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“Ouch!” he groans through clenched teeth.
“I’m ninety-nine percent sure we’ve got some good old-fashioned appendicitis going on here, but we’re going to order a CT scan to make sure. Once we confirm, we’ll get you into surgery. You’re going to feel as good as new in a matter of hours, bud. I promise.”
Calvin’s mother gasps, though I’m not sure what she was expecting.
Did she think we’d give him some painkillers and send him on his way?
I give her a reassuring smile. “Mrs. Humphrey, there isn’t a more routine surgery than this one, and our general surgeon is one of the best in the state. We’ll get Calvin in there right away, and he’ll be fine.”
I look over at Kendra, a nurse, who nods and heads off to submit the scan order and call down to surgery. Calvin’s tears have since dried and his expression is now somber but accepting. I give his foot a gentle squeeze before typing my notes into the tablet.
“Any questions?” I ask when I’m done.
The kid shakes his head. His mother is still stunned and silent, decked out to the nines in school spirit wear. I get it; she didn’t have this on her to-do list for the day. All she wanted was to cheer her kid on as he helped his team get the W, but appendicitis doesn’t care about things like that.
“All right. Let’s get you something for the pain in the meantime,” I say. “Any known allergies?”
“Just eggs,” his mother finally speaks.
“Ah, good. Fortunately there are no eggs in our pain meds or anesthesia,” I offer a lighthearted wink that goes unappreciated.
As I leave, I think more about the time I had to go through that horror. My parents had never left me alone before, but they’d decided I would be fine for a couple weeks with the Huttons watching over me. I was basically their bonus kid anyway.
And at first, everything had been fine.
More than fine—I was in heaven.
I got to live under the same roof as Stassi, tormenting her first thing every morning and last thing every night.
Not to mention, Mr. and Mrs. Hutton were the parents I’d always wanted—they let their kids do things for fun, not just with the aim of getting into a good college. They were relaxed, silly, and actually had lively conversation around the dinner table. Played cheesy board games, for crying out loud.
My parents moved around the house as if they were two planets in totally different orbits. If they ever accidentally went into each other’s orbit? Major explosion. And they were known to overreact—any little mistake I made became a major calamity whenever they heard about it. So more often than not, when I was in my own house, I was creeping around it, on eggshells.
But Mrs. Hutton had taken my little medical emergency in stride, putting me at ease with comforting words as she rubbed circles along my back, and Mr. Hutton cracked jokes as he drove me to the ER. Afterwards, they’d all sat around my hospital bed, just … being with me.
And they never left my side.
Even though I grew up with every privilege a kid could ever dream of, the Huttons made me feel more like a part of the family than my parents ever did.
I suppose I wasn’t very brotherly to Stassi, though.
Not then, and especially not now.
But she hasn’t been very kind to me, either. I haven’t seen her since she ditched me at Ted’s. She deleted the app, so I don’t have any way of getting in touch with her, unless I want to slip a note under her door or send her a Morse code message, knocking on the paper-thin wall that separates us. Not that it’ll do any good. Something tells me that as long as I live right next to her, she’s going to keep on finding ways to avoid me.
I’m not proud of myself, but last night, while home alone, I put my ear to the wall and listened. I knew that she was home and that her roommate was out because I saw them leave. I just wanted to know what Stassi was up to.
Which I think brings me one step closer to being a stalker.
After a minute of faintly listening to some angsty, acoustic playlist she was playing, I creeped myself out and stopped.
I’m a doctor, damn it.
People respect me.
I don’t stalk beautiful women who hate me—I save lives.
By the time lunch rolls around, I head to the locker room to grab my coat so I can get something other than cafeteria gruel. On my way, I pray I don’t run into Cherry. After last night’s shift, she all but tried to put her hand down my pants.
Ordinarily, I’d have been all over that.
Now the idea of being with anyone other than Stassi repulses me.
