Over & Out #10

by Melissa J Morgan

  “I’m sorry I kicked the ball into the wrong goal,” Karen apologized to Jenna for the hundredth time as they dug into the bag of orange slices that Mia had brought out to the field. It’d been so hot out the last few days, the counselors had been providing oranges and water during sports so no one would get dehydrated—Dr. Steve’s orders. Karen wiped a hand across her damp forehead and gave Jenna a worried look. “When you passed me the ball, I got so turned around, I totally forgot which side of the field our goal was on.”

  “Yeah,” snipped Chelsea, “never mind that I was yelling the entire time that you were going the wrong way to try to get you to stop. I knew you were challenged in the coordination department, but I didn’t know it was that bad.”

  Karen bit her lip, staring at the ground.

  “Don’t worry about it, Karen,” Jenna said, giving her an encouraging pat on the shoulder. “You’ll get it right in the next half. I know you will.” Then she leaned toward her to whisper so only she could hear, “And if it makes you feel better, I saw Chelsea trip over her own shoelaces yesterday.” She winked. “Miss Perfect has klutzy moments, too, just like everybody else.”

  Karen giggled. “Thanks, Jenna.”

  Jenna bit into another orange slice and sucked the juice down first. Then she stuck the peel into her mouth to make a huge orange smiley face.

  “A borange a bay beeps the boctor abay,” she sang at the top of her lungs, as best as she could with the orange stuck in her mouth. Soon everyone was laughing, even Chelsea.

  Jenna was in a great mood, even though her team had probably single-handedly set a record for Lakeview’s funniest sports bloopers in just one scrimmage. Her bunkmates were in serious need of some training, but she was confident she could get them ready for Color War, no problem. Even though not everyone in the bunk would be on the same team for Color War, Jenna was playing it safe and trying to get everyone prepped so her color team would be awesome, regardless of who was on it. With a few more scrimmages under their belts and some coaching tips here and there, they’d be ready for the sports competitions. But for today, Jenna was simply enjoying playing her heart out. She was playing forward, and she was on a rampage. Nothing could stop her. Except for maybe Alex. Jenna grabbed a second water bottle from the cooler, popped the lid, and shot a spray of water at Alex’s back.

  “Hey!” Alex cried, laughing. “Watch it!”

  “Oops,” Jenna said, faking surprise. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Very funny,” Alex said. “But you’ll pay for that on the field in the second half.”

  “I don’t think so. One more goal, and 4C’s going down.” Jenna ribbed Alex good-naturedly. She was head-to-head with Alex, who’d scored the last three goals for 4C’s team. But that was the way the two of them liked it. A little bit of friendly competition never hurt anyone.

  “We’ll see about that,” Alex said. “I’ve been saving my best for last.”

  At the start of the second half, both teams took their positions on the field again, doing their best to ignore the sun beating down on them. When Mia blew the whistle, Jenna kicked the ball deep into the left corner of the field and watched as Sarah head-butted the ball to stop it, then passed it right up centerfield to Tiernan.

  Suddenly, Karen raced past Abby and Priya, who were trying to block her, and straight at Tiernan. Jenna couldn’t believe it. Where had this aggressive side of Karen come from?

  “Go, Karen!” Jenna screamed as Karen unbelievably stole the ball from Tiernan and began dribbling it down the field.

  “Help help help help help,” Karen was yelling as she ran. Now that she actually had the ball, she didn’t have a clue what to do with it. Especially since Tiernan, after wiping the look of surprise off her face, had glued herself to Karen’s side to try to get the ball back from her.

  “Over here! I’m open!” Jenna yelled, waving her arms at Karen. “Kick it here!” Alex was on her like a hawk, trying to block her, but Jenna broke free and ran out into the open toward the goal. “Karen. Here!”

  In a moment of panic as Tiernan, Abby, and Priya all descended on her, Karen kicked the ball wildly up into the air. It headed toward Jenna, but she could tell it was going to land a few feet short. She shot into a sprint to see if she could reach it before Alex intercepted it.

  She was running full force when her right foot seemed, strangely, to sink straight into the ground. Her leg twisted, her knees buckled, and a searing needle of pain shot up her calf. For a second, it seemed as if time stopped, and she was airborne. There was a flash of blue sky and green grass, and then she hit the ground so hard that her teeth rattled in her mouth. After that, there was nothing but the pain, the horrible pain, stabbing through her right leg.

  “It hurts!” Jenna sobbed through clenched teeth, when she could breathe again.

  “Jenna, are you okay?” a voice said close to her head. “Open your eyes and look at me. Please.”

  She felt two cool hands holding her head and brushing her hair and clumps of grass and dirt off her face. But she didn’t want to open her eyes and look. No, it was better to keep them closed. Maybe if she kept them closed, her leg would stop throbbing as if it were being prodded by a thousand hot pokers.

  “Jenna, please, come on, sweetie,” the voice said. It was Andie’s voice. Jenna recognized it now. “Open your eyes,” Andie pleaded.

  Jenna finally opened her eyes, letting the tears she’d been holding in run down her cheeks, and looked up into a sea of worried faces. “I think I’m okay,” she whispered between sobs, wiping at her eyes. “My leg just hurts, but it’ll be fine in a minute. I’ll walk it off. What did I trip on?”

  Mia scoped out the grass around where Jenna fell. “It’s a groundhog hole,” she said. “I think you just stepped right into it and tripped.”

  “Stupid groundhog,” Jenna hissed as another stab of pain shot up her leg. “Stupid hole. I could’ve had that goal. I was wide open.”

  Nat, Alex, and Alyssa gave weak laughs.

  “Now I know you’re going to live,” Alex said, trying to kid. But Jenna could see the tears in her eyes, too. That made her cry even harder.

  “Let’s take a look at your leg,” Andie said to Jenna. She reached to take off Jenna’s shoe to check her ankle, but the second she got close to Jenna’s foot, Jenna let out a howl.

  “No! Don’t touch it,” Jenna said, her hands hovering protectively around her leg. Just the thought of the pain she’d feel if anyone touched it was enough to make her panic.

  “Okay,” Andie said, retreating. “No touching.”

  “Where does it hurt?” Alex asked, taking Jenna’s hand.

  She wiped away more tears and pointed to her calf. “Right along my shin.”

  “This doesn’t look so good,” Andie said. “Natalie, please go and get the nurse. And hurry.”

  “No!” Jenna said, trying to maneuver into a semi-standing position without putting any pressure on her right leg. She managed to get onto her left knee, with her right foot propped out in front of her, but even that little movement made her eyes water more. “I probably just bruised it when I fell or something,” she said, in what she hoped was a convincing tone. “It’s fine, really.”

  “Jenna!” Andie said sternly. “Lie back down. It could be broken!”

  “I’m okay,” Jenna said, ignoring her. She put all of her weight on her left foot and hopped around. But the second her right foot made contact with the ground, she sucked in her breath. “Yow!”

  She let Andie and Mia put their arms around her shoulders and ease her back onto the ground, just as the nurse ran onto the field with Nat, a few of the counselors, and—how embarrassing!—a stretcher.

  “There’s no way I’m getting on that thing!” Jenna said, pointing to the stretcher.

  The nurse smiled sympathetically. “Let me just take a look first, and then we’ll see, okay?” She gently examined Jenna’s calf, touching it as lightly as she possibly could. A frown flickered briefly across her face when she
rolled Jenna’s sock down a bit.

  “It’s starting to swell,” the nurse said, pulling out a huge pair of scissors.

  “What are those for?” Karen asked, paling.

  “I have to cut her shoe off,” the nurse said. “If we don’t get it off before her foot swells more, it could cut off circulation.”

  Jenna started to protest but then thought better of it. She didn’t want her foot to fall off, that was for sure.

  Alex grabbed her backpack from the sidelines and eased it under Jenna’s head as a pillow while the nurse cut through Jenna’s shoe and put a splint around her leg. Sarah gave Jenna some water and ibuprofen at the nurse’s instruction, to help with the pain and the swelling.

  “Do I get room service, too?” Jenna teased, trying to crack a smile for her friends.

  “All right,” the nurse said, standing up and motioning Andie, Mia, and Kenny to bring the stretcher over. “We better get you to the infirmary and put an ice pack on your leg. Then you’ll have to take a trip to the emergency room, I’m afraid. This has to be X-rayed.”

  Jenna’s half-smile shriveled up completely. “The emergency room!” she cried, and then she bit her lip to turn off the waterworks she felt building up again. The last thing she wanted to do was spend the rest of this perfect day stuck indoors with a bunch of stuffy doctors, but one look at Andie’s stubborn face, and she knew this was non-negotiable. That was when the panic set in. What if she had to have an operation or something? She tried to swallow her growing fear, not wanting anyone else to see it, but her heart was hammering so loudly, she was sure it was echoing for all to hear.

  “I’ll take you, Jenna,” Andie said with finality, but then she leaned over and gave her a hug. “It’ll be a quick trip,” she said soothingly. “You’ll see. But it’s important to make sure your leg’s not broken.”

  “Okay.” Jenna finally nodded reluctantly. “Oh, the mortification,” she said melodramatically as Kenny and the nurse carefully lifted her onto the stretcher. “Farewell, dear friends. I beg of you to forget this stretcher and remember me only in my days of glory on the soccer field.”

  “What are we going to do with you, Miss Jokester?” Andie sighed with exasperation, but she was smiling. Nat, Alex, and Alyssa just shook their heads and smiled, too, but they still looked worried.

  “I’ll be fine,” Jenna called back to her friends as she was carried off the field. “As long as no one else sees me on this stretcher.” She smiled a little when she heard the sound of their laughter. That was her job, to make everyone laugh. But the last thing she felt like doing was laughing right now. All she could do, as the nurse led the way to the infirmary, was hope that things weren’t as bad as they seemed.

  chapter THREE

  Things weren’t as bad as they seemed. They were worse. Jenna sighed and shifted in her emergency-room bed, replaying this afternoon’s catastrophe over and over again in her head. Why hadn’t she seen that stupid groundhog hole? Of all the ridiculous ways to end up in an ER, that had to be the dumbest. All of her earlier attempts to make light of this situation had fizzled out when she was faced with the creepily clean hospital. She couldn’t even think of one single, solitary joke to tell to pass the time. More than that, she didn’t even feel like joking. And when that happened, she knew she was in bad shape.

  “Jenna?” a voice pulled her out of her thoughts. “Are you going to put down a card, or do I have to play your hand for you?”

  Jenna blinked and looked up from the cards in her hand to see Andie sitting across from her on the bed.

  “Sorry,” Jenna said, trying to scratch at a spot on her calf hidden under the makeshift splint. “I guess I zoned out.” She laughed halfheartedly. They’d been playing cards for the last three hours, in between filling out paperwork and waiting for doctors and nurses in the ER to come poke and prod Jenna. They’d made her put on a totally see-through hospital gown before they would X-ray her leg, and she’d been shivering ever since.

  But that wasn’t even the worst of it. The worst was that she’d been taken to the X-ray room in a wheelchair! How mortifying, when she could walk perfectly fine. Almost. Sort of. Okay . . . not really. She couldn’t walk at all. And now she had to stay put in this bed—doctor’s orders—until he came in with the results of her X-ray. If he ever came, that is.

  Jenna sighed again, then handed her cards to Andie. “Can we take a break for a while? I don’t feel like playing anymore.”

  “Sure,” Andie said. “How about a little celeb gossip instead?” She pulled Cosmo Girl and US Weekly out of her bag.

  “Nah,” Jenna said glumly.

  “Your leg’s not hurting you too much, is it?” Andie asked worriedly, tucking the blanket on the bed around Jenna’s legs.

  “Not too bad,” she said. “I don’t think anything’s broken.” Maybe if she kept saying that, it would be true. Her leg was throbbing, even inside the splint, and every time she accidentally moved her toes or shifted her weight, the sharp pain was enough to make her eyes fill with tears all over again. She could tough this out . . . she had to. Color War started next week, and she was going to play, no matter what. “I bet it’ll be fine by tomorrow,” she said hopefully.

  “Maybe.” Andie smiled sympathetically, and Jenna could tell she was trying (a little too hard) to stay optimistic. “Let’s just see what the doctor says.”

  “Where is he, anyway?” Jenna grumbled. “They took the X-ray like an hour ago.”

  “About twenty minutes ago, to be more precise,” the doctor said, walking into the room.

  “Sorry,” Jenna stammered, blushing.

  “No apology necessary.” The doctor smiled. “Waiting in an emergency room can make minutes feel like hours.”

  “You’re telling me,” Jenna agreed, smiling in relief.

  “So, how’s your leg feeling now?” the doctor asked, checking Jenna’s toes and knee for swelling.

  “Way better,” Jenna lied. “I think we can take the splint off now. No problem. Nothing’s broken, right?”

  The doctor slid Jenna’s X-ray out of a large envelope and clipped it onto a lit-up screen on the wall.

  “Well, Jenna,” he said, “it’s not good news, but it’s not as bad as it could’ve been, either. You have a hairline fracture in your tibia.” He pointed to a very thin, barely perceptible crack on the X-ray of her calf bone.

  “That means it’s not broken, right?” Jenna asked, her heart giving a small leap of hope. “That means I can play sports again? If it’s just a fracture.”

  “I’m afraid not,” the doctor said gently. “A fracture is still a broken bone. You’re lucky it wasn’t a worse break. This type of fracture heals relatively quickly. But we’ll have to set it, and you’ll need a cast for about six weeks.”

  “Six weeks!” Jenna cried. “But that’s forever!”

  “It’ll go by faster than you think,” the doctor said as he took down the X-ray, snapped Jenna’s medical chart shut, and stepped toward the door. “I’ll send for one of the nurses to apply your cast and show you how to use your crutches.”

  “Crutches, too?” Jenna flopped back on the bed as the doctor gave her one more patient smile before walking out of the room.

  “The doctor was right,” Andie said, squeezing Jenna’s shoulder. “The next month will fly by. I broke my wrist when I was ten, and I had the cast off in no time.”

  “But you didn’t break it at camp, right before Color War, did you?” Jenna asked, not even trying to hide the crabbiness in her voice.

  “No,” Andie admitted reluctantly, “but you’ll still have a blast in Color War. You’ll see!”

  “Not in sports,” Jenna said.

  “You can be our token cheerleader!” Andie cried. But when Jenna shook her head, she tried again. “Mascot? Coach?”

  “It won’t be the same,” Jenna whispered. She bit her lip, trying to fight back the tears. But she couldn’t hold them back anymore, even as the nurse wrapped the plaster cast around her leg. The
re went her chance to compete in Color War. There went the rest of her summer . . . down the drain.

  Just the sight of the Lakeview campground as they drove in from the hospital made Jenna feel even worse. As she looked out at the lake, which she wouldn’t be swimming in, and the soccer fields, which she wouldn’t be playing on, her heart took a plunge to at least six feet under. She wobbled uncertainly on her crutches as she pulled herself out of the car, and she nearly tipped forward on her first awkward step. Luckily, Andie was there to steady her. Jenna didn’t even have the energy to protest when Andie had to help her maneuver from the car to the bunk.

  “Do you want me to see if I can get Pete to make a plate for you from the mess hall?” Andie asked as they slowly climbed the few steps to the bunk.

  “I’m not really hungry,” Jenna said. Suddenly she felt exhausted. Her leg felt strangely heavy and clunky in its cast, and her armpits hurt from leaning on her crutches, even though she’d only been using them for a few minutes. Great. How were her arms going to feel tomorrow after a full day of crutching it? She didn’t even want to think about it. All she wanted to do was crawl into her bed, pull the pillow over her head, and forget about this whole awful day.

  But as she hobbled into the bunk, she saw that she wouldn’t be getting her wish anytime soon.

  “Jenna!” Natalie cried, leaping off her bed and rushing toward her. “Are you okay? We’ve been so worried.”

  Alyssa, Tori, Karen, and Jessie surrounded her, trying to give her half-hugs around the bulky crutches and help her to her bed all at once.

  “So, what’s the damage?” Alyssa said, inspecting Jenna’s cast.

  “A hairline fracture,” Jenna said, making her best attempt at her usual carefree smile, but it wasn’t easy. She had a feeling her friends could see through her, too.

  As Jenna settled onto her bed, her friends flocked around her. Nat fluffed her pillows, Karen searched through Jenna’s cubby for her pj top and a pair of shorts (since her pj bottoms wouldn’t fit around her cast), and Mia broke out a set of permanent markers from the arts-and-crafts box under her bed.