by Piper Lennox
Get your shit together.
“Want one?”
I lift my head so fast, it hits the brick behind me. “Ow, fuck.”
There’s a hand stretched out in front of my face. It grasps a tin of mints. Shakes it at me, like I’m a dog in need of a treat.
“They’re rescue candies,” the girl tells me. Doesn’t ask if I’m hurt, even as I rub the back of my head and wince. “For panic attacks. Want one?”
I’m about to tell her this isn’t a panic attack—not that I would know—but she’s already grabbed my hand. I watch dumbly while she shakes two into my palm.
“Suck on them, don’t bite,” she orders, when I crush the first one between my molars.
“Sorry. Um...thanks.” I shrink against the wall; she’s taken a seat beside me, leaving barely two inches between us.
“Fair warning, I don’t know if these actually work.” The tin glints as she turns it, reading the ingredients. “Like, maybe it’s just a placebo effect? Something to distract you, until you calm down.”
I do feel distracted, and therefore calmer, but I can’t tell if it’s the candy or her.
“So.” She stretches her legs out in front of her. They’re tanned and smooth, save for a nick on her thigh. “You got my cousin’s kidneys.”
“Uh....” I pull my arm against my body when it brushes hers. “Yeah.”
“Take care of ’em.”
I should be relieved when she walks her feet back towards herself, using them for leverage to push up from the ground. Instead, with the rescue candies cramping my mouth, I feel this weird urge to say something. Anything, just to make her stay.
“Hey, wait a sec.” She turns and watches me stumble to my feet. “Thank you.”
“No worries.” She shakes the mints one last time, before dropping them into a pocket in her dress.
I brush the mulch chips off my dress pants. Not the smartest place to sit in formal clothes. “No, I meant thank you for….”
She furrows her brow. “For…?”
“I don’t know.” I spread my hands, rattled. Shouldn’t she know what I mean? What else would I thank her for? “That’s why I’m here, to thank the donor’s family. And you’re family. Right?”
“I didn’t give you her kidneys.” She gives me a long look, top to bottom. I know that face: she’s judging me. “I mean, even my cousin didn’t give you her kidneys, really. It was coincidence. So you don’t have to thank anyone.”
It’s then that I recognize her. Something about her snark is familiar, the way her smile doesn’t quite fit with what she’s saying. She sounds nice, but her words are almost too brutal.
“I know you,” I say, which stops her in her tracks. Her hand drops from the door to the event hall.
“What?”
“I know you,” I repeat. My foot catches on a shrub as I step over it. When I regain my balance, stumbling back on the sidewalk, she’s turned to face me.
I take a breath. “You’re the girl who gave me shit for wanting to replace my cat, if it died.”
She tilts her head and laughs. I watch her tongue wet her lips as she searches her memory and, finally, comes up with me.
“That’s right,” she says slowly. In a single step, she closes the gap between us. “I remember now.”
Two
One Year Earlier
Colby
“Please...do whatever you can.”
The pairs of eyes in front of me were both wide and pleading, but only one was staring at me: the little blonde girl on her tiptoes across the desk. Her fingers turned white on the edge.
The other stare belonged to the guy who brought her here. He watched her with that look—when you knew a kid would find out the truth, soon enough, but didn’t dare break it to them.
“Dr. Aurora is going to do her best, I promise,” I told them gently.
The girl’s grip loosened. “Aurora? Like the princess?”
“Exactly like the princess.”
She let go of the desk and stepped back, biting the bottom of her smile. While she turned her attention to the toys in our waiting room, I reached for the guy’s arm.
He was in a baggy dress shirt, smattered in blood. Combined with the pale, gangly look of his body, he looked pretty horrific. This was exactly the kind of thing we tried to keep behind closed doors, here.
“Sir,” I asked, “would you like one of our house shirts?”
For the first time since the two barreled into the clinic—the girl wailing at the top of her lungs, while he hugged the blood-soaked blanket to his chest—he looked at me. “Huh?”
“A clean shirt.” I nodded at the blood. “We don’t want other patients to see, and it’s a biohazard...” In the waiting area, the girl cracked a coloring book open to the spine and dug through the can of crayon stubs. “...and I’m sure your sister would feel calmer, too.”
“Daughter,” he corrected, focused on undoing his buttons. “Yeah, a clean shirt would be great, actually.”
I handed him a shopping bag for his shirt, then a clean cotton tee from the bin I kept behind the desk. All we had left were Larges. In the extra fabric, his limbs swam and vanished. His hands, I noticed, were puffy. His face was, too.
“So,” I said, hooking the office chair behind me with my foot, “how old is your daughter?”
He grabbed a napkin from the counter, one I’d left there during my lunch break. “Five.” Every swipe at the dried blood on his jeans proved useless.
“Here.” I slid him a laundry pen and mini bottle of club soda.
“Wow. You’re prepared.” His hand came in contact with mine as he took them. “But I guess you’d have to be, working in a vet’s office.”
“I am very familiar with bloodstains.”
“You’d be a good person to have at a crime scene.”
I looked at him. Both of us flashed understated smiles. Inappropriately timed jokes were actually a specialty of mine, even if nobody else agreed, but it was rare to meet someone else who knew humor was a good tool for hard times.
“How did the cat sustain the injury?” The chair whined as I scooted to the computer. “And do you have any records, from a previous vet? We can get those faxed over.”
The guy lifted his head, still dabbing at his pants with the pen. “No records. It’s a stray who kept showing up on our patio, so we kind of took it in, I guess? And I’m not sure how it got hurt. Some of the downstairs people have dogs, but they’re totally fenced in.”
“Where was it, when you found it today?”
“Under the steps to our apartment building.”
CLAIMED STRAY, I typed. FOUND INJURED UNDER HOUSE, CAUSE UNKNOWN.
“Hey, uh...listen.” The guy spoke so quietly, I didn’t realize he was talking to me, at first. He leaned across the desk. “If the cat doesn’t...make it,” he whispered, “can you guys just, like, pass me a note or something?”
“A note?”
“Yeah, you know, instead of telling me in front of my kid?”
Slowly, I looked from him to his daughter, still filling in a page with incredible concentration.
It clicked: he wanted to replace the cat with a lookalike, if it died, so his daughter wouldn’t know.
“If that’s what you want.”
“Thank you.” He passed back the laundry supplies, turned, and paused. I made eye contact as he turned again.
“Why did you say it like that?”
“Well....” Backpedal, I commanded myself. This was the kind of shit Dr. Aurora didn’t like: how straightforward I was with clients. I considered it a courtesy. She called it savage. I’d been on front-desk duty for the last week, ever since I told a family their poodle definitely wasn’t deaf; they were just inconsistent with its training.
The guy waited. He looked pissed. And exhausted, but I attributed that to the emergency he just went through, and the sunken set of his eyes and cheekbones. What a shame: he was good-looking, but the emaciated, run-down thing made me think drug addic
t.
Briefly, I wondered if I should add “POI” to the cat’s system file, Dr. Aurora’s personal shorthand for “possibly owner-induced.” We got a lot of people in there who lied about how an animal was injured. Most were innocent, like accidentally striking a dog in traffic and being too scared to admit it. But a few had serious issues with drugs, alcohol, or anger, and didn’t want to get caught.
It was especially hard for me to keep my mouth shut around those ones, even though Dr. Aurora believed those people deserved some credit. They brought the animal in anyway, lies or not; they wanted it to get help.
I just saw it as them covering their tracks.
“Well?” he asked, reclaiming my attention.
I decided not to backpedal. After all, he’d asked.
“The whole ‘replace the pet before the kid finds out’ thing? It doesn’t do them any favors. In my opinion.”
He blinked at me. “You don’t have children, I’m guessing.”
My shrug made my hands bounce on the keys, assembling a string of gibberish. “No. But I said it was my opinion. Feel free to ignore it.”
“I will.” Across the room, his daughter held up her picture: a pony with flowers in its mane, leaping over a crescent moon. From what I could tell, most of the picture was green.
All right: back to the monitor. “Name?”
“Buttons.”
I hid my laugh with a sip of my frappe, long melted. “I meant yours.”
“Oh. Walker.”
I typed it in. “And first name?”
“Orion.”
“Ryan. Got it.”
“No,” he sighed, pointedly annoyed. “Oh-ryan. Like the constellation.”
My eyes narrowed on his as I backspaced, four determined stabs. “Orion.”
Suddenly, a tiny pair of hands appeared on the countertop, then those big, grayish blue eyes again. “Is Buttons ready yet?” his daughter asked.
Both of us laughed. It made us blush when we looked at each other, embarrassed that we lost our cool in this miniature battle of wits and hardassery. At least, it did for me.
“Not yet,” I told her. “Would you like me to go check?”
She nodded gravely. I gave her a lollipop from my bag, flipped the desk marker to “Someone Will Help You Shortly,” and pushed through the swinging double doors to the back.
“Hey.” I tapped Aidan, the newest intern, on the shoulder and squinted through the observation window. From here, all we could see was Dr. Aurora’s back. Her shoulder bones shifted gracefully under the white lab coat. “How bad is it?”
“He’s losing that ear, no question.” Aidan’s answer hit the window and bounced back to me, tinged with wintergreen. “Lot of blood loss.”
“I figured. Based on how much the owner had on his shirt, anyway.”
“I saw that. Cute guy. Way too skinny for my tastes, though.” We paced away from the window, over to the two-way mirror that overlooked the reception area. Orion-not-Ryan kneeled by his daughter to help her color, then squeezed his eyes shut, like he was getting a migraine. “Do you think it’s POI?”
My laugh went over her head: while everyone else in the office pronounced the acronym letter by letter, Aidan said it as one word. It always made me imagine someone getting beaten up by those little squeeze-tubes of poi, the kind Mom sent me in care packages.
“No,” I said, when I realized she was waiting for my verdict. “He’s kind of a jerk, but I don’t think he did it.” I thought of the way he looked at his daughter, not me, when he asked me to do whatever I could.
“You gonna go in?” Aidan was visibly excited at this possibility: that face when your friend is about to do something that can only turn out epically well, or a disaster so enormous it takes on a life of its own.
Except for the fact that she and I weren’t friends. Coworkers who had lunch together sometimes, yes; contemporaries, even, since our age was close enough to mean we liked all the same 90s pop. But “friends” felt like a tad much. Could you even be friends with someone who never invited you places outside of work?
I looked back at the observation window. “No. Dr. A’s still pissed at me for the poodle thing.”
“And the parakeet.” She nodded, stealing the pencil I had behind my ear. “Better not rock the boat, I guess.”
Back in the waiting room, a woman with stacked hair leaned over my desk and swept the landscape. I hated when people did that: like I was ducked down, hiding under the counter.
“Hi, can I help you?” I asked. Her trembling, freshly shorn Maltese skittered his paws on the counter in an attempt to reach me.
“My dog is bleeding.” She hastily flipped the dog over, brandishing its nether regions to me in the fluorescent light. “Will he need stitches? If he needs stitches, I’m suing his groomer, because—”
“Uh...sorry, ma’am,” I said, “but I don’t see any blood.”
“Right here.” Her French manicure parted the bluntly cut fur near the dog’s belly. I squinted and saw that, yes, there was blood, but nothing more than a trickle.
“Oh,” I laughed, “that’s just an abrasion.”
“An abrasion,” she repeated sharply. “He’s bleeding.”
I thought about telling this woman, in an equally condescending tone, what “abrasion” meant, but knew it would earn me another lecture from Dr. Aurora. If I was ever going to get off front-desk patrol again, I had to prove I deserved it.
“He won’t need stitches,” I assured her. “If you’d like, I’ll take him back to clean and bandage it right now. No charge.”
Up until I added the last part, she was on the warpath, about to ask for Dr. Aurora by name. It was basically the equivalent of “let me speak to your manager,” and wouldn’t result in good things for either of us. But those two little words did more to placate her than anything else could have—another universal truth we shared with retail: people love free stuff.
“His name’s Wolf,” she called after me, as I took the dog through the doors. He perked up at the sound, but soon resumed trembling. It felt like a big, warm cell phone against my chest.
“Need help with those stitches?” Aidan grinned.
“I don’t know how Dr. Aurora thinks sticking me at the front desk is a good punishment for me upsetting people at the front desk. That took so much willpower, just now.” I pushed into one of the exam rooms and let the dog sniff the table while I grabbed a fresh scrub shirt. Aidan washed her hands, leaving the water running for me, and set to work.
“He doesn’t even need a bandage for this,” she muttered. I cleaned the wound and taped a square of gauze to it, which Wolf immediately tried to bite off, but gave up when I handed him a treat.
“There you go, bud,” I whispered. He jumped up against my chest, the fluff that the groomer left on his paws smelling like fake oranges. As I scratched behind his hears, his head tilting into my palm, I smiled. It was amazing how different so many animals could be from their humans.
“Colby? Aidan?”
All three of us jumped at Dr. Aurora’s voice, rattling the speaker. “Yes?” Aidan and I said together.
“Can you come in here?”
Aidan scooped up the dog and nodded. “You go first,” she whispered. I mouthed a thank you: she knew I was dying to show Dr. Aurora that I was ready for patient work again. I’d learned my lesson.
At least, I could pretend I’d learned it. I was probably still going to tell more than a few owners things they didn’t want to hear, but I now knew better than to do it in front of my boss.
When I entered the room, Dr. Aurora didn’t even glance up from the cat. “Bandage him up and get him settled in the back. I want to watch him overnight.”
I looked at the drip that snaked down to the cat. His leg twitched, but he was out. The bandages wrapped around his head made him look even smaller than he really was.
“Hey, Buttons,” I said softly. My fingers rubbed the matted fur under his chin. When I looked back up, Dr. Aurora was givin
g me a faint look of approval.
“Miss you back here,” she said, and tossed her gloves into the bin. “You’re a good assistant, Colby. You just have to learn how to talk to people.”
“I know.” Dr. Aurora wasn’t the first to tell me this. I wasn’t antisocial or awkward, but I did blurt stuff more than I meant to. I could have a temper. And I hated sugarcoating of any kind.
On the other hand, that was part of why I went into animal care in the first place. Animals were easy. When they were mean, it was for a reason. When they were nice, you knew you deserved it and that it was genuine. Animals couldn’t lie or manipulate you.
People were an entirely different story.
When Aidan got back from the front, she helped me set up the cat’s containment. We kept the drip in and hung the bag on the door; when the tranquilizer wore off, we’d remove the line and see how he did. For now, it was all about waiting, which was bittersweet: that moment when you knew nothing more could be done, which meant you’d done your best—but were now powerless.
“He doesn’t look like a Buttons,” Aidan remarked as I shut the door. “He looks like a Smokestack. Or Grayson.”
I smirked. “Because he’s gray?” Aidan was incredibly literal. Her dog, a mutt she’d adopted when someone abandoned him here after a hit-and-run, was named Alabaster, or Allie, because of his Arctic white fur.
“I’d better get back. Thanks for helping me.”
“No problem. Have fun out there.”
I flicked her off before pushing through the double doors, back into the waiting room.
“Is Buttons okay?” The little girl bounced over to me before I was behind the desk. “Can I see him?”
“He’ll be fine. But he has to stay here overnight, okay?” I started to tell her about the ear, but caught myself. Even my filter wasn’t that bad.
“I think the doctor will want to speak to you...in private,” I told her dad, right when the doors swished open, and Dr. Aurora called, “Walker?”
“I want to see Buttons!” his daughter squealed. He caught her arm and pulled her back before she could bolt past Dr. Aurora’s feet.