“Why? Did you pee your pants?”
“No, I’m bleeding,” Jordan yelled back up at her.
Edison turned and ran out of the room, panting, "ohmygodohmygodohmygod!"
Amy Meets Jordan
"What do we have here?" Amy asked.
Jordan looked down at her bloody shirt and answered, "A ruined shirt and a really bad home first-aid job."
Meet Dr. Amy Stewart. Amy was too short, too brown, too fat and too smart. That's what she thought anyway. She still pictured herself the way she looked as a sophomore in high school. Since that time, Amy had shed twenty pounds, gotten contacts, highlighted her hair and made good use of her brains. But when she looked in a mirror, she still saw her old self. It was like reverse alchemy. Her mirror turned gold into lead.
The first time Amy laid eyes on Jordan was in the emergency room at University Hospital. Amy sat on the rolling stool in a curtained-off cubicle and surveyed her patient. To say that Jordan was good-looking was an understatement. Amy thought Jordan was perfection personified – speaking purely from an anatomical viewpoint. Not that Amy was much of a judge of anything other than medicine, but to her this woman, with the sculpted body and long dishwater-blond hair, looked like one of those Olympic volleyball players everyone went gaga over. In short, she was the type of woman Amy despised.
Well, maybe despised was too strong a word. Loathed? No, she didn't loathe Jordan just because she was the type of woman that stared out at her from magazine covers, made a sports bra look sexy, and made her feel inadequate and homely and invisible. Hate? No, she didn't hate Jordan either, not exactly. She hated the idea of Jordan. Amy hated that there were women out there who looked like Jordan and made women like her feel like something you had to scrape off the bottom of your shoe.
Jordan asked, "You look like you're going to be sick. You're not going to throw up over a little cut and some blood, are you?"
"Of course not," Amy said, lifting her chin defiantly. "I'm a doctor."
"Yeah, but that was an 'I’m going to puke' face if I ever saw one."
Amy took a deep breath and assumed her professional look. Her professional look consisted of knitted eyebrows, a squinted right eye and pursed lips. If she wanted to be super professional she tapped her fingertip on her chin. She had perfected this look in front of her mirror in the bathroom at home. She thought it made her look smart, knowledgeable, caring and in control all at the same time.
"You're not pooping, are you?" Jordan asked.
Amy laughed.
“Because that face you’re making looks like you might have I.B.S. or something.”
Amy decided she was going to have to cultivate another professional look, perhaps one without the eye squint. "Who's the doctor here, you or me?" Amy joked.
"You are," Jordan answered. "Unless…" she said with widening eyes, "you stole a lab coat and scrubs and are impersonating a doctor."
"A doctor with I.B.S.," Amy corrected. She pointed to Jordan's overly bandaged hand, saying, "So, that's some first-aid job. If I didn't know better, I'd say that's an oven mitt under all that gauze. An oven mitt covered in gauze and attached securely by duct tape."
"It is an oven mitt attached securely by duct tape. This is what happens when you let a handyman slash inventor slash horror movie fanatic slash best friend play nurse."
Amy gently turned Jordan's hand over. "Well, it looks like the oven mitt did its job. Though I think it was due more to the tourniquet quality of the duct tape."
"Don't tell Edison that. That's my friend who did this first-aid job. She's already a huge fan of the stuff. Edison always says if you ever have to make a run for it, be sure to pack a hundred dollars in quarters, duct tape, and Vaseline."
Amy agreed on the first two counts, but wasn’t sure if she wanted to know about the Vaseline. "So, tell me what happened." She held Jordan's hand in an upright position and gently prodded at the rest of her arm, checking for contusions or broken bones.
"I fell out of a window. I was rescuing Mr. Pip. He was hanging from a tree branch."
"Who is Mr. Pip?"
"He’s the old man who lives next door."
Amy's eyes widened. Jordan laughed. "I’m kidding. He's my cat."
Amy almost laughed out loud. If she wasn't careful this woman was going to make her stoic doctor personae crumble. "Okay, you fell, but how did the cut happen?"
"There was a broken piece of shower door in the dumpster.”
"You fell into a dumpster?"
Jordan nodded. “Dumpster diving. Literally.”
“So, what happened to Mr. Pip?"
"He’s fine, although he didn’t say thank you.”
"Cats," Amy said, shaking her head in mock disgust.
"When I came to he was sitting on my chest licking his butt."
Amy chuckled. "Why don't you get out of that bloody shirt?" She peeled off her latex gloves and tossed them into a white can sitting on the floor. "Throw it in there."
Jordan looked at the symbol on top of the trashcan. "Because I'm a biohazard?"
"Pretty much. I'll find you another shirt to wear and be right back." She swished aside the curtain, drawing it closed behind her and went in search of the supplies she needed.
The Mole
Amy rounded a corner of the hospital hallway just as Jeremy did and he crashed into her.
Meet Dr. Jeremy Blevins. Jeremy was tall and skinny and had his hair pulled back in a ponytail. He looked like he had never outgrown the garage band look of his teen years. Jeremy was Amy's roommate and whenever she needed a last minute date to chaperone her somewhere, he was always available. As long as there was free food. It was a give-and-take system that had worked well for them for several years.
"I heard you had a hottie come in," Jeremy said. "Wanna trade patients?"
Amy sighed. If Jeremy wanted to trade patients it meant he had somebody really bad. "Who do you have?"
"Mrs. Markus," he said. "She thinks her mole is changing colors again."
Amy grimaced. "No thanks."
"No, you should really see it this time. It is a different color, I swear. It's green today. Last week it was magenta."
"Maybe it's a mood mole," Amy said. She looked closer at Jeremy. His eyes were bloodshot and glassy. "How long have you been on?"
He squinted at his watch and moved his lips in silent calculation. "Sixteen hours and counting. Why, you need some help?"
"Go home," Amy said. "You look like homemade poop."
"I believe the metaphor is homemade soap," he corrected.
"It's not a metaphor it's a simile."
Jeremy wagged his finger in her face. "I know what you're doing. You're trying to distract me from the hottie."
Amy answered, "I hate the term hottie."
“No, you don’t,” Jeremy said. “You only hate it that I didn’t call you a hottie.”
Jeremy dodged Amy’s playful swat. He laughed and walked backwards down the hallway saying with an ominous vampire accent, "Don't be late for supper. Isabel is preparing dinner.”
Isabel was their other roommate. You will meet her later in the story. Isabel was a budding chef. She liked to try out exotic recipes and Amy and Jeremy were her human guinea pigs.
Amy wrinkled her nose in disgust. "You go home first. Text me if she's boiling organ meat again, and I'll smuggle in some fast food."
“You’re looking pretty perky for pulling a double shift in the emergency room,” he said. “If I didn't know better, it almost seems like you’re, oh, what’s the word?” He snapped his fingers. “Happy.”