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“I was, but I have a patient in room four who needs stitches.”
“Okay, let’s go do it so you can go home.”
I was prepared to introduce them, but as was prone to happen in River Gorge, Tonya knew both Noah and his mother.
“What on earth did you get into this time, Noah?”
He didn’t say anything. Instead, he just held up his arm, showing her the cut.
“Okay, I know you’re up on your tetanus shots since I gave you one last summer, so let’s just get this stitched up.”
He nodded, but he looked like he might be sick, so I decided some distraction might be in order.
“So Noah, are you excited about spring break?”
“Well, I was, but like I said, I’ll probably be grounded the whole time.” He glanced at his mom, but her look didn’t give him much hope that he was wrong.
Tonya picked up the syringe with the numbing agent in it. “Okay, Noah, you remember the drill from when we stitched up your calf, right?”
“I do,” he said, turning his head away. Not that I blamed him. Truth was, the numbing was easily the worst part of getting stitches.
She nodded at me, letting me know she was about to start, so I went back to work to distract him.
“So, I love your nail color. You do that yourself?” He looked at me with a wariness and hesitation that I knew all too well. So I kept talking to see if I could make him feel any more at ease. “I can’t do my own. I do okay with the paint on my left hand since I’m right-handed. But when I try to paint the right hand with the left hand, I’m just completely hopeless. I used to have my friend Julius do it for me when we lived close to each other, but I haven’t really messed with that since I moved to River Gorge.”
Now that he got that I wasn’t judging him, he perked up a bit. “I don’t do mine. My friend Mitchell does it for me. He wants to go to school to do hair and nails.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He’s the best.”
“He sounds like a good friend.”
“He is. And good friends are hard to come by. Especially when you don’t…” He hesitated and took a breath. “Fit in.”
“Oh, believe me, I know.” Tonya gave me a look that let me know to continue on with what I was doing. “I mean, I probably had it easier than you do living in such a small town. I grew up in Austin. I can’t even imagine growing up in a small town like River Gorge.”
“Yeah, the pressure to either play football or be on the rodeo team and all that stuff is really, really heavy.”
“I imagine so. Do you like football?”
“Yeah, umm, no, not at all.”
I chuckled. “Me either. I was more of a theater kid myself.”
“Oh. Me, too.” He got so excited he forgot what we were doing and jerked his arm.
“Hey, if you want this scar to be pretty and neat, you need to be still,” Tonya grumbled.
“Sorry,” he said, wincing.
“We’re doing Something Rotten for the spring production. I’m so excited.”
“Really? We did that my junior year of high school. It was so much fun.”
“What part did you play?”
“Actually, I was the stage manager that year. How about you?”
