“Do not fuck the rookie.”
I shove him back and ignore the internal flinch because only one person at the station knows my whole big virgin secret, and that’s Easton, who won’t ever tell, not even under the pain of torture.
And it’s not that I’m ashamed. It’s more that whenever people find out, they make it their mission to try and get me laid, and it never ends well. So I pretend, and Easton keeps my secret, and the world keeps turning…
Blah, blah, bullshit, blah.
I grin, showing teeth. “Dude. Not a chance. I know better than to shit where I eat.”
“Do you?” he asks.
I hold up both hands. “I flirted with a rookie once, and it ended so badly the guy quit.” Also true—but it was obvious that rookie already had one foot out the door once he realized itwasn’t all naked firefighter calendars and rescuing kittens out of trees.
I’m not actually going to take responsibility for that one, but he was before Lex’s time and a great deflection from the truth.
“Come on, dickheads,” comes the voice of my best friend. Easton appears a second later, grinning from beneath a collection of shaggy blond curls that desperately need a trim. He has the truck keys in his hand and is holding his radio. “Let’s fucking roll.”
I have no idea what the call is for or what we’re doing. But I’m amongst the only people I really consider family, apart from my mom and sisters, so whatever I’m about to face, it’s going to be fine.
It is not going to be fine. It is not going to be fine at all.
I’ve been doing this job a while now, but somehow, I always forget that when little kids get scared shitless, it literally means shitless. It doesn’t seem to matter if they’re four or fourteen, inevitably, someone will shit their pants.
Today, it’s a six-year-old boy with his head stuck between the railings of his stairs at the top of his landing. Before we got there, his dad had been dealing with the stress by trying to literally rip the boy’s head through the slats, and his mom had dealt by crying hysterically and refusing to listen to the dispatcher when she tried to give her instructions.
And it didn’t get better when we arrived. The dad took a step back, at least, but his mom is literally at my elbow, screaming into my ear as her kid cries and makes a mess of himself.
And me.
As much as I want to just humor her and let her freak, the boy’s stats keep dropping. It’s probably due to anxiety, but his BP is all over the place, and he’s tachy at 120 bpm.
“Alright, we need to cut the railing,” I finally say once both Easton and I can determine the wood is synthetic and not going to bend the way we want it to.
“Do you have to?” the kid’s dad asks. “He stuck his damn head through there. Why can’t he pull it out?”
“Ever hear of a finger trap?” Easton says as he adjusts the pulse ox on the boy’s finger. The smell in the kid’s pants is getting worse, and I’m trying my best not to gag as I glance around for anything that can break the railing. “Easy to go in, almost impossible to go out.”
“But that’s going to be expensive to fix. You fuckers gonna pay for it?” he demands.
I turn and look over my shoulder as I hold his shit-pants son, who’s shaking and sweating and so scared he’s not even crying anymore. “No. But you can probably crowdfund for his funeral if you let him go into cardiac arrest.”
The dad freezes. “I…” He stops, holds up his hands, and takes several steps backward until he hits the wall. The stunned look on his face tells me he gets it, and that, at least, is a relief, considering the mom is crying hysterically again and tugging at my elbow.
I push her off gently, then turn toward Easton. “Go check the truck for something we can saw through this with, and ask Lex if he can bring some gas for this kid. We need to get his heart rate down.”
Easton nods and takes off running right as the kid heaves and throws up all over my arm.
“Sorry,” he wobbles. “I don’t feel good.”
“I know. And we’re going to get you out of here, and then you’ll feel better, okay?” I rub his back and do my best to keep him calm. “Just try and take slow breaths.”
He kid nods, shaking from the adrenaline. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”
My heart breaks a little for him because I know he didn’t. He was just being a kid. “It’s alright. I promise you’re going to be fine.” I don’t feel like an asshole for saying those words, even if I don’t know for sure they’re true. I need to believe in them in order to do my job, and lying to myself is something I’ve gotten a little too good at.
Like how I say I love my job. Like how I say I don’t mind taking care of my mom. Like how I tell everyone I’ve never regretted giving up my career to do this so I can make sure my mom and sisters have food to eat and a roof over their heads.
Like how I never talk about what happened with my stepdad, or how my mom was in and out of rehab for five years before she finally got sober. Or how my sisters were sent to foster care where I wasn’t allowed to see them for years before my mom finally got her shit together enough that they could come home.
