When the PA removed the cast, it didn’t smell as bad as I expected. The cast cracked off like a broken shell, my arm the tongue of a sea creature exposed, cold and vulnerable. As soon as it came off I slid from the noisy exam bed to leave, but there was more to do and the PA put up his hands in protest. I didn’t get it, really, the cage door had been unlatched and I could go throw my skin under the sun, maybe even join the softball team again, although my sister, T, wouldn’t let me. She waited by the car, so she could vape. Most bones heal well with treatment, I vaguely remember him saying when I was brought in. His breath smelled like red onions and honey-mustard salad dressing. After a bone breaks a blood clot seeps in around the halves. After a while a kind of prebone net grows inside the hematoma, slowly taking hold of the bone and pushing out the blood. Eventually the bone net solidifies into new bone and everything is fine. A seventy-mile-an-hour softball hit my elbow like cannon fire last spring. They gave me pain meds and surgery and pain meds and metal screws and more surgery and more pain meds and then nothing and more nothing until now.
“You’ve put on some weight,” he said.
The PA’s name was Paul or William or Paul William. I didn’t look at his chest because I didn’t look at people too often. Paul or William was white, with a spotty beard and shiny thinning hair cut close. He wasn’t a man in a sexual sense to me, but his energy probably was supposed to be sexual. I hadn’t gotten used to that thing that happens to people. I would feel it around Coach sometimes, not the desire to have sex but the reminder that it was possible, like storms are possible when clouds appear. Paul or William didn’t know a lot of things. He didn’t know why I was alone at the pediatrician’s when all the other teenagers had their parents dutifully in tow. He didn’t know my father died of sleep apnea the previous winter. He didn’t know my mother was so depressed she had cashed the life insurance policy for half a million dollars and spent every day high as shit while me and T managed the household, and I personally had to listen to a grown man comment on my medically insignificant weight gain. Paul or William was new, meaning he was a well-intentioned ass hat.
I quit softball like T wanted, sat around all summer, but I hadn’t noticed the change in my body. Perhaps a different kind of girl would’ve been hurt by that. A different kind of girl would’ve told her mother, who would have filed a complaint and exchanged letters with lawyers to feel all that could be done for her daughter’s emotional fortress had been done. A different kind of girl would’ve given him the evil eye and silent treatment until he walked back the comment to something so unrecognizable that it becomes a spell that conjures a nurse to finish the appointment. A different kind of girl would’ve said fuck you and your eyebrow mole. A different kind of girl would’ve tried to seduce him to prove her worth and fall headfirst into a bucket of low self-esteem and thirty-seven minutes later, in the Wendy’s parking lot with a cock in her mouth, feel for a brief moment victorious.
T had sex with Coach even after she made us quit the team. It still was mysterious. I couldn’t call it love. I’ve seen the videos of what is supposed to happen and I still can’t imagine it, sex with men. Men are like giant tortoises—big and round and dense and kind of cute in a slow ancient way. I don’t mind men, but I just don’t want to do them. I’d rather slide lettuce into their mouths and watch them chew.
Paul or William wasn’t our doctor or even an actual doctor. After Daddy died our actual doctor met us one time at a physical to tell us he got a job in another state. He seemed so sad about it, the timing, that he would be going right after we lost our father, like it was such a cosmic tragedy or insult. He really overthought it. Me and T were like it’s okay and it was okay, very okay, totally normal, but Dr. Lee was soggy eyed, apologizing over and over. It was a lot. Paul or William became the new normal. To be young and lack ambition seemed the new normal. He finished wiping down my arm and doing tests for mobility.
“You can exercise again now with more freedom. You used to be fit, you know.”
That time was too much. I looked Paul or William in the face hard and wanted to thump his right nipple and send a sting through his whole heart. The look on his face reminded me why I don’t like to look at people, how simple they are; it’s like they’re made of soup cans stacked up and held together with Elmer’s glue, dental floss, and hope. Their big chicken-noodle-soup heads will always crack open and say something stupid.
“I didn’t mean it like that!” Paul or William said in a hurry. “I just remember you were an athlete, right? My nephew plays football now. He’s okay”—he wobbled his hand in the air—“getting better. Plays receiver but should probably hold the line, doesn’t have the hands for it.”
I stopped looking at Paul or William, to be kind or maybe just to demand silence. This was the Kaiser Permanente in Long Beach, one city over and noisy. Nearly every seat in the waiting room was always filled. I met T outside. She looked like herself, face a perfect pear wrapped in the blue air from the vape. The palm trees in the landscaping sighed in the late morning breeze. I wanted a breakfast sandwich, some kind of potatoes, and an apple pie. She looked down at me and grabbed my elbow hard to see if it hurt. I didn’t flinch, so she was satisfied.
“He called me fat,” I told her.
She laughed, looked along my body, shrugged some, nodded some, kicked my calves lightly as if checking tire pressure, and said, “Yeah, kinda.”