He remained motionless, his body trembling with rage, rage I was oh so pleased to see. This was even more satisfying than besting him in the first place.
"Yeah." He finally said. "So you can rat me out and have me arrested or something."
"Oh please." I scoffed. "Having someone rat you out never bothered you before. Why don't you just admit it? You're scared of me. You wouldn't take a swing at me if I dropped my hands and closed my eyes, would you? It HURTS to get the shit kicked out of you, doesn't it? It's an experience you don't care to repeat, is it? You know that if you take a swing at me, or make any move at all towards me, you're gonna be riding in an ambulance again, don't you?"
"Fuck you!" He yelled, near tears now, on the brink of collapse.
I shook my head again. His friends were staring at him, nervous fear in their faces.
I spat, the wad landing on his shoe. "You fuckin' disgust me." I told him. "If you want to fight you come and find me." I said. "We'll have ourselves a fight. But keep in mind, that if you start any of your 'fuck you' and 'I'm gonna kick your ass' bullshit with me again, I'm not gonna be so generous. Like I said, talk is cheap. If you want some action, look me up.
If you don't want some action, keep your fuckin' mouth closed when you see me."
I turned my back to him and walked into the school, Mike in tow. I knew I had nothing to fear by turning my back to him. I knew it.
Lunchtime. In my previous life I'd always eaten pretty much alone since Mike had a different lunch schedule than I. But now I found myself the center of some attention. People kept coming up to me, just wanting to talk about this and that. I was becoming popular I realized, not sure I liked it. And again, I was thirty-two years old, not fifteen. The conversation I was offered was not terribly stimulating.
After only five minutes the combination of the cold and the endless litany of pussy stories, car stories, or drug stories drove me inside to the cafeteria. The cafeteria was the domain of the preppie students, those college bound overachievers. The air was warm and scented with the aroma of spaghetti. It was filled with the babble of conversations and the clanking of plastic trays on simulated wood grain tables.
I stood near the doorway surveying the scene, seeing the gathering of cliques at various tables, trying to find a place to sit down. Many of the students in there were those that were in my classes. They'd always ignored me since I wasn't quite one of them and I had no desire to strike up friendships with them now. With burrito and soda in hand I scanned around the room and finally locked onto a solitary figure sitting by herself near the back of the room.
It was Nina Blackmore, the future emergency room doctor. Like always, she was by herself, eating out of her tray and reading a book. Nina, in addition to being a high school classmate, had been a junior high and grammar school classmate as well. She'd appeared at our school when I was in the third grade, a new student from somewhere or other. That, in combination with a lisp that she'd had at that time had doomed her to the role of unpopularity. She'd been the butt of jokes since forever, although they'd been particularly bad in grammar school. Third, fourth, and fifth graders can be unusually cruel to kids who were somewhat different.
I myself was as guilty of this as everyone else. I'd done my time chanting teasing rhymes at her back then, deriding her, calling her ugly, making fun of her lisp in as cruel ways as fourth grade minds could conceive. Though she'd gone to speech therapy until well into junior high and lisped no more, the damage was done to her. She was an outsider, belonging to no clique, doomed to be by herself until probably college where she would show up the vast majority of her classmates by working her way into a one hundred and thirty thousand dollar a year job.
But even then the mark of her school years would be forever upon her. I would know her as a paramedic, would frequently transport patients to the emergency room where she was employed. She would have a reputation as a cold hearted, vindictive bitch among the paramedics and nurses that she dealt with. She was the kind of doctor that would question a paramedic or RN's every decision, no matter what the outcome of the patient. And she'd always reserved her most scathing comments for me. I'd always known that this was because I'd gone to school with her and had once, in grammar school, been one of her tormentors.
A typical example of her wrath is something that occurred nearly a year before my recycling, on a frigid January day. I'd been dispatched to a call for a child with seizures in a middle class section of the city. Child seizure calls are generally nothing that gets paramedics terribly excited. Usually the child either has a history of seizures or is having them because of a high fever. Seizures are not usually life threatening.
However, when I walked into the house that day with my partner and the crew from a Spokane Fire Department engine company, I took one look at the kid in question and knew that I was dealing with something more than a seizure call. The kid, who looked to be about ten years old, was lying on the carpet near the sofa. His skin was blue; as blue as a police uniform, and he was not breathing. His eyes were vacant, staring into space, bugging out. He was lying still.
There was a brief second of pause while we all clicked into 'this is really an emergency' mode. And then every eye in the room (except for the kid) turned to me, waiting for me to tell them what to do.
"Start bagging him." I barked to one of the firefighters and she rushed into action, opening their bag and pulled out the equipment.
I kneeled down next to the kid and felt for a carotid pulse. It was there, but it was weak and very slow. What the hell was going on? I'd wondered, trying to think. Ten year olds did not just suddenly collapse and die from a seizure. There was something I was missing.
The mother was, understandably enough, absolutely hysterical but, while I opened up my airway bag and began setting up to put in a breathing tube, she was able to tell me that she'd heard a strange noise and had entered the room to find her son seizing on the couch. It had gone on for a considerable time and then he'd simply stopped just before we'd arrived. His breathing hadn't started again. She told me he had no known medical problems. He'd had no fever, had in fact been perfectly fine when she'd talked to him less than ten minutes before she found him seizing.
While I pulled out my breathing tube and a laryngoscope, a lighted instrument used to peer down someone's throat prior to placing the tube, the firefighter began bagging the child, forcing air down his throat and into his lungs. While she did this my partner had hooked the child up to our EKG machine. I took a quick glance at the reading. His heart was only beating thirty times a minute and was slowing further with each passing beat. What the hell?
The firefighter that was bagging seemed to be having trouble. "The air won't go in." She told me. "It just blows out the side."
Armed with that information I took another look around the room. The television was on, tuned to a cartoon show. A half-eaten hot-dog was sitting on a plate on the coffee table. The light bulb suddenly went off above my head.
"Was he eating?" I asked the mother.
"Yes." She sobbed, wringing her hands. "I'd just given him his lunch."
"Shit." I muttered, everything falling into place.
"Stop bagging him and let me in there." I told the firefighter. She stepped aside and I picked up my laryngoscope. Lying on the floor near his head I inserted the blade into his mouth and lifted the tongue out of the way. A lightbulb on the end of the blade illuminated his airway for me. It was blocked solid by a chunk of pink hot dog.
"Matt, give me the Magills." I told my partner.
He slapped a long set of forceps into my hand, an instrument designed specifically for removing foreign objects from airways. I'd never used them before, true choking calls are rare, but they worked just exactly as I'd been promised. I grabbed the chunk of meat and pulled it free, revealing his vocal cords and trachea behind it. I gave him a second to see if he would start breathing on his own. When he didn't, I picked up the breathing tube and slid it through his vocal cords. The firefighter attached her bag to the top of the tube and began forcing pure oxygen down into his lungs.