“The cops will probably be here. It’s a hospital, we deal with casualties, the cops are always here.”
“Then I probably won’t go back in.”
“They aren’t actively looking for you, are they?”
He sighed. I thought I could hear him sit down. “The cops might not be,” he said. “But I don’t want to risk it. Plus, you’re probably so busy, you don’t need me to add to the burden of the healthcare system.”
“It’ll be a lot worse if you come in with an infection. God forbid we have to amputate your arm or something.”
“You’re going to amputate my arm?”
I couldn’t help but smile. “No,” I said. “I’m just thinking about the worst case scenario.”
“Okay,” he said. “But I don’t want to think about the worst case scenario. How bad is it, really?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“I assume you wouldn’t be calling me if it wasn’t bad.”
“It can be bad,” I replied. “It’s fine now, because you’re young, and I assume you’re not immunocompromised?”
“Not as far as I know,” he said quietly.
“But if the knife was dirty, you might get infected,” I replied. “You need to be careful, Jody.”
“I am careful. If I was more careful, I wouldn’t have gone to the hospital.”
“Stay on the antibiotics,” I said. “Please.”
“I wasn’t planning on not doing that.”
“Would you come to the hospital again? I’d like to look at the wound.”
“I don’t want to go to the hospital.”
I took a deep breath. “Listen to me,” I said. “I know you can’t come back to the hospital, but on Wednesdays, I work at a clinic for people with few resources. Unfortunately, you can’t make appointments or anything, but no one will even take your name down. Just come early in the morning. Do you have time?”
He sighed. “I guess.”
“I’ll have your personal effects. You left them here, right?”
“Yes,” he said after a beat. “I left them there.”
“So come and get them, and let me have a look at your wound.”
He thought for a second. “Fine,” he said. “If that will get you off my back. You promise you’re not going to call the police?”
“You haven’t done anything wrong, right?” I asked. “So why would I call the police?”
He sighed again and I heard him flop himself back on something soft, maybe his sofa.
“Be careful,” I said. “You don’t want to hurt yourself again.”
“Right,” he replied. “I’ll see you soon, Jess.”
“Yeah. See you soon.”
CHAPTER SIX
2009
I waited outside the doors at school as people filed in. I heard them snicker as they looked at me and I felt my heart drop to my stomach as I thought about going inside and trying to carry on with my day.
Things weren’t that simple. Things couldn’t be simple.
Because I could have, in theory, just cut things off and moved on with my life. But Jody was most definitely not going to let me do that. He was going to make me feel the sting of my actions, whether I liked it or not. He should have been able to just walk away, the same way I had walked away from him. But no.
It wasn’t going to be that simple.
Things could never be that simple with Jody Banks.
I closed my eyes as I pushed my way into the school. I was going to try to keep my head down. I should have known better, but I didn’t. I had trusted Jody—even though he really had given me no reason to trust him—so when he grabbed the camera and started taking pictures of me, all I did was smile. I didn’t think about covering up or about what he was going to do with the pictures. There was nothing in that moment except for the thrill of the experience, and I didn’t think it was going to go anywhere else. I didn’t ask him to delete the pictures, because I didn’t think there was a need to. He could have kept the pictures in his SD card and I didn’t think I would have minded.
As long as he kept them for himself.
But no.
I had been blind. I had been stupid. I had done exactly what I had told myself I wasn’t going to do. I had let a boy derail me even when it was obvious that he was bad for me.
My mom said, when I was a little girl, that I should wait until college to find a boyfriend. I always thought that she was being unreasonable, but as time passed, I could see that she was right. I should’ve waited.
I should’ve been with someone who wanted to be with me, someone who wasn’t ashamed of me.
I didn’t want to care about what Jody had done. It was easy to think that whatever happened between us was going to fade in time. Even if it hurt at that moment, I knew it wasn’t going to hurt for good. But this was everyone.
Not just him. Everyone.
He had to send my pictures to everyone. It was obvious that it was me, too, long dark hair in a ponytail, my blouse halfway down my chest, my bra peeking out over the fabric. I wasn’t naked, but I might as well have been. I had let him in, and it had been a terrible, atrocious mistake.
As I walked into the hallway, my head down as I tried my best to keep away from everyone else, from all the students who I knew were staring at me, I felt myself get more and more anxious. I knew that the best way to fight all of this would be to keep my composure, but it wasn’t that simple. None of this was simple.
My attitude might have been
