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I pried my uninjured eye open with a painful grunt; my lip split again, and I could taste a trickle of blood running into one corner of my mouth. The room seemed darker than moments ago when I’d fallen asleep, just minutes after Thais reset my elbow and splinted my fingers. The patter of raindrops on the pavement outside was soothing, and I could smell something burning that was neither foul nor particularly pleasant.
I lifted my head, tried to reposition my back against the chair. When I opened the eye further, I saw that it was darker in the room because it hadn’t been just moments ago I’d fallen asleep—it must’ve been hours.
“Thais?” My voice was weak, shaky.
“I’m right here,” I heard her say, but I couldn’t see her; I noticed a shadow moving against the wall, and I could hear liquid sizzling against coals, and her footsteps moving across the floor.
“Ho’vlong…I been ‘sleep?”
She stepped into my line of sight with a coffee mug in her hands; steam rose from the rim.
“Since yesterday,” she told me, and held the mug out so I could grasp it. “You needed the rest. Here, drink this. Good vitamin C.” She held the mug until I had a good grip on it with my uninjured hand.
As I brought the mug to my lips, the smell of pine needles wafted into my nose.
“Use the straw,” she told me, and then I felt her fingers touch mine as she guided it toward my mouth. “And sip slowly; it’s still a little hot.” I hadn’t even seen the straw before, my vision limited to only one eye.
I took a sip and then held the mug out for her to take it.
“No, you need to drink all of it,” she mothered. “And you need to take this pill. Should’ve started a round yesterday, but I couldn’t wake you enough to make sure you got it down.”
She held out her hand and a little white oval-shaped pill sat in her palm.
“What is it?” I was leery; taking random pills was as risky as eating wild mushrooms, and I thought we’d already been over that.
“It’s penicillin,” she said.
I looked at her awkwardly with my one opened eye.
“How…do you know?” I asked. “Better yet, how’s vat even vs’ossible?”
Thais put the pill into my hand and enclosed my fingers around it. Then she slipped out of my line of sight for a moment, and came back with a white bottle. She held it up so I could see. On the label there was a tropical fish, and above it read: ‘Fish Pen Forte’, and in smaller letters beneath it: ‘(Penicillin)’.
I looked at her with part disbelief, part shock.
“Where’d you v’ind dis?”
“Pet store across the street,” she answered. “I’m surprised no one noticed them before.”
“Vem? How many?”
“I found three bottles. Unopened. Seals unbroken. Atticus, I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
I looked down at the pill in my hand again, still not believing it, and then tried to give it back to her.
“Need to save it,” I insisted. “I’m going to’ve vine, but in case you ever get sick—”
“Take the damn pill, Atticus,” she told me, her gaze darkening.
I thought on it a moment, and in the end decided I had better do what she said. Not because I probably needed the medication this time to stave off infection, but because Thais was not in the mood to listen to my reasoning she would consider ridiculous.
I wedged the pill in-between my swollen lips and drank it down with pine-needle tea.
A fire burned in a small barbecue grill on four skinny legs near the glass windows; Thais left the door open to let the smoke and deadly fumes out. The flames were low, casting small shadows on the wall. Outside the rain fell steadily, without thunder or lightning, just a peaceful downpour, my favorite kind. It must’ve been how I could’ve slept so long.
I gazed around the rest of the room, taking in for the first time, what kind of building it had once been. It was also the first time I was fully conscious of my surroundings since the gauntlet in Paducah. I remembered when it happened, when I’d lost consciousness: the fighters had piled on top of me all at once, shutting out the light; I felt the heat of their bodies closing in all around me, robbing me of oxygen; the sensation of knuckles and knees and rock-like toes pounded on me from every angle; and then the searing-hot sensation of a blade splitting flesh, and then another. As if the pain from the stabbing and the broken fingers and the dislocated elbow wasn’t enough, I felt the moment when my ribs fractured, and then in the same instant my head struck the gymnasium floor, and everything went black.
After that moment, I remembered bits here and there: Thais standing above me, talking loudly as if to an audience, but I couldn't recall sentences, just words—Spanish, French, Roman Empire, American Autocracy—and trying to make sense of them on my own was a wasted effort; and I remembered being thrown back into a cage, and then—it seemed like only one second later—Thais and a pretty Black girl were dragging me from it; and I vaguely remembered seeing the city’s lantern lights in the windows as I was carried away; and then the stars above me came to mind, and my memory had strengthened. I remembered Thais lying beside me; I could feel the warmth and smoothness of her fingertips tracing my eyebrows. Lastly, I recalled—in great detail—Thais resetting my elbow.
