This Will Only Hurt a Little(7)
This time I cried out, “NO!”
I’ve been injured a few times in my life, like in a way that required ambulances and hospitals, and I know now that when I’ve been in one of those situations, when my body is going into shock, the person who comes to save me becomes very important. I just want that person to stay with me. It’s helpful to have something consistent to focus on. (This is also true of giving birth with no pain drugs but that is much later in this book.)
“YOU’RE GONNA BE FINE! I’LL BE RIGHT BACK!”
And with that, Lauren Ellis disappeared into the darkness. A small circle of kids started to awkwardly form around me. The saddest group of kids at the dance. The ones who had been standing at the sides. And here I was now, in the middle of everything, mascara pouring down my face in sheets, pooling under my chin and dripping onto my patterned silk shirt that was now also stained with sweat.
A kid stepped forward and yelled, “WHAT’S YOUR NAME?”
Oh, God. I shook my head. I needed someone I knew.
“DO YOU KNOW EMILY BRONKESH-BUCHBINDER?” I asked one of them. “CAN YOU FIND HER FOR ME PLEASE??”
She nodded and ran off just as a teacher finally showed up with a walkie-talkie. He was trying to assess the situation and figure out what was happening. All the while, “Smells like Teen Spirit” continued to play on repeat. Again. And again. And again.
Truthfully, this is where things get a little fuzzy. Emily showed up with her eighth-grade friends, concerned but also maybe a little wary of being identified with the injured seventh grader on the ground. Then the school nurse and one of the administrators arrived. Someone had the DJ turn the music down, then off all together, to the jeers of not only the moshing boys but also most of the student body population. Then the lights came on, garish bright fluorescent gymnasium light, illuminating me in the middle of a growing circle of kids. Rachel pushed her way to the front.
“OH MY GOD!” she cried. “What happened? We didn’t know where you went, and then someone said you were on the ground—”
Just then, another teacher pushed through along with four or five paramedics, snapping their gloves on, rolling a gurney behind them. One paramedic took charge, a ridiculously good-looking dude who was probably only like ten years older than us. Of course.
“Okay. Everyone! Out of the way. BACK UP BACK UP. GIVE HER SOME SPACE!”
I didn’t need space. I needed to disappear altogether. Forever. They kneeled down next to me and started taking my vitals, asking me my name and what happened. I told them I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t move my leg. I was in so much pain.
“Okay. I’m gonna need to get these jeans off of you so we can have a look, okay?”
I looked around in absolute horror. But before I could say anything, a female paramedic was using a pair of medical scissors to cut up the side of my jeans, past my knee, to my thigh, and was about to keep going when I screamed:
“WAIT! THESE ARE EMILY’S JEANS! YOU CAN’T RUIN THEM!”
The female paramedic looked at me sympathetically, nodded, and stopped cutting.
“Okay,” she said. “You’re going to need to get them off at the hospital, though, and I’m not sure how you’ll do that without cutting them. Your knee is badly dislocated.”
Then the hot paramedic said something dumb to try to get me to laugh. I did, but only to please him. I wanted to die. They secured my leg in a foam brace and loaded me onto the gurney. As they started to wheel me out, past literally every single kid I went to school with, my mom showed up with some teachers by her side. She was, as she likes to always say, apoplectic.
I wouldn’t call what my mom was wearing her pajamas, necessarily; it was more like a leisure suit, a soft purple velour tracksuit that she liked to watch TV in, which she had purchased at Price Club, obvi. Let’s just say it wasn’t the best thing for your mom to show up wearing to your school dance.
“Good Lord, Elizabeth!” she said, her eyes filled with worry. “What happened?! Are you okay?”
The hot paramedic knew how to handle this situation.
“She’s going to be fine,” he assured her. “It looks like she dislocated her knee. We don’t think she hit her head, but they’ll take a better look at her at the hospital.”
When we got outside, I saw multiple fire trucks and three or four ambulances. I have no idea what the 911 call was like. Maybe they just said there had been an accident at a middle school dance and the fire department was prepared for mass casualties? This was years before school shootings became a thing. (Ugh, that sentence is so upsetting. “Before school shootings became a thing.” Horrifying.) It was a chaotic scene, and teachers were trying to herd kids back into the gym. As they wheeled me past, I put my face in my hands, overwhelmed by pain and the sheer humiliation of being carted out of my school dance on a stretcher, my mom in her tracksuit yelling at some administrator as she tried to keep up.
This is what I got for wanting to know what was going on, for wanting to be a part of things, for wanting more. I got my fucking ass kicked. It’s too bad I didn’t realize the life lesson I was being handed. Because maybe, possibly, it would have saved me from even more pain in the years to come.
But at the time, it wasn’t a lesson. It was just the worst thing that could have possibly happened to seventh-grade me. My mom met me at the hospital, along with my sister and my dad. My sister could be such a bitch sometimes, but with tears in her eyes, I could tell even her heart hurt for me in that moment.