by T Cooper
And how’d I land here in paradise with this particular roommate? Starts with the letter J—for Jackhole. I was returning a punt in the ostensibly “light” practice we were having before Friday’s game, my face-mask view filled with Baron steaming toward me. As he closed in, I attempted to hurdle his back like you see in all the best NFL highlight videos, but before I could launch off the ground, dude rolled into my leg with all of his two hundred chemically enhanced pounds, and I heard a loud pop coming from the vicinity of my right ankle.
I didn’t think it was that serious until I tried to stand up and put weight on it, at which point I crumbled to the ground like that kid Damon when he fell off the bench on the night of our season opener. I probably shouldn’t have chuckled at him inside, because the Changers karma gods have obviously decided to punish me for my lack of empathy.
Anyway, I hopped off the field toward the coaches. My foot was sort of loosely dangling in the air while I held it off the ground. I don’t know quite how to describe it, but it was almost like my foot was no longer fully attached to my leg. I remember reading this story in Social Studies once about this Iraq War vet who’d stepped on an IED in Fallujah and lost his foot on one leg. Not that my injury was remotely in the vicinity of that soldier’s—just that I couldn’t stop thinking of the uncoupling he described every time I moved my leg and felt pretty much nothing at the end of it as I was being encouraged to lie still on the turf while the emergency Falcons golf cart sped my way.
I was so embarrassed splayed out there for everybody to gawk at (luckily the cheerleaders were on an entirely different end of the field, which forestalled Audrey getting yet another look at me failing miserably at something). That said, my chagrin quickly changed to anger when I saw Jason and Baron slap hands as I was wheeled into the field house by the trainers. Like they’d planned it or something—Jason putting Baron up to the task of taking me out because Jason and I are never on the field at the same time together.
No, that can’t actually be. Can it? is what was going through my head as I disappeared into the tunnel beneath the stands.
I soon forgot about Jason and really started freaking out when the trainer said he thought my ankle might be broken and I needed an X-ray, and not only were they going to call home, but also take me to the HOSPITAL. And then pow, at that word the excruciating pain and throbbing in my ankle magically bumped down the list of priorities, likewise all of Jason’s mustache-twirling villainy, when I realized that even though I was present and accounted for at the Changers Mixer seminar about emergency-room visits last year, I couldn’t remember anything I was supposed to do before the ambulance pulled up and the EMTs shoved me inside. So I said nothing. Not even a moan.
“He’s nonverbal,” the tech who rode in the back with me noted into a small headset.
“I’m verbal!” I shouted.
“Oh, good. We thought you were in shock and were starting to wonder about you,” she said, filling out some paperwork. “You’re going to be fine,” she added while rubbing her knuckles on my chest bone. (Ow, why?)
Before I knew it, we were at the hospital and I was being wheeled into the ER for admitting. I idled there, completely helpless in the hallway, with all the other patients in waiting. There was a dude with bloodstains on his shirt, a kid with a face swollen like a water balloon, and a lady who looked like she’d seen mucho hard times with a large, pus-filled infection on her thigh. I felt beyond freaked out so I told a nurse that I thought I was fine and would prefer to come back later if my ankle doesn’t feel better in a few days, but she ignored me, whisking by with some sort of machine with lots of wires sticking out of it.
All I could think was, I’m going to be “found out” for being a Changer, and, oh my god, what’s going to happen if I’m “found out?” Are the Abider Storm Troopers suddenly going to show up and take me to a deprogramming camp and conduct experiments on me and then if I’m not deprogrammed they’ll just quietly do away with me? I mean, from what Chase and Benedict say, it sort of seems like that’s a distinct possibility.
I’m falling into a fear spiral when I catch a glimpse of my ankle, looking like a tennis ball has somehow worked its way under my skin and is sitting on the outside joint, which is red and blue and so shiny it’s practically reflecting the fluorescent overhead light back at me.
And then click-click, the wheels on my gurney are released and I’m being pushed down the hall, past a police officer loitering in front of a room, and then into the room with the aforementioned Hells Angel hollering, “I know people who know people!” when I feel this sort of snap at the base of my neck like I felt on C2–D1 when Tracy waved that magical fob over my Chronicling chip.
Not three minutes later, a doctor rushes in—at least I assume he’s a doctor because he was wearing a white coat, had two pagers on his belt, and acted very self-important. He crosses to me, briefly looks me over, and announces to the room, “I’ll take it from here,” which prompts one of the nurses and another young doctor to leave.
He pats me on the thigh parentally.
“Hi?” I try.
“What seems to be the problem?” he asks, sort of leaning close and half winking. Or does he have something in his eye?
He takes what appears to be a stethoscope from around his neck, quickly slips it behind my neck, and holds it there until I feel that snap again at the base of my neck. Then he replaces the stethoscope, although I’m pretty sure that’s not what it was because no stethoscope I’ve seen can listen to your heart from the back of your neck.
“I hurt my ankle playing football,” I say, pointing down at the obvious.
“We’re going to need to cut these pants off,” he says to the remaining nurse in the room.
“NO!” I sit up and scream for fear of exposing my Changers emblem (not to mention my private regions, which I prefer to remain private). Doc plants a giant hand on my chest and pushes me back down against the partially reclined gurney.
“Relax, young man,” he says through clenched teeth, again with the half wink. “We are more than capable of handling your situation.” He annunciates each word clearly, like I’ve injured my brain and not my ankle.
The nurse tenderly handles my foot (Ow again), while another guy comes over and starts cutting the leg of my practice pants with a pair of those miracle scissors that can cut anything, including a penny (if the late-night advertorials are to be trusted).
The orderly stops trimming the spandex right at my hip, then carefully tucks the ripped fabric under my butt so that my cheek isn’t exposed. Praise be. I try to ignore everything else going on around me (plus the periodic, jarring, “I know people who know people!” from the other side of the curtain) and explain to the doctor exactly what happened in practice, what I heard, what I felt, and the doctor calmly tells me he wants to X-ray my ankle to see if it’s broken, even though he’s pretty sure it’s not.
“We’re going to take good care of you,” he adds. “And don’t worry, your folks have been notified of your condition and should be on the way.”
As if on cue, I hear, “Oh my goodness, oh my goodness, what happened?” from the hallway, and Tracy blows into the room wearing a floral jumpsuit from what has to be The Golden Girls resort collection, and yanks aside the curtain, interrupting the biker dude (“I know people who—what the?”), but then realizes her mistake and throws the curtain back, rushing around to my side of the room.
“I’m SO sorry I wasn’t there for you,” she practically cries. “This is all my fault.”
“Trace,” I say, patting her on the shoulder as she flings herself over me like an enormous quilt. “It’s not life or death. I just got hurt in practice.”
“Is he going to be okay?” she asks the doctor.
“He’s going to be aces,” the man replies. “But we have to get him over to X-ray now.” He nods his head at the orderly, who comes over, unlocks my wheels, and starts pushing me out the door, as Tracy clings to the side of my gurney Italian widow–style, n
ot relinquishing the metal guard until I’m all the way out the door.
* * *
Back in my room, we review the X-ray, which proved that my ankle wasn’t broken, but I did tear some ligaments pretty severely. Like, completely off the bone, apparently. While I had some strong painkillers “on board” (medical terminology I picked up), the doctor poked around my ankle region and pointed out exactly where my ligament was, versus where it should be, and the nauseating distance between the two. All the while Tracy sat at my side like she was on deathwatch, and then my folks showed up just as the nurse was finishing putting a cast on my leg, halfway up my calf. (I chose royal blue.) Apparently the tear was bad enough that it needed complete stabilization in order to heal properly.
After Mom hugged me (crying) and Dad squeezed my good leg (stoic), the doctor, Tracy, and my folks huddled in the corner and chatted for a few seconds, after which the doctor came over and whispered, “You’re going to be up and running in a couple weeks. That said, your football season is over.”
Huh? If I’m going to heal in a couple weeks, why can’t I play ball? I was about to ask Dr. Wink-Wink that very question, when Tracy caught my attention and mouthed, Later.
As I’m lying there waiting to be discharged and my folks are signing papers, Tracy’s thumbs are rapid-texting on her phone.
“Anyone I know?” I ask.
Her eyes dart around the room, and she shushes me: “None ya.” Then she comes back over to the bedside, where I’m sitting up now, a little dizzy from the meds. She hugs me hard, then hands me a miniature Dixie cup of water, which I finish off.
The nurse brings me crutches and asks me to stand on the good leg. She adjusts each down a notch then passes them to me.
“Good?” she asks.
I tuck the crutches under each of my armpits and grasp the handles, put some weight on them, taking some pressure off my good leg. Nod my head. I haven’t been on crutches since Andy broke his leg skiing when we were in sixth grade and I used to steal them and race across the playground, hopping on two feet in between each swing.
“And we’re Audi 2000,” the doctor says, practically as chipper as Tracy is when she’s not feeling guilty about being a lapsed Touchstone. “You’ve been very brave, Oryon. It was a pleasure treating you.”
We shake hands and they wheel me out of the hospital to the front door, some stupid liability rule, and I feel so odd sitting there infantilized with a blanket on my lap and my leg stuck out in front of me.
Dad pulls the car around, and Tracy loads my crutches in the trunk while Mom helps me hop to the front seat. We all get in together like one big happy family, which is when Tracy explains to me how the Council’s “health system response procedure” works. My chip tripped the containment plan, which is why the Changer doctor suddenly showed up and treated me accordingly. The injury to my ligament was bad enough that in normal cases they probably would’ve done surgery to repair it, but since I will have this body for only the year, plus we heal quicker than Statics during our Cycles, I should be able to walk just fine on the thing in a week or two. Even so, I have to leave the cast on for a month, and there’s no way I could go back to playing football (or skating), lest somebody get suspicious.
“So now it’s Changers: The Method-Acting Year?” I quip, loopy from the drugs, which are beginning to make me veeerrry sleeeepy.
No one bothers to answer, leaving me to contemplate the one upside to this whole debacle: I can quit football without having to quit football. It’s like getting an honorable discharge from the military. No giant mystery that my heart wasn’t really in it, but there was no way I was going to allow Jason to win by forcing me to limp off the team just because pointlessly ramming into other dudes at full speed wasn’t necessarily turning out to be “my thing.”
So, shout out to fate. You too, Lord King Butthole Jason. You did me a favor, brohaim. Stick that in your pipe and shove it up your bigot-hole.
CHANGE 2–DAY 33
It’s World War Z at Central right now.
All because of me. Well, me and Aaron. At least that’s what people are saying, though of course it all traces back to Jason, even if most folks aren’t capable of seeing it that way.
Yesterday after practice, Jason and Baron were whispering in the shower about how their little plan to wipe me out worked, and how awesome it was, et cetera et cetera, on and on like a scene in a cheesy anti-bullying movie or something. There were a few other guys around and nobody seemed to care, but apparently Aaron was in a bathroom stall listening the whole time, and when he walked out and confronted Jason and Baron, they acted like he was making crazy accusations and being anti-team, and even started yanking Aaron into the shower to do G knows what, some sort of jock hazing water torture they learned on the Internet.
Aaron fought them off and escaped, but he went straight into Coach Tyler’s office and proceeded to essentially put his whole college scholarship quest on the line by telling Coach what he heard and what happened afterward. Jason and Baron were called in, denied the preposterous notion that they’d somehow concocted a plan to injure a teammate, and apparently passed up every opportunity they were given to come clean and explain what their beef was with me (and Aaron). So Coach sent them home and said he’d be deciding in the morning whether the two would be allowed to play in tonight’s game.
As you can imagine, the news of the imperiled starters spread through the school about five seconds after Jason got out of there and used his QB-One omnipotence to rally the lion’s share of the school population to his corner.
What he didn’t count on was that Baron, terrified of his father (whose only joy in his otherwise suffocating life is football), called Coach Tyler privately after they left his office and squealed. He confessed that the brutal tackle was all Jason’s idea because he wanted to teach me a lesson (and scare me away from his sister), and that Baron didn’t want to do it but Jason “made him.” How much of a moron is Baron that he thought this story would make him look better than Jason?
Anyhow, Coach Tyler called an emergency staff meeting that went late into last night, after which it was decided both players would be benched for at least one game, and possibly more, depending on a disciplinary hearing that would be set up with the principal.
I wasn’t even in school Thursday so I could begin recovering, but first thing Friday morning, before I’d heard anything about Et tu, Baron, Coach personally intercepted me from homeroom and walked with me as I hobbled to his office, where he proceeded to apologize profusely for his ignorance about the team dynamics that had gotten so out of hand. He needed to get through tonight’s game, but asked to schedule a meeting with me and my foster parents first thing Monday to make sure they knew how seriously he and the school were taking this. He also inquired if I’d heard my parents say anything about “pressing charges.” Knowing the Council would want less than zero part of that noise, I immediately said something like, No freaking way, let’s just drop it and move on; it was just a simple football injury, they happen all the time.
The immediate outcome? Jason and Baron were suspended from play until further notice. And Central lost. Spectacularly. The first defeat in eighteen straight games.
I made the mistake of going to the game (as Coach had requested for “morale”). I stood at the end of the bench on my crutches, wearing my team jersey, sans pads. The instant the whistle blew after the other team scored a pick-six touchdown off of Aaron’s bobbling a pass from QB-Two, I felt the first soda cup whisk by my head and spray the back of my neck with Orange Crush.
“BOOOOOO” in unison from a corner of the stands. “There’s no R-A-T in T-E-A-M,” someone shouted.
I looked behind me, and there was Jason in the stands, banned from even being on the sidelines, bookended by hostile, zealous fans. I turned toward the field just in time for a giant pretzel to bean me in the middle of my back. They are heavier and harder than you’d think.
After the game, Jason raced down to the railing closest to
the field, leaned all the way over like he was about to do a somersault past it, and mouthed, You’re dead, to me while pressing a fake two-finger gun to his head and pulling the “trigger” as I limped by on my crutches toward the locker room. He seemed drunk.
“You too, you bone smuggler,” he hissed then, as Aaron jogged past me. Which almost caused Aaron to trip over a half-empty Gatorade bottle lying in the grass beneath him. His helmet snapped up toward Jason, who was now poking his tongue into his cheek and rolling his eyes back into his head. Aaron didn’t respond, just kept jogging off the field like he didn’t hear a damn thing, even though I know he had to be collapsing inside.
Not that I didn’t have my own problems to contend with. A few students, and even an adult—in fact I think it might’ve been the WOOO! guy who slapped my butt on the night of the first game—hissed various threats and insults at me as I went by. I texted Tracy and asked her to roll up pronto to give me a getaway lift home.
“This too shall pass,” she declared soon as I heaved myself and my crutches into the passenger seat.
“How’d you hear?” I asked.
“It’s on the radio.”
“Great.”
“You smell like a food truck,” she said, flaring her nostrils.
“It’s my new cologne. Eau de Pariah.”
“You going to be okay?” she asked, as we pulled up to my building. “Want me to come up until your folks are back?”
I shook my head no, climbed out of her VW bug, and started limping away on my creaking crutches. But then she beeped twice and I turned back, her automatic window slowly rolling down.
