In the ER, I lay on a gurney with my parents on one side and Delia on the other.
“We’ll need a CT scan,” the doctor—the same one who’d seen Kit the day before, incidentally—said, “once that stops bleeding.”
“You think he broke my nose?”
“Oh, he definitely broke your nose. I’m more concerned with your orbital sockets.”
“Her eyes?” Delia said. “Oh, God.”
“They’re pretty fragile,” the doctor went on. “A blow to the face can damage them pretty easily.”
“And how would you fix that?” Delia asked.
“Best case, we wait and they heal on their own. Worst case, surgery, which you may need for the nose anyway.”
“Surgery?” I said.
“We’ll do our best to make sure it heals straight,” he said.
He said a few other things, and my parents answered, but I didn’t really hear because I was thinking: Surgery.
On my nose.
Wonderful.
The doctor stepped out. To my parents, I said, “If you guys are all here, who’s with Kit?”
“Sebastian,” Delia said. “They’re like best friends now. I can’t believe that guy hit you.”
“I can,” I said.
“You’re lucky your friend shoved you,” the doctor said. “It could have been a lot worse if you’d gotten the full force of that punch.”
“My nose would be worse than broken?”
“He means you could have died,” Delia said. “People die from getting punched in the face in real life. It’s not like the movies.”
My mother put her hand over her mouth and my father looked distinctly sick. I said, “Is she here? She must be here somewhere.”
“I think she’s giving a statement,” Delia said.
“To the cops?”
“Yeah. They’ll probably want you to do that, too.”
I laid my head back against my pillow. “Would it be okay if I was alone, just for like five minutes?”
“Yeah,” Dad said. “Of course it would. Come on, guys.” And everyone got up and left.
I rolled to my side and looked at the poster next to me, which had little frowny faces describing the ten levels of pain. I’d given mine about a seven, but now I thought it was down to a six. It didn’t help that my hand still hurt like hell, but at least it didn’t seem to be broken. Unlike my nose.
It occurred to me that if they were putting me under and going in and messing around anyway, I could let them go ahead and fix me the way they’d fixed Delia. I could look just like her if I wanted to.
Hell, the insurance would probably even cover it.
I imagined my face looking like Delia’s, and a boy like Sebastian following me home from college and begging to sleep in my bed.
Well, maybe not like Sebastian. Maybe a linguistic wunderkind with nut-brown eyes and a cleft chin.
If I looked like someone else, would Greg have wanted me?
If I looked like someone else, could I have admitted that I wanted him?
I closed my eyes and dreamed of a world where I was so pretty Greg D’Agostino couldn’t take his eyes off me.
When I woke up, it was dark, and Delia was touching my shoulder. “Hey,” she said. “Time for your CT scan.”
I sat up a little. “How long was I asleep?”
“Half an hour. Probably stress and the pain meds.”
“Oh. God. They didn’t give me opiates, did they?”
She laughed. “No, I think it was just Advil.”
“Oh.”
“Delia,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“For getting punched in the face?”
“For being horrible. To you. About the nose thing. I get it. I get wanting to be pretty.”
She stared at my vital signs blinking on the monitor for a while. Finally, she said, “It wasn’t that I wanted my nose to be pretty.” I gave her the best incredulous look I could muster with my face all mangled. She said, “I just wanted it to be something I never thought about. I thought about it all the time. Every time I looked in a mirror, or saw a picture of myself, or walked by a reflective surface, I was thinking about it. I just wanted it to be like…like my chin or something.”
“Your chin? What’s going on with your chin?”
“Nothing! That’s my point. I never think about it, like, ever. It’s just there. I wanted my nose to be like that.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. I get that, too.”
She smiled grimly. “Does that mean you’re thinking about getting yours fixed? I saw your face when the doctor said you might need surgery.”
“No. No, I don’t need it fixed. It’s not broken. I mean, I know it’s literally broken, but not…No.” I adjusted the too-tight wristband on my left arm. “I’m not getting it changed.”
“But you thought about it.”
“Yeah. I thought about it.”
“But why not—”
“It’s just like you said. I need it to be something I don’t think about. If I had it changed, I would always be thinking about it. I’d always be wondering when a guy was flirting with me if he’d still be doing it if my face looked like it used to. I’d just be focusing on it all the time.”
“But aren’t you focusing on it now?”
I sighed. “Yeah. But honestly, that’s kind of your fault, no offense.”
“My fault? Because I got a nose job?”
“Well. Yeah. I mean, I forgive you. I get it.” I patted her hand, which was resting on my blanket. “The world’s hard to live in, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. It is.” She looked at me and said, “I’m sorry for not thinking about how that would make you feel.”
I touched the bandage over my nose. “Maybe I could just leave it like this? It’s got a certain je ne sais quoi, right?”
She laughed. “You know the difference between you and me? You can pull that nose off. Because all anyone can see”—she poked me in the chest with two fingers—“is this.”
“My stupendous cleavage?”
“Don’t do that,” she said. “Not everything is a joke.”
“You poked me in the boob!”
“I did not….Gah. Aphra.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I get it. And thank you.”
When the scans came back, they showed a clean, nondisplaced break of my nose and no breaks whatsoever of my eye sockets. I also appeared not to have a concussion, though sometimes those don’t show up for a while.
“Thank God for your ridiculously thick skull,” my father said. Delia, by then, had gone home to make sure Sebastian and Kit had not fallen down a YouTube hole.
“She got it from you,” Mom said.
“Thanks for that,” I said. “So can I go home now?”
“They’re going to splint your nose, and then we can go.”
Bethany came in through the curtain. Like me, she was still in her uniform. She had a splint on the index finger of her right hand.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
She held up her hand. “Broke my finger.”
“Punching the dirtbag?”
“Yeah.”
My mother said, “I think we should go find out what happened to your checkout papers,” and pulled my father out into the hallway.
Bethany sat down in the chair next to me. “You look like shit.”
“Yeah. I’ve heard that.”
“Is your chest okay? I think I might have hit you kind of hard. I didn’t mean to.”
“No, I know you didn’t mean to. Thank you for trying to get me out of the way. The doctor said you probably saved my brain.”
“Move over.”
“What?” I said, but I was already scooting over to one side of the bed. She lay down next to me and took out her phone.
“Please don’t take a selfie of us,” I said. She looked at me like I was stupid. Then she turned on an episode of My Little Pony, holding the phone so we could both see it.
She reached out and held my unhurt hand with her unhurt hand, my right and her left, and we stayed like that until my mother came back with the discharge papers and it was time to leave.