Time Lifts the Light

My muscles jerked into action and I leapt up as if someone had snuck up behind me and screamed in my ear. My knees knocked into the table and I winced as I heard a dull smacking sound.

"Oi!" Mikey protested as his bottle of orange soda was knocked on it's side, pouring over the table and oozing into the fabric of his shirt sleeve. "Indy! Mr. Cross is going to kill me!"

Daniel was looking at me strangely. If he had realized my grip on the situation, I figured he would do one of two things: run away in horror or give me that half-smile of his and push some sort of slimy food into Georgia's face.

Maybe I was idealizing a bit on the last option, though.

But, oddly enough, D.B.'s look was one that plainly said what the hell? and maybe even a little bit of I hope she doesn't yell at me again.

"What are you doing?" Kim asked, screwing up her face. "Oh, your pizza fell on the ground."
"I have to -- I'm leaving," I answered, immediately feeling my face turn red. My pizza had fallen into my lap when my knees banged the table and then tumbled to the floor when I stood up. There was a triangular patch of sauce and little flecks of pepperoni marking the middle of my skirt, a greasy arrow pointing to my crotch. "I'm going t-to the bathery." I shook my head. "Nursery."

I began gathering my things and shoving them into my backpack. My hands shook. D.B. was still staring.

"This school has a nursery?"
"Hey, that's my textbook!"
I paused for a moment and took Mikey's textbook out of my backpack, tossing it to the side and accidentally squishing Kim's juicebox, which squirted on Mikey's face.

"You've got to be kidding me," he said, dripping.

"I'm not going to the nursery!" I shouted. "I combined bathroom with nursery, then falsely corrected myself, then put Mikey's book into my backpack by mistake and I'm really sorry!" I zipped up my bag so hard that the zipper got caught in the lining. "And now this -- fricking -- got it! I'm going to the ba -- nurse! I'm going to the nurse!"
D.B. was standing up. What was he doing? What did he think he was doing? "Are you feeling okay? I'll come with --"
"No!" I screeched. "Sit down!"
D.B. plopped back down in his seat, bewildered.

And I turned and ran for all I was worth.

"Wait! Indy, can I eat your pizza?"
"Don't touch that, Mikey, it was on the ground!"

By the time I'd reached the nurse, I realized that I really had no reason to be there; it just happened to be the first thing that had appeared in my mind. I grew paranoid as thoughts of D.B. tracking me down fluttered into my head and jumped about a mile when Nurse Stump (who had singlehandedly tried to organize a girl's football team in her days at James Monroe High) opened the door.

"Come on," she beckoned, impatiently scratching my name off the clipboard.
"No I-I'm okay," I protested, standing. "I just --"
"You need a new skirt," she drawled, pointing to my pizza-stained ensemble. "You on your period?"
"No!" I choked. "It's pizza! It's shaped like a triangle!"
"I've seen weirder things," Ms. Stump said, shrugging her linebacker shoulders.

She disappeared through the door to her office and I wearily followed, ignoring the stares from the ruffled looking freshman boys, each sporting their own shiny black eyes and lounging in opposite corners of the waiting room. Nurse Stump was half hidden behind her desk, her rear end sticking up as she dug around in an old box for a skirt. These were the clothes for the kids who refused to dress out, the kids who threw up or wet themselves, the kids who accidentally dropped pizza down their fronts like an idiot. I was handed a musty smelling skirt was was more or less my size and a plastic bag in which to place the stained one I was wearing now.

I slipped into the bathroom connected to the Nurse's office just as the lady who sat at the front desk poked her head through the door.

"Jack Lewis is here, Nurse Stump," she said. "Hit in the nose, he said."
"Lewinski," I heard him protest, his voice sounding thick and muffled through the door of the bathroom. "It's Polish, it's Lewinski."
"Sit down, Jack."
"I'm fine! It stopped already!"
"Sit down, Jack. This is the third nosebleed this week."
"Rough week."
"You need a new shirt."
"I need a new nose."
"Sit." I could hear the nurse dragging the old box out from under the desk. "Why were you playing in your uniform shirt, anyway?"
"I took my gym clothes home to be washed. All I had were my cleats."
"And Coach couldn't --"
"I have to play!" he cried. "I can't just waste an entire hour of training!"
"And I suppose wasting an entire shirt is the alternative?"
"We've got a game this weekend, Ms. Stump. If I don't... If I..."
"Lewinski?"
"Atch-oo!"
"Oh!"
"Aw, burfect! It's bleeding agaid!"
"The bathroom, the bathroom! Don't drip on the carpet!"

I realized I'd been doing more eavesdropping than dressing and hastily did up the last few buttons on my skirt as the handle to the bathroom jiggled violently.

"Just a second!" I blurted, racing to unlock the door.

Jack Lewinski, James Monroe's star baseball player, stood before me with an ashen face and a freely bleeding nose. One hand pinched his nostrils together and the other was cupped under his nose, attempting to catch the overflow.

"S'cuse me," he said. "I'm sord of dribbing."

I leapt out of the way and he barreled past me, leaning over the sink and running the water, smearing the tap with blood. His close-cut dark hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat and I was slightly distracted by the smell of dust in the air. It seemed that, as he had sneezed, he'd sprayed blood down his front. His shirt was splattered artfully, as if on purpose. He was still wearing his cleats.

"Ms. Hutchinson," Nurse Stump barked, entering the bathroom. "Go under my desk and find a clean shirt for Lewinski."
"Y-Yes, Ma'am."

The box of old clothing was heavy, but I lugged it out and plunged into it's moldy depths. I figured I was looking for a medium or maybe even a small, but all I could find were triple XL's and a few dead bugs.

"What are you doing, Lewinski?"
"I'm trying to blow all the blood out so I can get back to prac -- nyaah!"
"Hold your head back to stop the blood!"
"Get off! I can feel it going down my throat! Get off, get off!"
"This is how you stop a nosebleed!"
"It's going to slide down into my stomach, you crazy witch doctor! I'm going to start burping up blood and I'm going to die and you're going to be so sorry..."
"I'm sure."
"I'll haunt you."
"Hm."

I had managed to find a large girl's shirt, which was sort of like a boy's medium, so I set it aside. It was at this point that Jack started making impatient whining noises. I could hear a foot tapping.

"What is it now?"
"It tastes like copper and it's all slimy and warm going down the back of my throat. It's like a slug."
"Well, It's your own fault."
"No, it's Bradley Baker's fault, the bitch. Curve-ball, my foot. He wants me out of the game on Saturday so he can heave his sorry ass up off the bench for once."
"I'm warning you, if he shows up here with a black eye, I'm calling you straight out of class."
"Ugh, am I done?"
"Can you still feel it bleeding?"
"Yes, woman! It's sickening, why do you think I'm doing a potty dance?"
"Then it's not done. Hold your head further back."
"Urk!"
"Where's that shirt?" Nurse Stump demanded, bustling out from the bathroom.

I started, vomiting out an "Uh..." before reaching, on reflex, toward the girl's shirt. I hoped he wouldn't be able to tell the difference, except for maybe a bit of suspicious looseness in the chest area. Nurse Stump nodded her head toward the door and I approached the bathroom feeling slightly queasy. A trail of blood ran from the door to the washbasin, which was stained a wishy-washy pink, and it almost looked as if a murder had been committed and then cleaned up hastily in the sink.

Jack Lewinski leaned under the faucet and scrubbed at his face. Water soaked his hair and collar and he let out a grunt of frustration at the cold sensation on his neck. He straightened up, his nose now plugged up with two wads of toilet paper, and started unbuttoning his blood-stained shirt.

"Gimme," he said thickly, stopping halfway down and holding out a hand for the shirt. I gave it to him and turned heel out of the bathroom before he could finish taking off his shirt and I said something ridiculous and embarrassing. "Hey, you're Indigo, right?"
I stopped at the door and looked at him in surprise. "Yeah..."
He turned his back to me as he slipped off his shirt and dropped it to the floor, where it landed with a wet, splattering sound. "You're in my same math class. Ms. Ramirez."
"Oh."
He unfolded the new shirt and shook it out, looking it over before pulling it on and trying to tug the buttons across his chest. "Do you have lunch this period? Is it almost over?"
"I -- I don't really... I don't really know," I stumbled distracted by the frustrated tch! noises he'd began to make. "Are you having trouble with that shirt?"
"Why are all the buttons backwards?" he demanded. "It's like a damn blouse."
"Uh..."

He turned around to face me, the shirt stretching comically across his chest and nearly popping out of the cuff seams, his baseball-enhanced forearms trying valiantly to break free of their girly prison. The blouse was a bit too short as well, and it exposed a patch of tanned skin just below his belly button.

"This is going to be a problem."

I fought back a snigger as Nurse Stump came back into the bathroom to check on Jack and muttered, Oh, Lord before silently leaving. I heard her digging around in the box once more. In a matter of seconds, she produced (by magic, I suspect) a plain white boy's shirt, sized M/L. It wasn't part of the uniform and it fit Jack like a cut-off trash bag, but it was clean and significantly better than my option.

The nurse wrote both our names on one note and we walked back to class together, realizing a little too late that the bell had already rung.

"We're already tardy," Jack shrugged. "Might as well walk slow and enjoy the day, huh?"
"Uh, yeah."
"I'm Jack, by the way. I didn't really get to introduce myself... so... I feel a little stupid, you know. Running around leaking blood."
"Oh, it wasn't that bad."
"I sneezed blood."
"Hm. Point."
"So... You friends with Michael Douglas?"
"Yeah."
"He's really tall."
I laughed. "You think?"
"Yeah... Yeah. Do you know if he's signing up for basketball? We could really use him come Spring..."
"You play basketball?" I asked. "I thought you -"
"No, no, baseball too."
"Oh."
"So?"
"So what?"
"Douglas...?"
"Oh! Uh, no. I don't think he's all too into sports."
"Huh. Shame."

We walked on silently for a while. Jack touched underneath his nose, checking quickly to see if he was bleeding again.

"Are you going to my brother's party on Saturday?" he asked out of the blue.
"Huh?"
"Do you know my brother, Caleb? He's a senior."
"No..."
"Oh. Well, he's having this huge party. I just assumed that everyone knew."
"I don't really go to parties."
"Well, you should come to this one."
I laughed. "My friends are sort of weird. You'd think I'd get made fun of for not going to parties, but they're the sort who'd tease me for going."
"Why?"
"Oh, I don't know. Teenage animals, burping contests, terrible music."
"You should come anyway," he pressed. "Sometimes it's fun to make people mad."

I thought about that for a moment.

"I'll go," I told him suddenly. "As your date."