl hiking for wood beast, boy shames family. There was a fear that Lee’s drinking once again caught up to his heart. The thought that Mary-Agnes crippled from a diabetes complication was sickening.
A faint hope flitted that his brothers were lost at sea, rather than a gathering ready to humiliate him. With a glance across the docks, he knew it wasn’t the case. Otherwise, there’d be a hoard of orange- vested locals boasting the self-appointed titles of volunteer search and rescue. The boat of a sea warden was nowhere in sight.
Noah hadn’t seen anything like it since he was ten, when Vega Kelley-Young tried to hide Luke in her car to leave his stepfather. Sam grabbed the stocky woman by her frizzy hair, dragging her from the seat and into the road. When Luke jumped