Meet Cute.

Usually, the guy runs into the girl. Maybe she’s outside in a downpour and forgot her umbrella. He sidles up beside her to lend the space under his. They fall in love, the happily ever after is implied, and you never again hear about the guy who fell in love with the girl.

But it was Talon who ran into me. Well, ran into turns the situation into something it isn’t. She crashed her car into mine, ripping most of the left side of my car away from its frame.

She was racing a yellow light and disregarded the mathematical certainty that she would not have been able to make the left-hand turn at the speed she was going. On top of that, the roads were slick from the beginning of the Nor’easter our little city had been preparing for.

Of course, when the police report was released, she was not at fault. Her brakes had failed and it was determined that human reaction time would not have allowed her to throw her car into a lower gear to slow her down.


I was home from university for Christmas, and the first thing my parents had wanted from me was to take my fifteen-year-old brother out just to spend some time with him. Apparently he was having some issues with some guys harassing him at school.

I picked up my brother from my parents’ house and asked him what he wanted to do for the day. He shrugged at first. It was only when I had made it across the city that he finally sighed.

“There’s a, uh, a new exhibit at the museum that I’ve been curious to see. I mean, you don’t have to. I know that this storm is supposed to bury us in a shit-ton of—”

“Jaime,” I stated, to remind him to get on with whatever he had to say.

“Right, okay. Um, then, if it’s not too much, perhaps we could possibly try the new Thai food place?”

As we were walking around the museum, I turned to Jaime and said, “You do know that Mom and Dad asked me to spy for them, right?”

He laughed. “They were never subtle, Oz.” Then he got all serious with me and sighed heavily. “You remember how I have this weird speech impediment that only happens when I’m really nervous?”

“The lisp-stuttering thing?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, what about it? You’ve had that since you could gurgle.”

He nodded. “Some teammates thought it would be funny to harass me about it. But it’s not that big a deal. It’s just some simple hazing, you know? The guys will let it go sooner or later. Right?

“Now, I don’t know what Mom told you, but you know she tends to exaggerate the things that happen to me. I’m still the baby of the family. It’s not as bad as she says. I’m not, like, I don’t know; Mom calls it ‘hopeless.’ Yeah, it’s annoying. But, I’m sixteen. ‘Almost everything’ annoys me. That’s what Mom says, anyway… But she basically thinks I’m suicidal. Which I’m not,” he refined quickly. “I’m not suicidal.” He dropped the subject after that, which I was okay with. He just stared straight ahead longingly.

“So, are you getting hungry?” I asked, just to change the subject.

He smiled gratefully and nodded. “Mom’s been trying to get me to diet with her, so it’s like I haven’t eaten in ages.”

I laughed and draped my arm over his shoulder. “Food it is.” I led him out to the parking garage and unlocked my car.

We pulled out onto the main street, slowing down when the light turned yellow.

Jaime played with the buttons to my stereo, grumbling about how I didn’t have any “cool music” to listen to. He eventually changed to the radio instead of the CDs I had in the player. He kept fiddling with the settings until he found a station that suited his wants.

The light turned green and I made the left turn onto the road with the Thai place.

Jaime was busy talking my ear off about how he’d wanted to learn how to longboard, but Mom wouldn’t let him because he “could fall and break all his bones off.”

“She just doesn’t want another son who’ll break several bones before he’s eighteen,” I told him. “Our family is prone to juvenile osteoporosis.”

“That’s not a thing,” my brother laughed.

“Whether it’s a real thing doesn’t matter. But that’s why Mom is always worried about us. We can break our limbs just by thinking about it hard enough.”

Jaime rolled his eyes. “Well, at what point will she stop pestering me to wear a helmet when I go to my friend’s house?”

“Never.” I put on my turn signal and checked my blind spot before pulling into the left-turn-only lane to the restaurant, applying the brake for the yellow light. “Mom still calls me to make sure I haven’t gotten into any accidents that might result in me losing a limb. One of these times,” I promised, turning to smile at Jaime.

Suddenly, my body was thrown toward the steering wheel. There was a harsh knock to my forehead, and the last thing I saw was my brother’s bloodied face pressed into the dashboard above the glove compartment.


I was wheeled into the same hospital room as Talon. She sat up as soon as my nurse left and inspected me. “You’re the kid from the car I hit, yeah?”

I turned to take her in; she had dyed orange-blonde hair that she kept pushing out of her face, blue eyes that were complemented and exaggerated by her hair, and she had several piercings. Her septum piercing looked ridiculous against her pale skin. “That I am,” I muttered, folding my arms over my chest. There was a sharp ricocheting pain in my ribs, so I lowered my arms to my sides.

She let out a happy sigh. “Thank God. They said that I had killed you.”

“Well, I’m alive.”

“I’d hate to have that on my conscience.”

“I don’t know about my brother—”

Her attention snapped to me in an instant. “Wait, what?”

“My little brother was in the passenger’s seat. I think a nurse told me he was in the ICU, but I don’t know for sure.” I poked at my forehead where there was a large clump of gauze. It felt like someone was using a battering ram against my brain.

I don’t know how I escaped from the car crash with only a few lacerations on my face, a concussion, and a broken leg, while my brother was in the ICU. It just didn’t add up.

She started moving around on her bed, the noise from the bed sheets rubbing together making the battering ram in my head just a tad bit worse.

I looked over at her. “What the hell are you—”

She was pulling at the wires attached to her. “I have to see if he’s okay.”

“Hey,” I tried. “Hey!” The second time worked, as she jumped slightly and faced me. “Lay back in your bed and quit fussing. We’ll get a nurse to check on my brother, okay? But there’s nothing you can do. And you’re really freaking me out.”

She frowned and bit at her lip, but settled down anyway. She hit the ‘call’ button.

I turned and looked out the window. The snow was coming down in big, fat, wet flakes now, landing on the window every once in a while and melting slowly.

“So,” she interrupted, “what’s your name?”

“Oswald. But everyone calls me Oz,” I mutter absently, a wave of my hand to follow.

“Oz? Like, The Wizard of Oz?”

“Yes. But my name’s Oswald, not Oscar.”

“You’re peculiar. Anyway, I’m Talon, like a bird’s claw,” she clarified. She reached a hand out for me to shake. “What were you and your brother doing out in this weather?”

“He wanted to go see a new exhibit at the museum, about the Rukwatitan bisepultus — I still don’t know what it is, some kind of dinosaur? —, then get Thai food.”

“Wait, there are still nerds who go to museums? That’s fascinating.” She was facing me, sitting cross-legged on the hospital bed with her chin in her hands, like she was interested in what I was saying.

I ignored her query about my “nerd brother.” In fact, I tried to ignore her completely.


Talon liked to talk. Sometimes, it wasn’t even intelligible things. She just liked any sound her vocal cords could make.

She was humming the Jeopardy theme, even though she wasn’t watching the T.V, nor was the program playing.

She even talked in her sleep. As if having to hear her all day wasn’t enough, I had to suffer through the night. At one point, I thought about smothering her with my pillow. Then maybe I could get two minutes of peace and quiet. But I refrained.

“You know,” she started.

I got up out of my bed and hobbled out. Luckily she didn’t follow me. I went to the nurse’s station to inquire about my brother. It had been a week, so I hoped he was better, if only slightly.

Just my luck, he’d been moved out of the ICU, but was still under constant care. I made my way to his room. He was laying down in the bed, a brace around his neck. He looked like he was asleep and at peace.

I walked up beside his head. There were a few slivers of hair hanging down into his eyes, so I gently pushed them out of his face.

He lazily opened his eyes at the touch, breaking that peace. “Hi,” he yawned, a small, sad smile pulling at the corner of his lips.

“Hi, Jaime.” I was almost afraid, but pushed myself to ask, “How are you?”

“Sleepy, mostly,” he yawned again. He leaned the weight of his head against my hand. “What about you?” He nodded to the crutches.

“Well, Mom will rub in the fact that we have juvenile osteo—”

“Shut up,” he smiled. “Speaking of Mom, has she been bothering you as much as she had been me?”

“I haven’t seen her.”

“Oh.” He looked down awkwardly.

“Don’t worry. She’s far more worried about her glass fifteen-year-old. As would I, so you need to sleep.”

“I’ve been sleeping a week straight, Oz.”

“Yes, but sleep heals the body, remember? So take a nap, kiddo. I’ll be back to see you later, okay?”

“Fine.”

As I left his room, Talon came skipping down the hall. “Hey!” she laughed. “How is he?” She moved to take a peek into the room, but I stopped her.

“He’s taking a nap right now, so I think it would be best you leave him be.”

“Oh, okay.” Without skipping a beat she jumped into the next topic that came to her mind. “Yeah, I’ve been coming down here to check on him because—”


I was bed-ridden for two days after talking to my brother. Mostly because the pain in my leg was almost unbearable after hobbling around.

During those two days, Talon had gotten far too close for my liking. She sat on my bed, moving her hands wildly as she told me about the accident from her side of the story.

“Man, my car, dude, just wouldn’t slow down. I had my foot to the floor, but that damned brake, man, just didn’t want to work. The cop, he asked me why I hadn’t shifted down. But I didn’t realized I was out of control until it was too late. The intersection came and went, and then there was your car, in the path of mine.”

I had a pillow over my face, silently hoping that I could smother myself to death.

As luck would have it, I didn’t die, no matter how much I wanted to right now.

The moment I had the okay to get up and roam around again from my doctor, I made a quick bee-line to my brother’s room.

As did Talon, lagging behind me only by a few seconds.

Surprisingly, as we walked down the hall to my brother’s room, Talon was silent. The only sound from her was the thwack! thwack! of her shoes on the tile floor.

I turned the corner from the hall to the room, stopping abruptly when I saw my mother sitting in the seat by Jaime’s head.

She shifted around to see who was coming in, eyes rimmed red. Her usual smile was downturned into her very motherly frown. Her eyes narrowed into a glare when she realized it was me.

The glare was very familiar. Eerily so. The last time I saw that look, I had told her I was going to switch majors (for the better, but she still was unimpressed by my indecision about my life).

The glare told me she was less than enthusiastic that my baby brother was lying in a hospital bed, and much less so that I had put him there.

My father looked up from his spot on the other side of the bed. Anger bubbled behind his eyes and he physically bristled.

The atmosphere intensified when Talon pushed by me to get into the room. She stopped, just as I had, and took in my parents. She turned to me as if to say I owed her an explanation.

My mother’s frown deepened at the random girl in her son’s hospital room, but I had that under control when I grabbed Talon by the back of her shirt and pulled her back out of the room. I let the door shut behind me.

“Wow, what the hell was that about?”

I just wanted her to trip and smash her nose in.

“I’m sorry, what?” she asked me.

“What, what?” I stalled, realizing I’d said the last statement about her smashing her nose in out loud.

She gave me a disbelieving glance, before she bounced right into talking about the situation that had occurred in my brother’s room. I refused to talk to her all the way back to our room, where I plonked down on my bed and folded my arms over my chest.


Talon finally went home after two weeks of nonstop talking. Though her doctor told her about a week ago that she could leave, she was steadfast in staying.

“I have to make sure the kid’s okay,” she frowned at him, arms crossed defiantly after he told her that she could leave.

He’d given up trying to talk some sense into her about the seventh time she referred to my brother as “the kid.”

As she shouldered her purse and reached for the cloth bag that had her change of clothes in it, she turned to me. “Get well. And keep in touch.” She was referring to the several (hundred) hints she’d dropped, as well as the little Post-it on the table beside me where she had scrawled her number. I tried crumpling it up and throwing it away a few times, but it showed up again the next morning.

She looked like she wanted to say something more about the fact that she was expecting me to call her sometime in the future. She lingered at the doorway, pondering whether to say something else. If she had, I probably would have taken my crutch to her temple. But she just blinked blankly at me before turning and leaving the room.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

Finally.