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Finally a nurse came up to me and said, “You need English?” in a slight accent.
“Yes! I’m so sorry, I’m an American who has been stuck here during the lockdown, and…”
“What symptoms?” she asked, scanning the medical document I had filled out.
“None.”
“You have been in contact with an infected?”
“Yes, my… boyfriend. He has fatigue, a slight fever, and this morning he lost his sense of taste.”
I searched her face for any kind of reaction, but she only nodded and tore open the seal on a big plastic bag. She removed a device that looked like a long Q-tip, then opened a plastic vial on the table next to me.
“I must take sample in nose,” she said. “It will be, ah, unpleasant.”
“Okay,” I said, pulling my mask down so she could access my nostril.
She gently tilted my head back, then inserted the Q-tip. The tip hit the back of my nose, near my sinuses… and thenkept going. My eyes watered and I let out a little whimper as it went deeper into my skull. It felt like it was touching my brain.
She removed the Q-tip and nodded at me. “See? Unpleasant.”
“You weren’t kidding,” I muttered. My eyes were still watering.
She broke the long Q-tip in half, then stuck the cotton part into the vial on the table. Then she screwed the cap on, taped a red sticker over it, and dropped it in a big bin on the ground with all the other tests.
“Results in three days,” she said. “Maybe sooner.”
“Thank you so much,” I said. “What about my boyfriend?”
She looked around. “He is where?”
“He’s back at our hotel. He didn’t want to come, but I was thinking you could give me the testing kit to take to him…”
“He comes here,” she said while throwing away the remaining parts of the test kit. “Go now. Be healthy.” She nodded at me and hurried off to the next testing table where a man had been coughing for several minutes.
I stood and prepared to leave, but the bin to my right caught my eye. It was full of fresh testing kits, hundreds of them in identical plastic bags. I looked around the tent. There was a bin just like it next to every testing chair. They had plenty.
I snatched a plastic bag, tucked it under my arm, and hurried away from the site before anyone could see me.
43
Molly
The Day I Panicked
“I can’t believe you stole a test for me,” Donovan said through the door. “What happened to the cute girl who was afraid to disobey aclosedsign?”
“The test is easy,” I said, ignoring his jests. “I had it done on me. I can walk you through it.”
“You didn’t have to do this,” he replied on the other side. I heard the crumple of plastic as he examined the kit. “You shouldn’t have gone out and risked yourself.”
“I wanted to get myself tested,” I replied. “Getting you a kit was a secondary benefit. If you test yourself now, I’ll take it back to the testing site.”
“I’ll take it later, I promise,” he said. “I just want to rest now.”
He sounded much more tired than this morning. That worried me.
“You don’t want dinner?” I asked. “It’s five-thirty.”
