And She Made the Shape of My Heart With Her Hands

“Ow! Ow! Ow!”

“Okay,” the doctor moved his hands in another position around my wrist. “Does this hurt, too?”

He suddenly gripped my wrist harder; I practically jumped out of my skin. “Holy hell, yes!”

The doctor flinched, either from my language or sudden increase in volume, and let go, taking a clipboard out, and jotting stuff down. “I can already tell it’s broken at least somewhere, but we’re going to take x-rays to be sure where.”

“Okay. Are you doing that this second?”

“There’s someone being x-rayed right now, but we’ll come back and get her in a few minutes,” he answered my brother.

As soon as the doctor left, Garrett muttered, “This is the slowest hospital ever.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Good thing I’m not dying right now.” Garrett snorted.

“How long do you think we were waiting to get in here?” Pat asked. “Maybe like two hours?”

“Eh. Maybe an hour and a half,” I theorized.

“Doesn’t matter. The point is, it took way too long,” Garrett grumbled. “Good thing you weren’t going into labor or something. You would’ve had the kid right on the ER’s floor.”

I let out a faint laugh, as did Pat. “Ew,” I commented.

Two minutes later, I dropped the icepack somewhere on a counter. It had well lost its coolness by then.

“Hey,” I said randomly. “If I did have a baby on the floor out there, do you think we could sue them?”

Pat and Garrett pursed their lips in thought. “Maybe,” they answered in unison.

“Hey. Then I could go home with a new baby and some extra money. That’d be sweet.” Pat laughed lightly as Garrett shook his head, crossing his arms.

“Cara, you can come with me now,” the doctor poked his balding head in. I hopped off the table and left the boys.

The doctor took me in a dark room. He quickly but efficiently took my x-rays and led me back to where I was before. Pat was sitting on the counter where patients were supposed to be and where I had just left. I sat next to him, his right arm and my left arm, (the good one), were touching. I got slight chills even though his warm body heat flowed into me.

Before any of us could start a conversation, the doctor came back in quickly. I was surprised.

“It’s broken,” he stated. Garrett rolled his eyes in a ‘no shit’ sort of way. The short man slapped my x-rays on a backlit frame. He used a silver pen to point to a part of my bone around my wrist that had a long and curvy thin line running across it. “This is obviously where it’s broken. Cara will have to have a cast. We’ll do it right now.” He gestured me to follow him.

***

Garrett smiled. “A purple cast?” I nodded my head eagerly and smiled like a little kid coming out of a candy shop. He chuckled. “Alright, little girl.”

“Hey! I think there’s a black sharpie in the van! I want to be the first to sign it!”

Garrett and I followed Pat to the van. When we got there, Pat rummaged through the glove department, pulling out a small black sharpie. He whipped around and smiled at me as he wrote his name on my new purple cast.

“That’s probably going to be the best name on your cast,” he said, capping the marker.

“Hm. Give me that,” Garrett said, grabbing the marker. He signed his name, too. “It’s not the best name on there anymore.”

I sighed. “Whatever. They’re both awesome. Can we go now?”

Garrett sighed. “Get in the van.”

***

“Oh, I want to sign it, too!”

I chuckled and handed over the marker to Kennedy. He wrote his name and smiled proudly.

“Me next,” Jared said. He spelled his name out and underlined it, giving me the sharpie back.

“Trevor,” I called out. “Sign the cast.”

He got up off the couch and took the marker from me. In sloppy print, he managed to just make ‘Trevor’ readable. He smiled.

“Thanks,” I smiled back.

Not a moment later, John walked through the hotel room’s door, not expecting us to be here. His eyes lit up when he noticed me, but his face remained the same.

“Hey,” he greeted. I smiled back and waved. “How long is that going to be on?” John pointed to the cast on my right forearm.

I shrugged. Then my brother answered for me, “Maybe like six weeks or so.”

He nodded his head as he snatched the black marker from my grasp. In his handwriting, he signed, ‘John Ohh’. He gave the marker back, smiled covertly, and walked away.

I looked down at it. He had nice writing. It was unique.

I was just about to put my arm back down to my side when I pulled it back up to my view again. I studied his name and what was next to it. It was a heart.

My stomach felt like it moved or something. Was that heart supposed to mean something?

I shook my head back and forth from my absurd thoughts. Of course not. That’s just stupid…

“Come on. We have to go,” Tim said as he walked in the room. He spotted me and looked down at the cast. “Oh, yeah. I heard about your fall. You okay?”

I nodded and smiled, assuring Tim it was okay.

“Alright. Well it’s already almost 12 A.M. so we have to go.”

We all shuffled down to the van, climbing in. We were all tired, not just from the ‘excitement’ of today, but because of the heat. It really does take a lot out of you.

I sat down in my seat, my butt hitting something. I lifted up and looked down. There was my stupid dark purple Sidekick sitting there, reading that I had two text messages, one from Camille and another I assumed to be from Paul.

I picked up the phone and glared daggers at it. After all, it was the reason I now had this cast on my arm. It was also the one that caused me to wonder about the heart next to John’s name.