Level Hands: Bend or Break, Book 4 (31 page)

He sat there as the light changed, the sun setting earlier now than ever. Heard his roommates come in and chatter in the common room. Ignored their knock for dinner, and a later one when
The Walking Dead
came on, because he’d managed to find some kind of equilibrium with Austin after his suitemate managed to stay in school and on the team. Rafi ignored his phone buzzing when Lola called, and a second call from Mari.

He sat in the dark until his back ached from not moving and one thing became perfectly clear.

If he couldn’t talk with any kind of control, of kindness, of restraint, then maybe he shouldn’t talk at all.

Rafi sent one text message and turned his phone off.

I’m out of control. I need some time to know how to apologize. And what to do so I can stop this. I won’t come to see you until I figure it out. I understand if you don’t want to wait for me, but I hope you can.

He hadn’t realized how quiet life could be, how constantly he’d been checking that electronic lifeline, until he shut it down to save his sanity and went through twenty-four hours without saying a word outside of class. The sudden silence in his head when he and Denny stopped talking, face-to-face or via the Internet, was deafening.

His suitemates were mad and not speaking much to him either. Well, not mad, exactly, so much as frustrated at how his fight with Denny was wrecking the smooth rhythm of their group friendship, not to mention the equilibrium of the team. They pushed him in their own ways to talk about it. Austin by joking, Bob by hinting and Vinnie by flat-out telling him to get off his ass and fix the problem.

But Rafi didn’t feel like talking in his suite or at the boathouse or anywhere else he was surrounded by people who were so deeply woven into his life now that he couldn’t escape them even when he wanted to. He was still showing up to practice, working hard, if not killing himself. Denny nodded at him, but never came close enough to make conversation the obvious next step, and Rafi stayed away from him while he tried to figure out what the hell he was going to do now.

The only place he felt like talking was in the writing center. For the first time since he’d arrived at Carlisle, he’d shown up for an appointment without dread of making a fool of himself. With maybe the smallest bubble of excitement rising in his belly.

His anthro professor had assigned a final paper in his History of Protest and Revolution class. As was his habit now, Rafi had brainstormed some potential topics, then scribbled sketchy outlines of each one, trying to figure out where he had the juiciest ideas.

By the time he threw his backpack under the table and slid into the seat across from Bree, he’d managed to find one thing to eke out a smile for in his fucked-up life.

“Ask me.”

“What?” As if she didn’t know.

“G’wan. Ask me.”

Bree didn’t know about his personal problems, so she could grin at him and lean forward on her elbows, getting right in his face. “Whaddaya got for me today, Castro?”

He smacked his notebook down on the table. “I got a kickass anthropology paper outline for you, my friend. Check it out.”

“You outlined? Before coming to see me?” She lifted one dark eyebrow and tilted her head. “Progress. Give it here.”

He didn’t even have to watch. Propping his feet up on the chair next to him, he crossed his arms and leaned back, staring up at the ceiling. He considered whistling casually.

He felt as fake as he’d ever been in his entire life.

The little
hmmm
of satisfaction Bree let slip after a minute made him want to punch his fist into the air. But that clashed with the laissez-faire persona he had going on, not to mention was so far from his actual feelings he couldn’t even see it from here, so he didn’t.

Rattling papers drew his attention back to his tutor as she slid the outline across the table. “Nicely done, my friend.”

“Nicely done?” He shook his head mournfully, feigning sorrow. “That’s all I get.”

Rolling her eyes at him, she kicked at the leg of his chair under the table. Rafi jolted in his seat and stuck his tongue out at her. The glow of one tiny triumph was riding high in his chest, and he was milking the moment, damn it.

“You get grilled about next steps, that’s what you get.”

He left his feet on the chair, because he was getting so good at this he didn’t even need to sit up straight to think hard anymore. Which sounded dumb, but he’d realized at some point that he was so tense about whether or not he could keep up at Carlisle that he was literally demanding perfect posture of himself, because at least he could look like he belonged.

When she was done going over his research options, Bree waited for him to head out, but Rafi wasn’t quite ready. He hesitated for a minute, but finally came out with it. The rest of his life was such a mess he hadn’t even had a chance to mention this to Denny or his sisters or anyone else, but he could maybe say it to this girl who was only peripherally part of his tangled world.

“I’m thinking that maybe I want to go to med school. But that’s crazy, right?”

“Why is it crazy?” Bree pushed the cover of her laptop closed and yawned hugely. He knew she worked a ton of hours and felt guilty pushing to extend their time. But he didn’t want to fuck her or fight with her, and that made her a safer place to try out something he’d been thinking about ever since Lola’s accident.

“Let’s face it. I’m not the greatest at studying. And I’m pretty sure you need to be better than average at it to get into med school. Not mention, you know, graduate.”

“You do fine. Most of what’s slowing you down is that you’re still learning the basic strategies. I think you’ll find out that by this time next year—”

“If I’m even still here next year.” Because some days it felt like there were seven hundred reasons to go home, and some pretty small change balancing out that scale on the stay side.

Denny. If he’s still speaking to you, Denny balances it all out, and you know it.

But Rafi didn’t know how to shut down the other voices in his head when they started to drown out what he knew was true.

Unlike every single other person in his life, Bree didn’t argue with him when he said shit like that. It was one of his favorite things about her.

“—this stuff is going to come a lot easier to you. Won’t feel like you have to work so hard all the time just to get started.”

“Man, that would be great. Because I am not handling this stress right.” He shook his head. It was too much to admit that he wanted it. “I don’t know, though. It sounds kind of crazy, doesn’t it? Me, thinking I could be a doctor?”

“I don’t think it sounds crazy. Hard? Yes. But not crazy.”

“I don’t know,” he repeated. Ever since the idea had gotten lodged in his brain, he’d been picking at it, like a hangnail. Picking and worrying and chewing on it until the whole idea was swollen and sore. “It’s just, after what happened to my sister, I couldn’t stop thinking of all the ways I wanted there to be more options for her.”

He’d given Bree the rundown shortly after the motorcycle accident, when he’d dropped in to apologize for blowing off an appointment with her.

“You know…” Bree drew the words out, crossing her arms and looking contemplative. “There’s more than one way to skin this cat.”

“Gross. What?”

“It’s not like being a doctor is the only way you have to offer better medical care to people in your community. You could be a community health care organizer. Or…have you thought about going to nursing school?”

“Be a nurse?” He flinched and tried to hide it, but obviously failed at that because she glared at him. Bree never let him slack on his research, his outlining or his editing. No way was she letting this one go just because it wasn’t for a grade.

“Yes. A nurse. Why? Do you think that’s a job only women can do?”

Damn. Maybe she was grading him.

He knew better than to answer that one in the affirmative. Even if he obviously really did, deep down, because when had he ever seen anyone other than a woman working as a nurse?

Never, that’s when. Even after spending eight solid days at the hospital, he still hadn’t seen a single male nurse. Reason told him they had to be there. But Rafi hadn’t met one.

“Of course not.”

“You know, this might really be your kind of thing. It’s the nurses who do all the real frontline care.” They’d talked before about his frustration at not being able to help Denny enough when he’d first been hurt. And she knew how obsessive he was about Lola.

“I don’t know…” He let his voice trail away. Bree was the kind of girl—woman, jeez, she’d kick his ass—he could be honest with about most things. But he didn’t think the knee-jerk reaction against applying the word nurse to himself was one of those things.

“I’m surprised. I wouldn’t have thought you were the kind of guy to let other people’s opinions of you matter so much.”

Like he couldn’t recognize a reverse-psychology trick, or whatever that kind of manipulative bullshit was, when he heard it. Besides…

Rafi barked a laugh. “Yeah, well, I’m a way better bullshitter than you realize. I care too much. All the time.”

“Oh, for crying out loud.” Bree opened her laptop and rattled furiously on the keys for a minute. Swung the screen around and pointed. “That guy’s a nurse. He look particularly girlie to you?”

He stared at the picture of the guy with big arms and a buzz cut, wearing a jumpsuit and hauling a collapsible stretcher across the tarmac to a waiting military helicopter.

“Pretty sure my sisters would kill me if I joined the military,” he joked, trying to put off the moment when he had to acknowledge that yes, he did have a whole mess on internalized misogyny still roiling around inside him, damn it. And thanks to spending enough time with Bree this fall, he even knew what those words meant.

“Don’t be deliberately obtuse. You don’t actually think you need to get shot at for four years before it’s okay for a man to be a nurse, do you?”

He shook his head. No, he didn’t think that, even if he was acting like he did.

“Of course not. I know you know this, Rafi. You’ve never been one of those guys.”

He knew what she meant. Dudebros. Guys who might as well be dropping shit on the floor to get women to bend over and pick it up, for all they viewed women, and things associated with them, as lesser objects. And he wasn’t. He really wasn’t.

Whether it was growing up as the baby brother of four women who didn’t hesitate to jump down his throat at any sign of
that’s a girl thing
or his own years of getting hounded about being gay in a ninety percent Latino high school—until he snapped and became hella gay for a while, in a spectacularly pink phase of
fuck right off
that almost got him expelled for starting fights with his wardrobe alone—he’d been pretty sure he didn’t have any traditional gender roles stuck in his reflexes.

It was pretty lowering to find that you could still have some secret pockets in your soul where the whispering voices passing on society’s judgment were louder than your own.

Although after the way he’d been behaving all semester, it really shouldn’t have come as any goddamn surprise that he did. “I’ll think about it.”

“Do that.”

Bree shut her laptop again and growled at him to get his butt out of her chair and go do something useful so she could help someone who really needed it. But when he snapped a salute and a “Yes, ma’am!” at her, she caught him off guard with the hug she came around the table and gave him.

“So this is a thing we’re gonna do now, huh?” he asked into her hair.

“Shut up and go to the library.” She squeezed her arms around his waist.

He squeezed her back, her tininess reminding him of his sisters, and went to the library.

On the way there, he pulled his phone out of his backpack and held it in his hand, thumb rubbing over the power button.

Thinking.

He turned on his phone and called home.

“I’m thinking about checking out nursing school,” he said to Mari, after fifteen minutes of catching up on everyone’s updates and shutting down the lecture she so clearly wanted to give about not being able to reach him at all times.

“Yeah? That would be cool. More school, though.”

And that was it. No hesitation. No funny look.

Admittedly, they were talking on the phone, so funny looks were a bit harder to translate, but if anyone could manage, Mari could.

“You gonna improve the standard of care in the ’hood, ’Lito?” she teased, and he knew she was remembering when he’d pulled her into the hallway at the hospital and freaked out about whether or not Lola was getting the best possible care.

“Maybe. Yeah.”

“Good.” Her voice was brisk now. “Somebody should.”

As if she knew he’d called because he needed to know they would be okay with it, Mari called the rest of his sisters to the phone, bringing in Sofi on a three-way call when it turned out she was at work already.

They grilled him about what classes he’d need to take at Carlisle to prepare. How much financial aid he thought he could get for nursing school. Whether or not he’d be coming back to Chicago for that or, God forbid, would he have to go somewhere else far from home?

“Jesus, you guys, I haven’t figured it all out yet. It’s just an idea!”

“It’s a great idea. I read there’s already a shortage of nurses and it’s only gonna get worse. You’ll always have a good job wherever you go.” That was Sofi.

“I’m not going anywhere except Chicago.” Rafi could only imagine how hard he’d want to get back home when he was done at Carlisle. And that was another reason he and Denny didn’t fit. Denny wouldn’t want to follow him back to Pilsen.

“We’ll see,” Nita said, like she was some kind of mysterious prophet, staring at his future in a glass ball full of smoke and dreams.

The ghost of a touch slid up his spine and he shivered.

After talking to his sisters, it was almost easy to drop the idea in conversation with his suitemates.

Of course, first he had to take his share of the shit they’d been holding in reserve, waiting for him to rejoin the human race.