Page 17 of Dropping the Ball

Madison boos. “We hate that kid.”

I smile even as I remember the flood of humiliation as soon as the kid had said it. “I haven’t stayed in touch.”

“Did Micah act like a complete tool?”

“He didn’t do anything, but when I looked over, he was shirtless.” I remember the hitch in my breath and how my palms broke out in a sweat, which had never happened before.

“Ohhh. Shirtless boys are devastating when you’re seventeen,” she says.

“This was catastrophic. I think I went blind for a few seconds? It was partially panic, likeHow did this kid know? Is it because Micah knew and told him?Then add in the devastating shirtlessness, and yeah. He had a really nice chest.”

Madison gives a soft laugh of understanding. “Don’t know why you said that in the past tense.”

“But my blackout or whatever . . .” I squeeze my eyes shut for a split second, helpless against the worst part of the memory. “I walked right into a pole.”

“Oh no. Is this when—?”

“I broke my nose,” I confirm. “I broke it walking into a pole while looking at a shirtless boy I had a crush on—in front of him. And no, that isn’t why I was mad at him.”

I’ve read that the human brain can’t recreate the sensation of a pain you remember in the body. But right now, I’d argue with science. I remember the excruciating jolt as I slammed into the pole and my vision went white. That’s the color of pain. Searing white. My nose hurt right away, but my brain wasn’t far behind, throbbing within seconds from the impact.

“I remember dropping straight to the ground, hunched over because I thought I was going to puke. Micah and his friend ran over, yelling my name, and I wanted them to stop. It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard, but it also sounded like they were in a tunnel. Micah was trying to get me to look up, and I did but only to tell him to go away because I wanted him to be quiet. His friend started yelling about blood, and I looked down to see it all over my shirt and my hands.” The memory is becoming more vivid as I relive it.

“Micah told him to calm down, that it was only a bloody nose, and to go to the locker room and get paper towels. He told me it was fine, he’d had a bloody nose before, and said to tip back my head and pinch the bridge of my nose. Meanwhile, I wanted to die, and not even from embarrassment. It hurtsobad.” I give a faint sniff. “My eyes are stinging just thinking about it.”

“It sounds horrible,” Madison says.

“It was. And I hated the fuss.” I don’t like being the center of attention. I can hold my own if I have to do public speaking, but Madison is very much a dance-on-the-tables kind of girl, and I’m very much a don’t-even-go-to-the-club kind of girl. “I told him I would go home and ice it, but he was worried that it wasn’t clotting. Then he asked me if I had any tampons.”

She gasps. “No. No, he didn’t do the . . .”

“She’s the Manthing and shove it up my nose? Yeah.”

She clears her throat. “Okay. Well.” Another throat clearing. “It was a bonding experience that should have made you closer.”

She’s trying to keep a straight face, and it wins a small laugh from me. “It’s true I’ve never shared that same level of intimacy with another guy since.”

She breaks down and laughs too. “I’m sorry. That’s pretty bad.”

“I know. Then he made it worse by forcing me to go to the infirmary.” About half of Hillview’s students were residential. Boarding school, basically. The campus had a small clinic with a full-time nurse practitioner. “I absolutely didn’t want to go because they would call Mom.”

Madison sucks air through her teeth and nods but says nothing.

“I explained it would worry her and she would overreact, that I’d just drive home and take it easy, but he wouldn’t listen. He was already calling the front office to tell them we were on the way for a bloody nose.”

“He didn’t know,” Madison says.

“Itoldhim,” I repeat. “I told him Mom would make a bigger deal out of it than it needed to be. I told him I needed time to go home and study for calculus, but it didn’t matter. Once the infirmary called Mom, it was all over.” Mom is a hypochondriac, and sometimes, growing up, it almost felt like it spilled into Munchausen’s-by-proxy. She obsessed over every sniffle or bruise we got, and we learned never to show it if we felt even a little bit gross or it would become a production.

“How high did she go?” Madison asks.

“The nurse told her to give me ibuprofen and wait for the swelling to go down before worrying about x-rays—”

“Whoops.”

“Exactly.” Suggesting I had something worth an x-ray had unleashed Cynthia Armstrong’s neuroticism, and there was nodamming the flow. “By the time Mom was done, she had me at St. David’s and made them call in the chief of surgery—who wasn’t even on call—then she madehimcall in the chief of plastics. And every single one of them said the same thing. It probably was broken but not severely enough that it would need to be reset, and they wouldn’t be able to do much until the swelling went down. I didn’t get home until almost midnight. Mom gave me ibuprofen, except she didn’t tell me it had sleepy stuff in it. I couldn’t study. I still had to take the calculus test the next day. Want to guess what subject Micah was better at than I was?”

“Calculus.”

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