Wicked Things by Yolanda Olson
Hollis
I triedto be as patient as I could be with the nurse at the front desk.
She asked for my identification, and I gave it to her.
She asked me for my insurance card, and I told her that I didn’t have one.
But when she peered at my ID then back up at me with that fucking unsavory look in her eyes, one that I had become all too familiar with, I swiped my card out of her hand and started toward the emergency room doors.
I hadn’t come here to be ridiculed.
I came for help and found only the same bullshit snide looks that I almost always got when people realized that not everything was exactly as it was presented.
“Hollis?”
I heard my name just as the sliding double doors opened, and I paused long enough to glance over my shoulder.
A wave of relief crashed over me when I saw Melody walking toward me.
She was one of the very few kind people I knew in my life, and she didn’t care one way or another about who I wanted to be as opposed to who I was.
“Come on, honey,” she said gently as she wrapped an arm around my waist, and carefully turned me back around before leading me into her station.
Melody was about forty, had blonde hair with already greying streaks in it, friendly, warm brown eyes, and small scars scattered across her face from what I assumed was a childhood acne problem.
When the front nurse bitch walked by the station, Melody held her eyes before pointedly whipping the curtain closed in her face.
“Some people,” she muttered dryly under her breath as wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my left arm. “Tell me what happened, Hollis.”
I rolled my eyes as she began to squeeze the inflation bulb.
“Ran into the town’s finest last night.”
Melody lifted her eyes to mine and raised an eyebrow causing me to turn my face away.
She let out a soft sigh as the blood pressure cuff deflated. The only following sound came from the Velcro as she pulled it apart then tossed the cuff onto the desk behind her.
“Do you want me to do a kit, honey?”
I shook my head vehemently.
I knew that she only wanted to help me and that I should welcome it, but I had been humiliated enough already without having to go through that, too.
“I just want to make sure that you didn’t catch something,” she pressed gently as she rested an impossibly soft hand on my arm.
I got up from the chair I had been sitting in and sniffled as I rubbed the bridge of my nose with a finger.
“You know where to send the bill, right?” I asked curtly as I turned my eyes toward the curtain.
“I didn’t even get to properly do my job, but something tells me that maybe you just needed to see a friendly face today,” she remarked with a quiet chuckle.
I shrugged as I stared down at my broken fingernails. I began to inspect them, while maintaining such an air of stubbornness over me, that she knew it would be best to just let me leave.
I watched Melody shake her head out of the corner of my eye.
Without pressing me any further, she reached for one of my hands, gave it a gentle squeeze to let me know that when I was ready, she would be too, then pulled the curtain open for me.
“Take care of yourself, honey. I’m fond of seeing you, but not in here.”
I glanced at her for a moment before I walked toward the curtain, stopping long enough to give her a kiss on the cheek.
My own mother never loved me, so it was nice to have a surrogate from time to time.
Even if it was always when I had gotten too far in over my head.
