Page 23 of A Summer Mismatch
Logan
“Thatisquiteanensemble, my friend.”
Logan looked up from Adia’s bloodwork results to find Kai standing in front of his desk, his hands on his hips. “What?”
“Your scrubs.”
Logan had bought the rainbow-print zebra-striped scrubs on an impulse, mostly in order to make Cameron smile. He always saved his funkiest scrubs for Tuesday.
He tried not to think about how he’d never before looked forward to a Tuesday so much. “I like them.”
“Me too,” Kai said shaking his shoulders. “It’s like a peacock, strutting his feathers for the ladies.”
“Stop.”
“No, this is great. It’s going into section two of my paper—when human behavior mimics nature: mating rituals. This paper is going to take me to the next level.” He flicked his hand out to make his fingers snap together.
Logan rolled his eyes. Many people didn’t know that male peacocks were the ones with the beautiful array of feathers. When they were in mating season, they would spread their colorful feathers out to attract the female of their species.
Kai, as an ethologist, studied behavior in animals, and, apparently, behavior in Logan too.
“Well, make sure you take me to dinner when you make it big,” Logan said.
“We don’t even have to wait until then. Remember, this weekend…”
The blind date. Logan had completely forgotten. “Kai—”
“Don’t come up with some sorry excuse.” Kai backed away from him with his hands up. “I can’t hear anything.” He slipped from the room, and then stuck his head around the doorway a moment later. “Oh, not that you care, of course—you and your scrubs are too cool for that—but Julia and Cameron are here.” He gave Logan a broad smile and leapt from the doorway as Logan threw a package of sticky notes at him.
Logan’s heart skipped. He hadn’t texted Julia, wanting to give her some space after everything that had happened on the beach. He had held out hope that she’d text him, but his phone remained quiet all weekend.
He took a minute to calm his heart and enter the rest of Adia’s results into her chart. Adia was a seven-year old African elephant. She was social and adored people more than any of their other elephants. Her blood work had come back with her white blood cell count slightly elevated, which most likely just meant the sample had been mishandled at some point and she’d need to be retested, but it still concerned him.
He’d add some supplements to her diet this week, just to be on the safe side.
He pushed back from the desk and headed out to the elephant enclosure to see Julia and Cameron. As usual, Cameron spotted him immediately and raced over for a hug and a high five.
“How are you?” Logan asked. He ruffled Cameron’s short, blond hair. “You got a haircut. I like it!”
Cameron gave Logan a huge smile. He navigated to a screen three buttons in. “Handsome,” he said. “Pretty. Handsome.” He pressed it several more times, laughing more each time.
“You found a word you like, huh?” Logan chuckled along with Cameron. Man, he loved seeing this kid every week. He let the stress of Adia’s bloodwork roll off of him. He’d retake the sample tomorrow night when Allison came in for her shift.
“How’s your summer going?” he asked, then waited while Cameron went to a new page on his tablet. From the corner of his eye, he saw Julia watching the elephants. Lulu was extra energetic today, and had been exploring every corner of the enclosure.
“Good. Fun. Nice. Happy.” Cameron paused and then repressed the happy button again, which Logan noticed had a picture of a smiley-face emoji.
Cameron then pressed every button in the row, all a different emoji, then went back and did it again, Logan forgotten for now.
“He likes to explore pages like this. It helps him remember what the buttons sound like and where they are.”
Logan turned to find that Julia had moved to stand beside him, a soft smile on her face as she watched Cameron.
“One time, he found the animal sounds page at school and pressed them so many times, the teacher called in the speech therapist and my mom for a meeting. The school wanted to take his talker away from him during class.”
Cameron navigated to the animal sound page as Julia spoke and started pressing the loud moo, baa, and meow buttons with a sneaky smile.
“What did they do?” Logan asked.
