by Amanda Heger
Felipe grinned. “Yes, you can do it.” He held a bottle of clear liquid in one hand and a packaged syringe in the other. “But first I am going to inject him to make his ligaments loosen. Plus it will help with the pain.” He unwrapped the syringe, and beside her Leonardo went stiff.
“No, no.” The boy stood, still cradling his shoulder against his body. His gaze darted around the room before locking on the door.
Annie put a hand on his good arm. “Todo bien.” She flashed him a bright smile, feeling only slightly guilty about using his obvious crush on her to distract him from the syringe in Felipe’s hand. It was still covered by the cap, but she could tell that was a Godzilla-sized needle under the plastic. “Siéntese.”
Leonardo sat, but his stare pinged back and forth between the syringe and the door. She leaned forward and forced him to look at her.
“Todo bien,” she said again, as if Felipe hadn’t just uncapped the giant needle behind her. If Leonardo turned around and saw that, he’d be gone. “¿Cuándo es tu cumpleaños?” It was an Intro to Spanish level question—in fact her first Spanish oral exam had centered around birthday party vocabulary—but it was the first one she could remember.
“Febrero.”
“Yo también.” Annie feigned fake excitement, as she asked him more birthday details. What day in February? His was the twentieth, hers was the third. Did he have a party? Yes, with his brothers and some candy from the store down the street.
Felipe tossed her a baggie full of alcohol wipes. “Keep him talking, but clean his arm. Here.” He pointed to a spot on his own arm, then began drawing liquid into the needle.
Annie pulled out a wipe and gently rubbed the spot on the boy’s arm. It took six sets of alcohol pads, but finally she got his arm free of mud and sweat from his fall. She was running out of things to say about birthdays, but luckily Leonardo wasn’t. Maybe it was nerves. Or maybe he was a birthday fanatic, but he had a lot to say on the topic.
“Bien,” Felipe said. He leaned in and spoke to the boy. There wasn’t a hint of worry in Felipe’s face, and if she didn’t know better, she would have guessed they were talking about the weather instead of the gargantuan needle behind the doctor’s back. “Mira a Annie.”
Leonardo’s eyes locked on hers as he followed Felipe’s orders. The boy gripped her hand with the strength of a hundred hulking body builders, but Annie held in her gasp. He flinched for half a second as the needle went in, and the liquid disappeared into his body. Felipe pulled the needle out and recapped it with the protective covering.
“Good job. Bien hecho.” Annie patted Leonardo’s good arm, and the boy’s chest puffed out as if he’d just slayed a dragon.
“Now we wait,” Felipe said. He eased Leonardo onto his back and poked around on the groove in the boy’s shoulder. “You still want to reset the arm, yes?”
She gulped but nodded. “Can I feel it?”
He made room for her hand, and with fingers like feathers, Annie touched the spot on Leonardo’s arm. Where a normal shoulder would be hard, it was mushy.
“¿Lista?” Felipe asked.
“Yep.” Her voice cracked on the end, but she smiled as if she wasn’t twirling in a cyclone of excitement and terror.
“Put one hand around his wrist.” Felipe took her hand and clamped it to the arm clutched to the boy’s chest. “Put the other hand here.” He wrapped her fingers around Leonardo’s forearm, just above the elbow. “Bien. Keep this hand steady and move his wrist very slowly. So he makes a half circle. Like this.” He demonstrated with his own arm. “But if there is too much resistance or he is in too much pain, stop. Do not force it.”
Annie’s pulse thudded in her ears. “How do I know if it’s too much?”
“You will know.”
She gulped back her nerves, trying to find that excitement that had rushed through her a few minutes ago. “Okay. You talk to him this time. I have to concentrate.”
Before long, Leonardo was rambling about soccer teams. Her fingers were sweaty, and she prayed they wouldn’t slip from his arm, making things worse for everyone involved. As if moving the thinnest piece of porcelain imaginable, she lifted his wrist.
“Bien. Keep going,” Felipe said.
She did, until the boy’s forearm stuck out at a ninety degree angle from his ribcage. “Now what?”
“Keep one hand on his bicep and lift like this.” He raised his own arm above his head, keeping the elbow bent. “You will feel it move back into place.”
She licked her dry lips. No big deal. “Okay.” She inched the boy’s arm upward, and almost instantly his entire arm jerked into place. The odd curve in his shoulder disappeared. “I did it!”
“Better!” Leonardo’s face brightened, and he started to sit up.
Annie’s hands were still wrapped around his arm, and the feel of the bone sliding back out of socket made her insides drop to her feet.
“Owwww.” He collapsed back into the bed and wiggled in pain.
“It is okay,” Felipe said. He put a hand on the boy’s chest. “Try again.”
“Maybe you should do it?”
“He moved too soon. It is fine. Try again. I will hold him still.”
“Okay.” The arm was harder to move this time, as if the shoulder had gone from mildly annoyed to full-on rage. Leonardo groaned and writhed on the bed, and she paused.
“Bien. Keep going. Go slow. Pull down a little on his elbow this time. Do not jerk.”
Annie clamped her jaw shut. Tears filled Leonardo’s eyes but didn’t spill over, and she pressed down. The arm wouldn’t budge. She released the pressure but held his arm still, and counted to five.
“Annie?” For the first time, worry tinged Felipe’s voice, but she ignored him and tried again. Pressing on the elbow while lifting the forearm, she pictured the bone slipping back into the C-shaped joint. Just like in her anatomy books.
A dulled pop rang out and the pressure released.
“Better,” Leonardo said, again. He tried to shoot up to sitting a second time.
“No! Stay still.” Annie scrambled to keep him down.
Felipe pushed against the boy’s chest with one hand. “No te muevas.” He prodded the shoulder with the other. “Better. Feel.”
Annie ran her hand along Leonardo’s shoulder. Except from the pinprick of blood where the injection had gone in, everything looked perfectly normal. Better. Holy shit, I made him better.
“We will make him a sling and then walk him home, yes? I need to talk to his mother.”
Annie shook her head, fighting back a weird rush of excitement so high it made her eyes sting. “I mean, yes. Where’s the sling?” She moved toward the supply bag so they wouldn’t see all her emotions bubbling to the surface. Wearing a grin the size of the Grand Canyon might seem inappropriate after practically torturing a child.
“We will make one from a shirt,” Felipe said. More Spanish chatter rose up behind her. Felipe. Leonardo. Felipe again. “No, no.”
She turned. “What?”
Leonardo gave Felipe a look that would cut glass.
“He wants to know if we can make it out of one of your shirts.” Marisol entered the room with a beer in one hand and a deck of UNO cards in the other. “To remember you.”
Annie laughed and pulled out her backpack. “Sure.”
• • •
The breeze was a welcome relief from the humid air inside Leonardo’s house. They’d spent the last hour packed into the living room, as Felipe showed the boy’s mother techniques to force his shoulder into place. All the while, Leonardo glued himself to Annie’s side and rambled on about how she was the best doctor he’d ever seen.
Felipe would have been upset if it wasn’t so ridiculous. And maybe even true.
Night had closed in, and the only light on their path came from the windows of the houses along the main street.
“Thanks for letting me do that.” She stopped and squeezed his hand. Shadows covered half her face, but her eyes were
still bright. “I can still feel his bones sliding back into place.”
“De nada. Although I am afraid Leonardo will be heartbroken tomorrow when he wakes up and you are gone.”
“I’m sure he’ll survive.” She shrugged and smiled simultaneously. “I was hoping to leverage his crush to get a few more star fruit, though.”
“Hmmm.” Felipe reached for her hand and guided her up the footpath that curved away from the road. “Turn here.” A few meters later, the sweet fragrance of the pink flowers and tart star fruit drifted on the breeze.
“Wha—”
He put both hands to her face and pulled her lips to his. “Stay here.”
The boy and his brothers had picked over most of the tree, but near the middle, Felipe spotted two clumps of fruit within reach of the thin, sprawling trunk.
He hadn’t climbed that particular tree since he was six or seven, but he inched his way up, pulling himself by the thickest limbs. The bark scratched and scraped his hands, and as he eased himself along the branch below the fruit, his shirt snagged and ripped, leaving a tattered square of blue cotton amongst the leaves.
“Is everything okay?”
“Sí,” he said, trying and failing to pull his gaze from the overhead shot of her cleavage. “I cannot let Leonardo have all of your affection.”
He shifted an inch, and the soles of his worn tennis shoes slipped. Felipe grabbed the overhead limb with both hands as the entire left side of the tree quaked with the sudden shift of his weight. The distinct pop of a branch breaking away from the rest of the tree rang out from his right. Felipe’s heart seized, waiting to plunge to into the mix of mud and grass below.
But his branch held steady.
“Are you—oooof.”
“Annie? Annie?” He shuffled toward the trunk as fast as he could manage. The rest of the way down was a blur of scraped hands and knees, the bark tearing through his pants. His pulse thudded against his temples as he pictured Annie on the ground, knocked unconscious by a fallen branch. “Annie—”
Her hysterical laughter cut off his words. “Seriously? I think Leonardo wins this one.” She stood where he’d seen her last, but leaves protruded from her hair and stray star fruit lay scattered on the ground around her.
“You are okay?” He rushed toward her, squinting to see her pupils.
“I think I’ll make it.” She held a piece of fruit between her palms.
The breath rushed out of him, and he wrapped his arms around her shoulders.
“I think we’re even now.” She smiled, her entire face lifting with the movement.
“Even?” He plucked a leaf from the end of her braid.
“I electrocuted you, and you threw an entire bushel of fruit at me.”
Even though his entire body flashed with shame, her laughter was contagious. “Come. I promise not to cause any more head injuries.” He nodded to a tall, rolling hill to their right. From the top, silhouettes of a hulking boulder and a single crooked tree looked down on them, illuminated by the full moon.
“Hold on.” Annie squatted to pick up a handful of fallen fruit. “I don’t care if this stuff tried to kill me. It’s so good.”
He took what she couldn’t carry, and they climbed the hillside without saying a word. Annie walked ahead of him, the clack of her flip-flops announcing her every step. As they crested the top of the hill, Felipe forgot the fruit, letting it fall to the ground a second time as his hands slid down her ribcage, turning her and pulling her in for a breathless kiss.
Annie’s haul let out a series of small thumps as it hit the earth, her hands rushing and tugging his hair. Below, the fireflies were out in full force, flashing and glowing, lighting the distance between the small homes. “Annie,” he muttered into her neck, pushing away her braid. She let a sharp breath escape, and Felipe covered her mouth with his. The kiss built until his tongue crashed into hers. Their lips and hands and hips met, pushing and pulling and kneading into one another.
She stepped back. He kissed the freckle below her left ear. He kissed the hollow of her neck. He kissed the bit of collarbone poking out from her shirt.
Annie bit his earlobe, and the breath fell out of him. He was so impatient to touch her, so thirsty to feel her bare skin against his.
“Hey,” she said.
He kissed her again, lightly this time, letting his lips graze the soft skin at the edge of her mouth.
She slipped her hands under his shirt, and each time her fingers grazed a new patch of skin, Felipe let out a sound that was half whimper, half roar. He let his tongue explore hers as he exposed an inch of her back to the moonlight and hesitated for a breath, expecting her to pull away again. But she pressed harder against him, and her tongue flitted across the ridges of his ear.
Felipe lay on the grass and pulled Annie to him. She wrapped her legs around his waist, straddling him, pressing into him with the same hard urgency in her kiss.
He shifted his weight, and they rolled. Her back arched toward him, and his breath quickened, overcome by how much he wanted her. By how much he needed her. His other hand inched up her shirt, tracing a line from her naval to her breast.
“Felipe?”
“¿Sí?” He pulled back to look at her face, counting all those freckles across her nose—the ones that had been there that first night in the airport, and the ones she’d sprouted since.
“I’m a little, uh…” Her forehead creased. “Prude, I guess.”
“What is wrong? Prude?” The words were familiar, but all his blood was far from his brain. The only image they brought to mind was of a piece of dried fruit. He shifted his weight to roll off of her and tugged at the end of her braid.
“I, uh, um…” She stared at the sky. “I don’t know if I want to have sex with you. Wait, no. I mean, I want to have sex with you, but I don’t know if it’s the best idea. I think—” Her words raced faster from her mouth with every passing second, and he could barely hang on.
“Annie.” He tilted her chin toward him. “We do not have to do anything you do not want.”
She hooked one set of long, delicate fingers behind his head. “We don’t have to stop just yet.” Her hand trailed down his chest as she arched up and placed a delicate, questioning kiss on his lips.
Felipe covered her body with his. He kissed her mouth. Her neck. Her ear. Her mouth again.
She wrapped her legs around him, her hands exploring. Between his adolescent crush and the way she leaned against him that first night in the airport bar, he’d thought about her hands on him many, many times. But when Annie finally touched him, it was better than anything he could have imagined.
He unglued himself from her, and peeled off her shirt. His wasn’t far behind. The sight of Annie on the grass, shining under the sky, made every muscle in his body tense. In the seconds he knelt there watching the rise and fall of her chest, she slid out from under him with a single deft move, and Felipe found himself staring at her. Her shoulders were cloaked in freckles, and they faded into the skin near her collarbone, except the single brown spot that escaped and migrated to the top of her right breast.
She laughed. “There was a rock in my back.”
Felipe stared, taking in every inch of her. The way a single curl escaped her braid and hung across her cheek. The fine sheen of sweat clinging to her cleavage. He sighed, knowing there would never be enough time to memorize it all.
Day Sixteen
While the clinic wound down outside the tiny one-room school, Annie dug through her supply box. Again. She’d pawed through the sex ed materials at least a dozen times since they’d arrived in this village, organizing then reorganizing the condoms, laminated charts, fuzzy uterus, and other birth control options. This was her chance to prove herself. To do something entirely her own. To leave her mark on this place that seemed to be marking her at every turn.
She plucked a pack of birth control pills from the box, so ancient its yellow plastic case was layered with months of grime. A deep crack ran throug
h the middle, and a single piece of dirt-tinged tape held it together. Only for demonstration. She sat the pill pack on the makeshift teacher’s desk.
Next, she pulled a diaphragm from the box, and turned the small silicone cup in her fingers. I thought these went out with the first Bush administration. She propped it next to the pills, hoping no one would ask how to use it.
The door swung open, its apple-red wood creaking and groaning. Marisol smirked as she dropped a yellow-green plantain on the table. It was monstrous, nearly as long as her forearm and just as wide. “I got the biggest one I could find.”
“Mari! I can’t use that. The condoms won’t even fit.” Her insides were slushy and nervous enough without having to stretch a condom over a giant, edible phallus.
“They will. Trust me.” Marisol’s eyes were bright under her bouncing eyebrows.
“You do it then.”
“What do they say? Those who can do it, do it. Those that cannot do it, teach it.” She tossed her hair over one shoulder. “Besides, this is the first time for this class. If I do it the first time, they will expect me to do it every time. I already have too many things to do at the clinic.”
“Wait. What? First time? Are you serious?”
“Sí.”
“I barely speak enough Spanish to find the bathroom. You think it’s a good idea for me to be the first person to do this?”
“Of course. If the people make a riot, we will say it was the gringa’s idea.”
Annie’s mouth went slack, gaping wide enough for a train to pass through. Apparently, the mark she was hoping to leave was going to be even darker than she’d imagined. She felt like a skydiver, overcome by both excitement and second thoughts as her toes dangled over the edge of the plane.
“I am not serious,” Marisol said. She picked up the mammoth plantain and wagged it at Annie. “You are the first because I told my madre you could do it. She has been wanting to do this for a very long time.”
