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"No, Lucie, you gotta stay still so I can cut you open."
Above his head, ten year old George O'Malley brandished a rusty pair of scissors, dulled at the tip and discolored at the base. Below him was nine year old me, who squirmed on his bed.
"This is boring," I complained, "I don't want to play doctor and patient any more. I want to go outside and play pirates on the playground."
"Come on," he frowned, "one more surgery and then we'll go outside and do what you want to."
"Fine," I pushed my head back into his pillows once more, rolling my shirt up to my ribs so he could touch the cool blades to my stomach.
"What's it look like, Doc?" I asked him in my best manly voice.
"Your appendix is bursting, so I need to cut it out."
"Where's my knock out gas?"
"I got it!" He turned to me, tossing the scissors to the side. He grabbed a pillow and pushed it on my face, pretending to smother me unconscious. I threw him off, laughing, with no care in the world.
Eight feet away from me stands my childhood friend, the boy next door, my confidant, my George. It feels like I haven't seen him in a lifetime, but he looks the same as when I left him all those years ago. A mess of brown curls, two wide doe eyes, a crooked nose.
He must have been the one the others were talking about, the one who delivered a baby on his first day. I crack a smile at that: I knew George was meant for great things, and I knew he would excel at being a doctor.
"George," I begin once more, lifting up a hand, in hopes that he would grab it, that we could mend the rift that time had created between us, but it's no use. He stares at my outreached hand like it's poison, like it would kill him to touch it, so instead, he looks me right in the eyes with a hurt gaze that makes me die inside.
"I didn't know you wanted to be a doctor," he tells me, and he turns and walks out of the locker room, leaving me behind, just like I did to him all those years ago.
✱
"Why won't he stop crying?"
Turning around on my heel, I watch as one of our patients du jour tries, unsuccessfully, to quiet his screaming baby. There's a look of exaggerated desperation on his face, an expression that I would usually find funny, if not for the fact that I was running on fumes after staying up all night.
