Defective (The Institute Series Book 3) (4 page)

I shrug. “That’s fine by me. I didn’t want to go in the first place.” A lengthy silence ensues before I finally throw my hands up in defeat. “I’ll let you guys talk,” I say, stalking off to my room.

Chapter Four

“Alright, where is she?” I ask as I arrive for my Friday night shift at the clinic.

Aunt Kenna looks up from the reception desk, a confused expression on her face. “Where’s who?” she asks.

“Ebbodine,” I say through gritted teeth.

“Oh, she’s back on hospital rounds for the next week or so. Sorry, I probably should’ve told you I’m going to need you a bit more this week.”

“More?” I ask. “I’m already doing five twelve-hour shifts. How many more do you need me to do?” I try to dull my whine down to slight annoyance, but Aunt Kenna just looks at me like I’m a tantrum-throwing toddler.

That’s the annoying thing about being an employee on a salary – I have to do as many hours as they ask of me, but I don’t get paid any more.

“It’s only one extra shift, I’ll sort something out for the other ones,” she says, her eyes looking too tired to fight me. It’s only then that I notice how visibly upset she is. Her eyes are red, her cheeks blotchy.

“I’m sorry. I can do more.”

“I appreciate that, Lia.” The small smile falls from her face as she looks back down at whatever she’s looking at on the reception desk.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” she says waving her hand as if to shoo me away.

“It’s clearly not nothing if you’re worrying about it.”

“It’s the clinic,” she stutters as tears start to fill her eyes. “We can’t afford to keep going the way we are. We’re understaffed and overworked. We only get so much funding from the government and the rest we rely on donations, and as you can imagine, that’s not bringing in much funds – if any. I don’t know how long we can continue to stay operating like this.”

I go behind the reception desk and put my arm around her. “I had no idea. I’m so sorry. I know with Dr. What’s-his-face leaving suddenly we’ve had to alter opening times, but when we replace him, we can reopen twenty-four seven.”

“We can’t afford to replace him,” she mumbles. Aunt Kenna wipes her eyes and lifts her chin. “We’ll work something out. It’s all okay. You’ve just caught me at a weak moment. You don’t need to worry about a thing.” She walks into the treatment room out the back, leaving me to tend to the reception desk.

It’s easy for her to say that, but how can I not worry about it? This is her baby, and as much as I don’t enjoy working here, I don’t want to see it fail. We’re doing something good here. At least, we’re trying to.

I’m relieved to see that not much has been going on for the day, just general practitioner things, mainly. No stabbings. That’s a good start. I don’t say this aloud, though. Everyone knows it’s a jinx if you say anything like that aloud. It’s just like saying, “Gee, we’re quiet today!” If anyone ever says that, it’s a guarantee that your day is about to get exhaustingly busy.

“I might go grab myself a coffee while we’re quiet,” Aunt Kenna says.

“I know you did not just say that!” I exclaim.

“Oh, you’ll be fine. I’ll be two doors away, and Vic is here if you really need him,” she says, leaving the clinic.

I prepare myself for an onslaught of patients fighting over who arrived first, who’s in a more critical condition. But it doesn’t come.

Another thing that’ll always get people to come through the doors is to think that it’s so quiet, I may as well get my books out to study while I have some downtime. It’s Friday night and that’s usually our busiest, along with Saturdays. Drunken bar fights, people letting loose over the weekend doing stupid stuff. Tonight seems to be different so far, but it’s still early.

Just as I reach into my bag on the ground for one of my text books, I hear it. The swinging of the doors whooshing open, the urgent footsteps heading towards the reception counter. I almost fall over myself as I stand.

It’s
him
, I see Chad. Ash-blond hair that’s naturally blonder at the tips, strong muscled arms wrapped around a woman’s limp body.

I shake my head and really focus, noticing that the man in front of me is – of course – not Chad. This guy is tall, well over six feet, and the more I look at him, the more I realise he looks nothing like Chad apart from the two similarities I seemed to pointedly notice first.

This tends to happen a lot. I see someone with similar hair, eye colour, or build, and I immediately think of Chad. I secretly come up with crazy theories that the person I’m looking at is really Chad, and that he somehow had to fake his own death and get reconstructive surgery to look vastly different. Deep down I know these theories are just painful fantasies, brought on by my never-ending grief over the loss of him. I saw his body, I know he’s gone. He’s dead; he’s not coming back. This still doesn’t stop me from thinking crazy things about him, though. I see him in almost everyone I know, and even strangers on the street.

“A little help, please?” the guy says to me, bringing me out of my daze.

“Sorry, of course. Bring her this way,” I say, gesturing towards the treatment room.

By the looks of her, she’s in bad shape. Not as bad as the girl from the other night, but she’s been beaten pretty badly. I begin to wonder if the guy carrying her did this to her.

Gesturing to the closest bed in the treatment room, he sets her down in a gentle and caring manner. Maybe he’s not responsible after all. She lets out a groan of pain as she holds on to her right side.

“I’m going to need you to step back into the waiting room, please sir,” I say, following him out and grabbing registration forms off of the desk. “If you could fill these out while I start treatment on your girlfriend, that would be great. Thanks.”

“I… uh… She’s not—”

“I promise we’ll take good care of her. Just take a seat, and I’ll come let you know when you can see her,” I say before walking back into the treatment room.

Approaching the girl, I try to focus on anything other than her face, but it’s her face that has the most damage. Her right eye is so swollen it’s closed shut. There’s a bump on the left side of her forehead that’s red, and easily going to be bruised in a few hours. She has a patch of skin missing from the left side of her chin, I can only guess it was caused by a fall on cement or bitumen of some kind.

“Hi there,” I say in a calming tone. “My name is Allira and I’ll be fixing you up tonight.” The girl just looks at me, her eyes wide… well
eye
– the one that isn’t closed shut. I’m not sure if she fears what I’m going to do to her, or if she’s reliving what’s already been done. “Can you tell me what happened?” I ask, knowing full well she probably won’t tell me.

She tries to shake her head, but winces in pain and grips her side a little tighter.

“I’m going to examine the rest of you, is that okay?”

“Yes,” she manages to get out.

Lifting up her shirt reveals a huge, red, bruising mark on her ribs about the length of a foot. I think it’s pretty safe to say that at least one of her ribs is broken. Pulling her shirt back down, I look at her with furrowed brows.

“What I’ll do first is get all of your stats, take you for an x-ray, fix up that open wound on your face, and we’ll get a cold compress for your eye. Is that okay with you?”

“Yes,” she says, again struggling to get the word out.

“Is there anything else we should know? Anywhere else that hurts?”

“Just my ribs,” she says breathlessly.

“We’ll get you x-rayed as soon as we can, okay?” I tell her. She nods in response as I start getting the things I need to fix her up.

I check her stats to find she has slightly raised blood pressure, which is understandable in the state she’s in, her temperature is fine, and her pupil reacts when I shine a light in her good eye, which is all good news. Grabbing an ice pack for her eye, I’m about to take her to get an x-ray when Aunt Kenna comes back in.

She must’ve had dinner, too, as she was gone for at least half an hour. “Sorry, I didn’t even see anyone come in. I was trying to keep an eye out. What do we have?” she asks, approaching us and standing at the foot of the patient’s bed.

“She’s going to need an x-ray on her ribs. She has a wound on her chin which needs to be cleaned and patched up. Her right eye is swollen and is currently being iced to try to bring the swelling down.”

“Great work, Lia. I’ll take it from here, I need you back out on reception if that’s okay.”

“Sure.”

I make my way back out into the reception area to find the guy who brought the patient in sitting in the waiting room, still looking at the forms. He gets up when he sees me and makes his way to the desk.

Again I’m flooded with memories of Chad. This guy even walks like Chad. I shake my head.
Stop thinking about him.

“Got them all filled out?” I ask, grabbing for the forms.

“Uh, not quite. I filled out what I could,” he says sheepishly, handing them to me.

He’s only filled out her first name and address.
Wow. What a catch this guy must be.

“You don’t even know her last name?” I ask, trying to hide the condescension in my voice.

He slowly shakes his head while he looks at his shoes.

“Well she might be here for a few hours yet. You’re welcome to go home, and we can call you when she’s ready to be picked up.”

“I don’t mind waiting.”

“Suit yourself,” I say, sitting down at my desk with the barely filled out form. I can’t even put this information into our computer yet. I’ll have to give it to the patient later to fill in.

He remains standing at the desk, leaning on the bench with his elbows, looking down at me with a weird smile on his face.

“Can I help you with something else?” I ask.

“Yeah. I’ve just been wondering about this place. I didn’t even know it existed. Tina told me to bring her here,” he replies.

I glance down at the form to confirm Tina is the patient.

“We’re still relatively new. We’ve only be open a few months,” I inform him.

“And it’s a clinic solely for the Defective?”

“Well, we’ll treat anyone. We just don’t get many non-Defective here. Any actually. They all go to the hospital.”

“Why can’t the Defective go to the hospital?” he asks, confused.

“They can, but we feel that we’ll give them a higher level of care here,” I say as diplomatically as possible.

“Oh, okay,” he replies, but still seems a little confused.

I resist the urge to look at his right arm. It’s pretty clear he’s not Defective, and I don’t want to be one of
those
people. I hate when people do it to me, I don’t want to do it to others.

“Was that all?” I ask, still in a professional manner even though his lingering is making me self-conscious.

“I was just wondering. Umm… what time do you finish tonight?”

“Well, we’re open twenty-four hours a day over the weekend. We close on Monday mornings from 6:00AM, and reopen at 6:00AM on Tuesday until Thursday at 6:00AM when we close, and open again at 6:00AM on Friday and go through to Monday morning.” It took me a long time to memorise that confusing timetable.

“Oh. I didn’t mean…” He looks at me with an analytical stare before continuing. “Why the odd and different opening times?”

“We had a doctor leave, meaning we only have my aunt and another doctor, Vic, to run the place. We’re understaffed, but there’s no budget to hire new staff. We really need volunteers, but there’s not many of them around these days who will work with blood, pee, and spew for free.”

He gives a slight laugh at that. “Fair enough. It’s a shame though – there must be high demand for a place like this.”

“There is. This is actually quiet for a Friday night.” As the words fall out of my mouth I curse myself, and just as I do, the door opens with another patient entering.

Tina’s boyfriend guy, man, person – whoever he is – smiles down at me. “Looks like you might have spoken too soon.” He taps the desk with his hand before going back to the seat he was sitting in earlier, leaving me to attend to the next patient.

***

I jinxed myself. I’ve been run off my feet all friggin’ night. Typical. It’s 5:30AM and I’m finally back at the empty reception desk, getting ready for my shift to end. In the waiting room, the guy is still here. He’s fallen asleep in one of the chairs – quite a common occurrence when waiting for someone to be treated. His girlfriend, Tina is asleep in the treatment room. She has two cracked ribs, and Aunt Kenna wanted to observe her overnight. In the mad rush of things, I managed to get a chance to tell him that Tina was going to be here all night and that he should go home, but he said he was fine to wait. I guess he’s got that going for him; he’s loyal, even if he doesn’t know her last name. Maybe they haven’t been together all that long.

I don’t even know why I’m thinking about this. It’s their business, not mine.

I find myself watching him sleep.
Nope, not creepy at all.
He doesn’t snore. A half-smile finds my face. That’s one thing I don’t miss about Chad. His snoring could’ve woken a whole neighbourhood. But I’d put up with it every night if it meant he was here.