Page 45 of The Kiss Principle

“José,” I snapped. “How hard did you hit your head?”

He squeezed his eyes shut. I couldn’t find anything worrisome on the back of his head. Not even a bump, actually. I rubbed his chest with my free hand.

“Slow down,” I said. “Slow, slow. We’re going to take care of your knee in a minute.”

He nodded, and slowly, his eyes opened. Tears spilled down his cheeks, and his voice was thready as he said, “I didn’t hit my head.” He gestured. “I caught the toilet like this—” He threw out his arm. “—and it slowed me down.”

“Okay, that’s great. Where’d you take the fall, then?”

“My arm,” he said. “And my ass.”

I checked his arm. There was no visible sign of a broken bone, but since I’d loaned my X-ray specs to Augustus when he was seven and (big surprise) never gotten them back, I couldn’t tell for sure. “Do you think something’s broken?”

He shook his head.

“Do you want me check your ass? That was a joke, sorry.”

“Fernando, my knee. Oh God.”

I shushed him. Together, we got him into a sitting position, propped up against the tub. I looked at his knee. Aside from the scar, though, there wasn’t anything I could see. I took out my phone and then realized I had no idea what to Google. “What was the procedure?”

He had both hands over his face, and his chest was still rising and falling more rapidly than I liked, but he sounded surprisingly steady when he said, “ACL reconstruction.”

“Okay. Let’s see what Dr. Google has to say.”

Well, it turned out, not a whole lot. Most of the articles were about the actual process of injuring your ACL, which usually involved a fall.

“Let’s get you to the ER,” I said.

He dropped his hands. “Fernando, no.”

“Zé, yes.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t afford it.”

“Don’t worry about that right now; we’ll figure it out.”

“No.”

“It won’t be charity. We can find a way—”

“No!”

It was the first time he had yelled at me. He was trembling—and, I noticed, about to cry again.

“Okay,” I said. “No hospital.”

“I need to—” He twisted around like he wanted to get up. “I need to get to my room.”

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m—”

“It was a rhetorical question.” He reached for the side of the tub, like he might push himself up, and I caught his hand. “Unh-uh. Nope.”

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