Stitches of Life

Forever Young

"High school bus crash." Webber informed us. "Bunch of kids just came in. We got more on the way."

"Watley, Grey, come with me." Derek told Lexie and I as he led the way into the ER.

"Bumpus, come on." I waved to one of my interns, having had the others stay with my other patients upstairs or charting. He listened to me while I, in turn, listened to Derek, following him over to a bed that had a teenage boy laying on it, a paper cup taped over his right eye and a girl standing at the foot of his bed.

"What's your name?" Derek asked the boy.

"Danny." The boy told us.

"Hey, uh, Danny, I'm gonna take this off so I can have a look, okay?" Derek told him as he began to remove the cup from over his eye. I watched as he carefully removed the tape and once the cup was gone, I could feel my eyes widen. In his eye was a pencil.

"Okay, Danny, we need you to hold still." I told Danny as Derek began to lift the top of the bed so he was in a partly sitting up position.

"It was that asshat Sully and his stupid friends!" Danny swore as I started to take his blood pressure.

"The driver kept turning around, telling them to shut up-" The girl started to tell us as Derek tried to get a better look at Danny's eye.

"I'm just drawing a logo, and suddenly I'm upside-down." Danny said.

"And the pencil went, like, all the way in Danny's eye." The girl added the obvious.

"Yeah, I can see that." Derek nodded.

"Should I call his parents?" The girl asked.

"Why don't you let us do that?" I shook my head.

"Sully and those jerks should be in jail." Danny vented. "You should be calling the police, not my parents."

"You just need to not think about those kids, okay?" Derek told him. "You're gonna be out of high school soon. You never have to see 'em again."

"Oh, yeah. I still gotta finish." Danny pointed out.

"Danny, you need to calm down. Okay? 'Cause when you raise your voice you get upset, your blood pressure shoots up, and you could lose your eye." Derek tried to calm him down. "I need you to stay calm."

"Okay, I'll try." Danny agreed.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*

"I never knew what to say to them." Lexie spoke up as she and I waited for Danny to finish in CT, Derek checking up on a few other kids that had been brought in with the accident, Bumpus tailing him, eager to learn. At Lexie's words I glanced up from the monitor, waiting for the images to come up. "In high school- kids like him- they were always so... separate from the rest of us, you know, alone. It wasn't like that for me. I... I was prom queen and class valedictorian."

"Yeah, I wouldn't broadcast that." I warned her, finding myself thinking back to my own time in high school.

"I had a great group of friends, you know?" She kept going.

"Not really." I shook my head.

"Hey." Derek greeted us as he came in, Bumpus following him. "Well, let's see what we got here. Oh, you see that, Dr. Watley?"

"Yeah." I nodded. "Looks like the pencil lifted up one of the branches of the ACA."

"Is that a-a bleed?" Lexie pointed out on the scan.

"It is. It's a little one." Derek nodded. "We need to get that pencil out of there before it gets any bigger."

"I'll book an OR." I said.