All Grown Up Read online

  “Hey,” Jody said, standing up. “She said to leave her alone.”

  Max raised his eyebrows, scoffing before he spoke. “Really?” he asked. “You’re going to defend this ugly bitch?”

  My gaze darted between Max and Jody.

  Jody’s lip curled up for a second and I saw his expression harden. “No,” he said. “Of course not. I just don’t think you should be wasting your time with her.”

  Max laughed heartily. “Good point,” he said. “You’re right, of course, I just…”

  I couldn’t hear anything else except laughing, and I could hardly see from the tears swimming in my eyes.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  2019

  I got into the hospital a little early because I hadn’t been able to sleep. My jog had taken place slightly earlier than it normally did, and after showering, I changed into some more appropriate doctor clothes. I was wearing slacks and a white button-up blouse with short-sleeves, with a necklace that didn’t hang too loose and stud earrings. I knew it was better if patients didn’t have anything to hang onto in worst case scenarios, but I still wanted to look good and presentable.

  It was only just getting dark when I walked toward the nurses’ desk in the emergency room. I looked at the practically empty waiting room from behind the glass pane door and smiled before I turned to see the nurse on a shift.

  “Hey, Louise,” I said. “How is tonight looking?”

  “Good evening, Dr. Meyer,” she said. “I heard dayshift didn’t have it too bad but…”

  I nodded. That meant nothing for night shift.

  I sighed before I turned back to look at her, looking her up and down before I asked her anything. I shouldn’t have, probably, but I wanted to. I needed to know. It was like a compulsion. “So,” I said. “Did you hear about a patient who came in last night? Young man, late twenties, he had a knife sticking out of his arm.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I heard about him. I’m sorry I missed that.”

  “It’s less exciting than it sounds,” I replied. “There was a knife sticking out of him, I got it out.”

  “You got it out?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He didn’t need surgery, it was good. But I was going to ask where he was. I wanted to follow up on his situation.”

  “It was a sticky situation,” she said with a snicker.

  “Yes,” I said. “A pointed issue.”

  We both giggled under our breath as she walked around the nurses’ table. She tapped on the keyboard several times, and she got a little bit closer to the screen before he spoke. “Oh, that’s strange,” she said. “It looks like he was discharged. Well, no, that’s not right. It looks like he discharged himself.”

  I shook my head. “Why?”

  “I don’t know, there was no reason provided.”

  I blinked. “Do you have contact details?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Do you want me to email them to you?”

  I nodded. “Yes, I’ll go to my office and call,” I said. “I’m concerned about infection.”

  “Got it. Should be in your email inbox now, Doctor.”

  “Thank you, Louise,” I said. “I appreciate you.”

  She smiled at me. “Oh, wait,” she said. “Someone left a note on his file.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Nothing medical,” she said. “He just left a bunch of his personal belongings here. As if he was running for something. I’m surprised no one called the police, to be honest.”

  “Oh, someone definitely called the police,” I said. “That’s probably why he left, right?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Wonder how he got the knife in his arm,” she said.

  “He told me he fell while cleaning the kitchen.”

  She rolled her eyes, tapping the desk with her long fingertips rhythmically before smiling. “They should probably come up with better lies.”

  “I agree,” I replied. “Anyway, I’m going to call before it gets too late, and before anyone else comes in and needs my attention.”

  “Yes, Dr. Meyer,” she said.

  I walked away from her and toward my office. I opened the door and shivered a little. The office was always a little too cold and the window always felt like it never closed properly, so I walked toward it and tried to pull it to my own body. It didn’t budge.

  I didn’t care that much about the window. I was just putting off the phone call, because I didn’t know if I wanted to call Jody. I probably should, just because he was a patient in my hospital. He had every right to check himself out on his own recognizance and it was probably the smart idea, considering the hospital had to call the police once he was out of danger.

  When he was checked into the room, he was probably worried about what the police were going to do. If I was him, I might be worried too.

  God, I could remember that boy, who was so bright and so promising, and I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to him. After our confrontation at school, we rarely ever spoke to each other again. Maybe that was the way it should have been, but it felt wrong, and when I found him again—when he walked into my life again.

  Completely unexpectedly.

  I logged into my computer, checked my emails for five minutes, then told myself to stop putting it off. I needed to call him.

  I grabbed the phone, steeled myself by taking a deep breath, and grabbed the receiver. The hospital hadn’t updated for a while and I was surprised we didn’t have rotary phones. Each number key made a loud beep noise as I dialed his number.

  It rang a few times before he answered. I thought about hanging up before it sent me to voicemail. But he answered before I could chicken out.

  “Hello?” the familiar voice said.

  I swore under my breath, moving the receiver away from my face. I sighed before I spoke into the receiver. “Mr. Banks?”

  “Jess? Oh, shit, I mean, Dr. Meyer,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting your call.”

  “I went to check in on you today, but you weren’t in the room, like you were supposed to be,” I said. “How are you feeling? How’s your arm?”

  He sighed. “I’m okay,” I said. “Just a little spooked. You didn’t have to call.”

  “I did have to call,” I replied. “I’m worried about infection, Mr. Banks.”

  “Can we drop this? Seriously.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m worried about any infection there, Jody.”

  “I’m fine. I’ve taken the antibiotics you prescribed.”

  I shook my head. I was trying to be patient, but it was hard to be patient with him. “You can’t just stop taking them,” I said. “You have to keep taking them. You have to finish the course. I would feel much more comfortable if I was able to see it.”

  He sighed. “I can’t be at the hospital,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t. I shouldn’t have driven myself there in the first place, but I was too much of a coward to pull it out myself.”

  I practically winced. “You should have not pulled it out yourself! Pulling it out yourself would have been a terrible idea.”

  “Actually, it might have been the best idea,” he said. “I had to practically leave in the middle of the night. I didn’t want the cops to find me and…”

  I cleared my throat when he trailed off. “Maybe it would be good if the cops found you,” I said. “You didn’t do anything wrong, did you?”

  I heard him chuckle quietly. “No,” he said. “Of course not.”

  “Well, then.”

  “Still, I would rather not deal with the cops, if I can help it.”

  “Just how much trouble are you in?”

  “I’m not,” he said. “Because I left the hospital.”

  “So I can’t coax you to come back,” I said after a little while. “Not even if I ask very nicely?”

  “Unfortunately not,” he said. “Unless you can guarantee that the cops won’t be there.”

  “The cops will probably be here. It’s a hospital, we deal
with casualties, the cops are always here.”

  “Then I probably won’t go back in.”

  “They aren’t actively looking for you, are they?”

  He sighed. I thought I could hear him sit down. “The cops might not be,” he said. “But I don’t want to risk it. Plus, you’re probably so busy, you don’t need me to add to the burden of the healthcare system.”

  “It’ll be a lot worse if you come in with an infection. God forbid we have to amputate your arm or something.”

  “You’re going to amputate my arm?”

  I couldn’t help but smile. “No,” I said. “I’m just thinking about the worst case scenario.”

  “Okay,” he said. “But I don’t want to think about the worst case scenario. How bad is it, really?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “I assume you wouldn’t be calling me if it wasn’t bad.”

  “It can be bad,” I replied. “It’s fine now, because you’re young, and I assume you’re not immunocompromised?”

  “Not as far as I know,” he said quietly.

  “But if the knife was dirty, you might get infected,” I replied. “You need to be careful, Jody.”

  “I am careful. If I was more careful, I wouldn’t have gone to the hospital.”

  “Stay on the antibiotics,” I said. “Please.”

  “I wasn’t planning on not doing that.”

  “Would you come to the hospital again? I’d like to look at the wound.”

  “I don’t want to go to the hospital.”

  I took a deep breath. “Listen to me,” I said. “I know you can’t come back to the hospital, but on Wednesdays, I work at a clinic for people with few resources. Unfortunately, you can’t make appointments or anything, but no one will even take your name down. Just come early in the morning. Do you have time?”

  He sighed. “I guess.”

  “I’ll have your personal effects. You left them here, right?”

  “Yes,” he said after a beat. “I left them there.”

  “So come and get them, and let me have a look at your wound.”

  He thought for a second. “Fine,” he said. “If that will get you off my back. You promise you’re not going to call the police?”

  “You haven’t done anything wrong, right?” I asked. “So why would I call the police?”

  He sighed again and I heard him flop himself back on something soft, maybe his sofa.

  “Be careful,” I said. “You don’t want to hurt yourself again.”

  “Right,” he replied. “I’ll see you soon, Jess.”

  “Yeah. See you soon.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  2009

  I waited outside the doors at school as people filed in. I heard them snicker as they looked at me and I felt my heart drop to my stomach as I thought about going inside and trying to carry on with my day.

  Things weren’t that simple. Things couldn’t be simple.

  Because I could have, in theory, just cut things off and moved on with my life. But Jody was most definitely not going to let me do that. He was going to make me feel the sting of my actions, whether I liked it or not. He should have been able to just walk away, the same way I had walked away from him. But no.

  It wasn’t going to be that simple.

  Things could never be that simple with Jody Banks.

  I closed my eyes as I pushed my way into the school. I was going to try to keep my head down. I should have known better, but I didn’t. I had trusted Jody—even though he really had given me no reason to trust him—so when he grabbed the camera and started taking pictures of me, all I did was smile. I didn’t think about covering up or about what he was going to do with the pictures. There was nothing in that moment except for the thrill of the experience, and I didn’t think it was going to go anywhere else. I didn’t ask him to delete the pictures, because I didn’t think there was a need to. He could have kept the pictures in his SD card and I didn’t think I would have minded.

  As long as he kept them for himself.

  But no.

  I had been blind. I had been stupid. I had done exactly what I had told myself I wasn’t going to do. I had let a boy derail me even when it was obvious that he was bad for me.

  My mom said, when I was a little girl, that I should wait until college to find a boyfriend. I always thought that she was being unreasonable, but as time passed, I could see that she was right. I should’ve waited.

  I should’ve been with someone who wanted to be with me, someone who wasn’t ashamed of me.

  I didn’t want to care about what Jody had done. It was easy to think that whatever happened between us was going to fade in time. Even if it hurt at that moment, I knew it wasn’t going to hurt for good. But this was everyone.

  Not just him. Everyone.

  He had to send my pictures to everyone. It was obvious that it was me, too, long dark hair in a ponytail, my blouse halfway down my chest, my bra peeking out over the fabric. I wasn’t naked, but I might as well have been. I had let him in, and it had been a terrible, atrocious mistake.

  As I walked into the hallway, my head down as I tried my best to keep away from everyone else, from all the students who I knew were staring at me, I felt myself get more and more anxious. I knew that the best way to fight all of this would be to keep my composure, but it wasn’t that simple. None of this was simple.

  My attitude might have been what kept me afloat, and I was going to have to keep it, but inside, I felt like I was crumbling.

  I got to my locker, expecting to see some graffiti on it or something. There was nothing. I breathed a sigh of relief as I opened it. As soon as I did, thousands of little pieces of paper flew out, spreading around all over the floor. They were at my feet, surrounding me, and it took me a second to realize that it was the pictures. Somebody had printed out the photographs, in color, in black-and-white, and in sepia. The sepia one felt especially insulting.

  I swore under my breath, trying to ignore my now shaking hands, as I got to my knees and began to pick them up. I heard snickers around me, other students going back and forth, none of them stopping to help.

  My friend Britney—my only friend, though we weren’t that close—rushed to my side as she helped pick them up.

  “Jess,” she said. “I didn’t know if you’d be coming to school today.”

  I looked at her as I crumbled up one of the photos. “Why would you think I wouldn’t?”

  “Because of this,” she said, dropping her voice to a whisper. “I think it’s so unfair that someone manipulated your image like this. You deserve better.”

  That was the first time since I had been in school that day that I felt the tears were actually coming. I tried to stop myself from crying by tilting my head back, but I couldn’t help but sniffle a little bit before I looked at her again. “It is me, Brit,” I said. “They didn’t doctor anything.”

  She blinked, clearly taken aback. “Wait. Are you saying you let someone take those pictures of you?”

  I nodded, trying to ignore the growing lump in my throat. “Yes,” I said. “But I didn’t think he was going to do this with them.”

  She winced, clearly shocked. I liked Britney, she was a sweet girl who focused mostly on her studies, but unlike my own situation, her parents were very involved. It made us clash sometimes, but I had gone to church a couple of times when she had invited me.

  I didn’t expect her to react the way she had, with what felt like abject horror.

  “What did you think he was going to do with them?”

  I blinked. “I don’t know,” I said. “To be honest, it never occurred to me to ask.”

  She shook her head, tutting as we both stood up, and handed me a bunch of the pictures, which were basically little balls of paper in her hand. She put her hand on my shoulder. “Everyone makes mistakes, Jessie,” she said. “But you need to be more careful.”

  My gaze darted between her face and her shoulder. “Ugh,” I said. “I hate it
when you’re right.”

  “I’ll see you in chemistry?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “See you then.”

  When she walked away, I wiped the tears from the corners of my eyes away and grabbed my books. I wanted to walk toward my classroom and forget all about what had just happened, about how judgmental freakin’ Britney was being, about the pictures being spread everywhere, and about the fact that Jody must have spread them.

  I didn’t want to think about that at all.

  I kept my head down, still feeling the head of people’s words around me when I heard a thin voice call out to me from behind.

  “Jess.”

  I didn’t stop. I ignored it as I walked away from Jody. I didn’t want to speak to him. I really didn’t.

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “Wait, Jess,” he said.

  I looked up at him, my eyes still full of tears. “I don’t think I will,” I said as his cologne hit me. He always smelled good, and I had always liked it, but right then, I couldn’t help but find it a little offensive. More than a little offensive. Why did he have to look and smell so good as he was basically in the process of destroying my life?

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t want to deal with him at all. I turned around and began to walk away, but he easily caught up to me.

  “I—can I just talk to you?”

  “You are talking to me,” I said, not slowing down for one second. He matched my pace.

  “No, I meant, in private.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think I ever want to be in private with you again.”

  I heard him groan. “Stop,” he said. “I mean it.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Before I could go much further, I felt him pull me back by the hair of my ponytail. I felt like throwing up as I turned around to face him, my eyes narrowing. “Don’t touch me,” I said. “Don’t you fucking touch me.”

  He held his hands up by his sides as he let go of me. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

  “Just like you don’t mean to do half of the things you do, right?”

  He shook his head. “That’s not fair.”