by Eden Beck
I wince, but he stops when Olive grabs his arm.
Over by the far window, Beck and Heath turn around. They’ve heard the edge in Jasper’s tone too. They’re getting ready.
Ready for what?
“Nowhere,” I say, hastily. “I’m going nowhere.”
“That’s right,” Jasper says, swaying on the spot. “Nowhere. Not right now, and not in life.” He snorts.
Beck laughs, but Heath just keeps on staring. For such a big man, he doesn’t seem to be holding his liquor well at all. I can’t decide if he’s going to fall face-forward or if he’s going to try to hit me.
Olive frowns as she glances around between them. “That’s mean,” she says, but she continues clutching Jasper’s arm. “You’re mean.”
“Just don’t want him to get his hopes up,” Jasper says, mock sweetness dripping from his voice.
But he doesn’t fool Olive. She drops his arm and takes a step away from him.
“I don’t like when you act like this,” she says, her righteous stance undercut by the little stumble she makes trying to stand on her own. “He hasn’t done anything, has he? He’s okay.” She turns to look at me, once again letting a reckless smile tug at her mouth. “He’s cute.”
Stop it, Olive. She’s going to get me killed.
Jasper’s eyes fill with rage as I shoot Olive a pleading look that she doesn’t see. Heath and Beck straighten their shoulders and start walking toward us.
Jasper takes a step forward too.
I take a step back, glancing over my shoulder as I do so. I’m right by the exit. There, past the door behind me there’s nothing but stairs. The corner landings are small. Not enough to break a bad fall.
“He’s just a fucking runt, Olive,” Jasper snaps. Heath and Beck hesitate and share a glance. If even they’re surprised at his tone, what’s he about to do to me? Jasper’s eyes are wide and manic, his teeth clenched. He starts to step forward, and I know in that second that he’s going to do something.
If I don’t do something first. And I know what that is.
God damn you, Rafael.
I take a deep breath and step backward. My foot hits nothing but air.
“Alex!” Olive’s voice echoes in my ears.
Better to control the fall, I suppose. Or, at least, that’s what I tell myself in the moment before all the world turns into a terrifying, dizzying blur.
Chapter Nine
I’m only half-conscious when Heath and Beck carry me back to the school, but I’m conscious enough to know Jasper stays behind.
Every single part of my body hurts and being jostled between two drunk boys doesn’t help. Blood trickles out of some sort of gash on my head. I only know this because a piercing pain prompts me to raise my arm up to touch my face, only for it to come away smeared with something dark.
But that pain is nothing compared to the aching in my ribs.
Neither Heath nor Beck speaks, except for the moments when Heath taps on my face and yells for me not to fall asleep. They both wear grim expressions as they enter the school through my smoking-spot door and carry me through to the infirmary.
“Can you stand?” Beck grunts as we approach the door.
“Maybe?”
My voice comes out in a croak.
He and Heath gently lower me to stand, but my knees buckle from the pain. Heath catches me under the armpits while Beck hammers away at the infirmary door. Heath’s touch is surprisingly gentle. Especially when he’s part of the reason I’m like this in the first place.
The glossy wooden door swings open and a woman stands in front of us in pajamas.
“What’s going on?” she asks groggily, flicking the infirmary lights on. “What are you boys doing out of bed?” Her eyes fall on me and she gasps. “What happened?”
“Stairs,” I wheeze, “I fell.”
She doesn’t ask any more questions, just beckons for Heath to bring me inside. Beck helps him, and I groan as they lay me on the nearest bed.
“Thank you, boys,” she says with a nod that doesn’t detract from the wary, all-too-knowing look in her eye as she looks over my companions. “You may leave.”
They glance at each other, then at me. Beck shrugs and turns on his heel to walk out. Heath, however, stays a moment.
“So … is he gonna be all right?”
“He will be if you let me work on him,” she snaps, her patience finally reaching its limit.
Heath nods and hurries out of the infirmary. I feel my eyelids blinking slowly. Moments seem to be skipping. One minute, I’m just laying my head down on the pillow and letting out a breath as my eyes alight on the exposed beams overhead. The next, the nurse is reaching down toward the hem of my uniform shirt—and I realize my mistake.
“No,” I say, sluggishly moving my arm to keep my shirt firmly in place. It feels like my arm weighs a thousand tons.
“I have to look at your injuries,” she says curtly.
I eye her a little more carefully, or at least as carefully as my swimming vision will allow.
She’s young to be in charge of an entire school’s medical facilities. She barely has any wrinkles at all, just some crow’s feet framing her dark eyes.
“Don’t be so self-conscious.”
“No,” I protest again, but she’s easily able to move my hands away. I guess to her, they’re just arms, not great big heavy elephant’s trunks.
“There’s nothing I haven’t seen.” She pulls my shirt up and cold air hits my chest, and she pauses. “Well.”
I’m keenly aware of how constricting the two sports bras I’m wearing are. They dig into my sides, making it difficult to breathe. They stab into me, aching.
Or maybe that’s a dislocated rib.
Either way, it doesn’t matter. I’m finished.
I’m found out.
The nurse goes quiet, but she doesn’t stop undressing me. The only thing that changes is that, unless I imagine it in my delirious state, she goes to the door and turns the key so it clicks locked.
I don’t protest when she comes back to my side with a pair of scissors and starts cutting away the double-layered bras. In return, she doesn’t comment at my exposed female form. It’s easier, somehow, the rest of the undressing. Now that she knows I’ve got breasts, there’s no look of shock on her face when she discovers I have no dick either.
I sneak a peek at her face, but her expression is blank. That is, until she presses two fingers to a blossoming bruise on my side and I nearly pass out from the excruciating pain.
Only then does she purse her lips, her gaze briefly flickering over my body with a mixture of pity and—unless I’m mistaken—disapproval. But that is it. She gets to work.
I don’t know when I fall asleep. All I know is that when I wake, the sunlight coming through the tiny window next to my bed definitely isn’t the sort of pale white you see in the morning. From the looks of it, it must be somewhere around noon.
My limbs feel stiff. There’s a bandage around my head and some sort of pressure on my chest.
I try to sit up, but my ribs hurt so bad that I hiss in pain. Best to stay immobile, then.
A flood of broken memories wash over me all at once. The party. The stairs. Blinding pain, the long hike through the forest, and then the look on the nurse’s face when …
A jolt runs through me. I’m so done.
The curtain around my bed rips back and I flinch, which hurts more than my revelation that all this has been for nothing.
The nurse from last night stands over me with an inscrutable expression. She gets straight to the point.
“Alex,” she says. “Very unisex name.”
I don’t reply. She leans forward and gently prods my ribs, a gesture that makes me cry out in pain. She sighs as she straightens.
“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” she asks. There’s no questioning what she means by that.
“Did you tell the dean?” I ask.
“No.”
“Is the
re anyone else in here?”
“No. Just us,” she says. She sits in the chair next to my bed and crosses her legs. She’s wearing scrubs now. They make her look older, somehow.
I sigh. “I’m pretending to be a boy so I could come to this school.”
“That’s not what I’m asking,” she replies, waving her hand. “I want to know if you really fell down those stairs.”
Now that surprises me.
“What?” I ask.
“Did you fall down stairs, or did you get beaten up?”
I’m taken aback. So far, no one’s even acknowledged the abuse. I mean, at least not where The Brotherhood is concerned. I know I’ve only been here a couple weeks, but every one of my professors has witnessed some form of bullying … and so far no one’s even batted an eyelid.
Crazy how quickly that sort of thing, that sort of expectation, just becomes normal.
I flounder for words for a moment, trying to think of how I’m supposed to respond.
“Even if I didn’t just fall … if I told the dean those three were involved … would it really make a difference?” The look on the nurse’s face tells me what I needed to know.
Still, I frown up at her, confused about something else entirely. “So, you really don’t care that I’m a girl?”
She shrugs. “It’s not my business. Plus, it wasn’t even clear if you were a girl.”
I frown. “But I have—you saw—”
“You could be trans, for all I know,” she interrupts, though I know from her expression that she knows that isn’t the case. That fact only serves to make what she says next even more surprising. “Your genitalia isn’t my business unless there’s something wrong down there.” She sighs and folds her hands in her lap.
As I struggle to find the words to reply again, she surprises me even further.
“I wanted to be a doctor, you know.”
I just shake my head, trying to clear it. This must be some kind of fevered dream. A wasted hope. Any minute now I’m going to wake up and the dean is going to be standing over me, ready to tell me I’m expelled.
But for now, I might as well play along.
“A doctor?” I say, trying to sit up and wincing again. The nurse offers me a gentle but sturdy hand up. She doesn’t stop when she sees my face grimace.
“You’ve got to be tough to survive in a place like this,” she says. “But it’ll be worth it.”
More evidence that this is just a dream. That doesn’t stop me from looking at her out of the corner of my eye.
“What do you mean?”
I blink at her, confused. She brushes some dirt off her pants leg.
“Men still get a lot more opportunities than women. This is an elite school. Bleakwood is the kind of place that opens doors nowhere else will.”
I want to turn to look at her better, but another stab of pain at my side makes this whole fever dream a little less convincing.
“I should have gone to Grandview.”
She snorts. “You think it’s difficult here? You wouldn’t survive a single day there.”
I blink at her, more confused than ever.
“There’s two different kinds of strength,” the nurse says, looking away from me for a minute. She continues picking at something on the knee of her scrubs. “You’re resilient. You should have broken bones in a fall like that, last night.”
I let out a choked laugh that makes the bones and muscles in my torso scream. “Call it practice.”
Her face darkens a moment, and I have to elaborate. “I just … I have pretty rowdy brothers.”
“Pretty rowdy? Are you sure …”
“Please, don’t get the wrong idea,” I say, quickly. “There are four of them. It just got a little crazy. Sometimes they forgot I wasn’t like them.”
“And now look who’s forgotten?” she says, getting as close to actually acknowledging my little farce as she dares. At least, without actually acknowledging it.
I look over at her and feel a tightening in my stomach. “Are you going to tell anyone?”
“Tell anyone what?” she says at first, but then leans a little closer in and can’t help the shadow of a grin from breaking across her face. “Your secret’s safe with me, Alex. Call it nurse-patient confidentiality.”
Then she sits back and slaps her hands on the ends of her knees. “But if anyone asks, I knew nothing.”
“You can claim I have a micro-penis.”
It’s her turn to laugh. It comes out as a bark so loud she has to cover her mouth.
I laugh too. “I’d like to see them ask to see proof.”
There’s a knock at the door and both of us fall silent as a boy steps in with a clipboard to hand off to the nurse. I quickly grab my shirt to cover myself—only to find it’s not there. I half freeze, prepared to roll off the edge of the bed to hide—but the boy barely bats an eye at me.
The nurse gets up to take the paperwork, and I take a quick glance down at my chest. It’s been bound so tight and that no sign of breasts exists. Whatever’s left of them after not eating for weeks now has been shoved up into my armpits or flattened down under the extra layers of gauze.
I feel gratitude swell inside me as I glance back up at the nurse shooing the boy back out of the room. I can’t believe I came to this school thinking I could pull this off by myself.
Even more so, however, I can’t believe I’ve been so lucky to find the help I have.
The nurse must be able to tell I’m about to cry or something, because she clears her throat and puts on a matronly expression.
“You’re going to need to get some extra rest. Those bandages aren’t going to feel right for a while, so you should probably stay in the infirmary while you adjust.”
“Adjust?”
“Get used to them,” she says. “You’re going to be spending the better part of the semester wrapped up.”
I raise an eyebrow. “A whole semester?”
“If you’re lucky.” Once again, the slightest smile tugs at the corner of her mouth before she forces her expression serious again. “Who knows, it might be the whole year.”
That slight hint of mirth fades further as she looks me over.
“You’re sure you fell down the stairs?”
I know what she’s asking. I also know that even if it wasn’t the truth, even if I explained the circumstances leading up to it … even if Jasper or Heath or Beck had picked me up and thrown me down those stairs themselves … it wouldn’t change anything.
So I just shake my head.
“It was no one’s fault but my own,” I say.
She nods and picks up the chart, about to head out and leave me alone in the infirmary. But before she leaves, I stop her in the doorway with one last question.
“You said you wanted to be a doctor. Why didn’t you, then?”
She bites the inside of her cheek for a moment, leaning out the door to glance out into the hall. Once she’s sure we aren’t going to be overheard, she turns back to me.
“I used to say it’s because I didn’t get into med school. I didn’t have the credentials,” she says. “But now … I think it’s because I wasn’t brave enough.”
“Brave … enough?”
“I didn’t realize there was more than one way to fight back. Don’t let them scare you away, Alex. If this is what you want, don’t let anyone take it from you.”
Though she doesn’t say as much, the meaning in her words weighs heavy on me.
Fight back, she says.
And fight back I will.
Chapter Ten
I’m not as strong as them. I’m not as rich. Not as powerful.
In fact, my rich and powerful meters are practically in the negative currently.
But the nurse’s words run over in my head. After that one conversation, she doesn’t bring up the topic again. To the casual observer, I’m just another boy in the infirmary to her. Not the secret compatriot she just basically told to keep deceiving the school that employs
her.
Fight back.
What sticks with me the most, however, is how she worded it.
There’s more than one way to fight back.
I think I know what she means.
She doesn’t seem delusional enough to think I can somehow stand up to the boys in a literal sense. They’d beat the shit out of me. Even if they found out I was a girl, I don’t know if that would stop them.
Sure, I’m their target. They can’t be avoided. But I can fight back in my own way by just not giving up. I came here for a reason. I need this. I need the opportunity. I’ve always been smart, but never enough to get-into-Harvard-by-my-own-merit smart. Not with a full ride … which is what I’m going to need if I want to go anywhere.
At least anywhere that counts.
I’m not even sure what I want to go to college for, I just know whatever it is I don’t want to settle.
I don’t want second best.
Which is, after all, why I’m at Bleakwood in the first place, is it not?
So yes, I’ll fight back. But like the nurse suggested … I’ll do it in my own way. I’ll do it just by not dropping out. Like she said, I’m resilient. If I can survive falling down that many flights of stairs with nothing worse than a couple sprained ribs, I can handle anything.
Starting with a few days stuck here alone in the infirmary.
Staying here really isn’t so bad. Rafael drops by to give me my homework. He eats the food that’s too fatty for me to eat if I want to stay rail-thin and boyish. The nurse—Ms. Weber, I come to learn—can’t know that I’m not eating everything she gives me.
Though I think she suspects it.
During the day, I get to rest. It’s a short reprieve from the bullying, though one that grows boring with surprising speed. I find myself gazing out my tiny window most of the time, looking out onto a remote section of the grounds while I get lost in daydreams.
I’m staring out onto my little section of grounds on my last day, considering if it would be worth it to throw myself down some more stairs if need be if it means I’ll end up here again, when I see movement. Someone is out there, moving along the outside of my vision.
