leaving you starving
Apr 5, 2024 23:03:22 GMT -5
Post by ✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ on Apr 5, 2024 23:03:22 GMT -5
5.
He never finished school.
There wasn't time when he was kid and all of his ideas were so large that they stopped fitting within the walls so he blew them out and then got kicked out. At the time, he didn't think he needed it anyway, no one where he was from ever even dreamed of a higher education, it was so out of reach.
When Heath gave Nemo that wad of cash, he didn't have the heart to tell him how useless it was. His educational record stopped abruptly in elementary.
He just slips it beneath a floorboard, then looks for another job and tries to forget about it. The hospital hires him as a janitor and it feels like a step below mechanic but rent still needs to get paid.
Like always, he picks up on things fast and fits himself in to daily workings smooth as a river stone. When he's cleaning the kid's ward, they shrink away from him. It doesn't hurt, little kids always get a little scared of the scar at first. Then one night, he brings a flashlight and tells them old stories. After that, the nurses start calling him Piper because of the way the kids scurry after him every time he comes through.
A doctor requests him in his ward because of the way he can make his patients smile. Another catches wind of this and every Thursday after, he's scheduled in hospice. He ends up in a different section every day of the week.
Slowly but surely, life softens again.
He signs up for adult upgrade courses at the high school and for the first time, doesn't feel like he's suffocating inside a classroom. They fasttrack him within a week, say he could have his diploma in a month at the rate he's going.
The guilt starts to lift.
Then one night, gang members flood emergency, there are so many that they run out of beds, then chairs. People lie on the ground and he has to step around them just to get through but Nemo always goes when they call a code orange, he has to check, to look for him.
As soon as he makes it through the doors, his mop is taken and they hand him gloves, thread, and a needle so sharp the end appears to simply fade out of existence. He steps back, hands shaking.
"I'm not-"
"See one, do one, teach one," says a nurse.
"I'm a janitor, Orville," he says.
"Then watch close."
He wants to shut his eyes and turn away but he doesn't. For a moment, the hospital disappears. He's ten years old again, sitting in the cold glow of a staticky television, watching his parents use. He never liked needles, then one night, he got stuck by one and it grew beyond that. He's terrified of them.
"Got it?" he asks sharply.
"Yes," Nemo says.
Cold steel in his fingers, the patient's skin hot and aching beneath his closed fist, it's brutal how slow he is at it at first. The kid hisses softly each time he starts the next stitch. Then he's done, the wound is closed. Another nurse kneels beside him, "Watch," she commands as she presses a bandage over Nemo's work and deftly wraps it.
"He gonna be okay?"
"For now. Next one's over there."
"I'm not allow-"
"You think that matters to them?" she asks, then sweeps her hand across the room's horizon, "They need us, Nemo."
She hands him a new needle in a plastic package, then shoves a handful of them into his pocket.
"Keep going, don't stop until I tell you."
She never tells him.
So he never does.