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“Ready to go?” she asks Seth.
“Yes,” he says as he bolts for the front door.
Heidi looks at me, her expression aching, but we can’t talk right now.
We give each other hidden smiles before she follows him out.
The door closes.
Shit.
CHAPTER 30
DREW
“It’s not broken,” Jenna says as she dabs the bridge of my nose. “Just bruised, I think.”
She opens the first aid kit on the kitchen table and rifles through the contents.
“You think?” I ask.
“Well, my first aid training didn’t cover nose injury by severe pelvic thrust, but yeah. I think.” She grins at her own joke as she rips open a butterfly bandage. “If it starts bleeding or becomes too unbearable, stop by the campus wellness center. Otherwise, they’d probably just slap a bandage on it and tell you to take ibuprofen... like me! Take some ibuprofen. You’ll be fine.”
“No, it’s okay,” I say as I lean forward. “I trust you.”
She lays the bandage on my nose with a careful, surprisingly gentle, touch.
“Leave that on for a day or so,” she says. “It might not do jack shit other than remind you not to touch your nose, but as someone who has broken her nose before, that’s a lot more difficult than you’d think.”
“I’ll do my best.” I pick up the ice pack again and rest it between my eyes. “How did you break your nose?”
“Neighborhood fight club,” she answers, then flashes a smile. “No. Tenth grade. I got punched in the face by the ninety pound farm girl at a school dance because she thought I was hitting on her date, Charlie Nolan.”
“Were you?”
“No. Actually, I was confronting him about what he did to Heidi.”
I lower the ice pack, suddenly filled with an urge to track down this Charlie Nolan... and making him pay.
“What’d he do to Heidi?” I ask.
Jenna takes a breath. “This might surprise you, but Heidi isn’t exactly a social butterfly. So, when Charlie Nolan, one of the hottest jocks in our class, asked her to the spring fling dance, she was so excited. We got all dressed up. I did her hair. I taught her how to do her make-up. We made a whole thing of it. Then, we waited for Charlie Nolan to pick her up, but he never showed. And it broke her heart.”
My chest twinges. “That sucks,” I say.
“Yeah, it really did. She stayed home. I went to the dance, mostly because she made me. She’s the suffer alone type. I walked in and there was Charlie Nolan, bumping and grinding and having himself a great time. I went right up to him, asked what the hell he was doing, and he just started laughing. His friends cracked up, too. It’s like the entire class was in on the joke except us.”
I bite down. “Assholes.”
Jenna nods. “Anyway, that’s when Princess Cow Patty wandered up and picked a fight with me. She punched me, I backhanded her, and she—” she snaps her fingers, “went right down. Charlie Nolan didn’t like that, so he tried to take me down, too. I kicked him so hard in the jewels, he got testicular torsion.” She sighs, nostalgic. “That was the night I knew I wanted to be a doctor.”
I squint, amused. “Was Heidi okay?” I ask.
“Eventually, yeah,” she says. “But she never went to a dance again. She skipped our senior prom even though, at that point, people had forgotten all about it. Three really nice guys asked her to go. She said no to all of them.” She pauses. “You know I almost went to Yale?”
I blink. “Really?”
“Full ride, not that I needed it. But I moved out here with Heidi instead because I knew that if I didn’t, then she’d spend four years alone in a dark room. I didn’t want that for her. I’ll have my pick of medical schools regardless, thanks to my mother’s name, but you know all about that. You’re privileged, too.”
