Chapter Forty-Two: Forever Young
"You look like you're gonna hurl." Alex told me as we sat around the resident's locker room with the rest of the residents, waiting for Bailey to come and talk to us since she'd been appointed as the new chief resident, replacing Callie.
"I've just got a lot going on tonight." I told him, giving a small shrug. My stomach felt as though it were in knots as I thought about everything that was going to happen once I got off work tonight.
"I'm sure you'll be fine." Izzie told me from where she sat on another bench.
"And please, spare me the chick gossip tomorrow. I really don't want to hear about what you and Lucas do when you're alone." Alex shook his head. At his words it felt as though the knots in my stomach were becoming tighter. Though it'd been weeks since I had told Lucas about Mark and I's kiss, I had yet to tell my friends about the aftermath of what happened. As far as they all knew, Lucas had came back and we'd worked things out. I wasn't surprised Alex thought Lucas and I were having a date night tonight when in reality Lucas was coming by the apartment to collect the rest of his things.
"All right, listen up." Bailey got everyone's attention as she walked into the room. "I have nothing but respect for the job done by Dr. Torres, but things are gonna be different from here on in. This will be a professional environment. So your love lives, your hopes and dreams, the little joys and tragedies that make you who you are have no place in my hospital. The locker room is for changing, not for crying. The on call room is for napping, not for anything that requires a locked door. Stevens, did you hear a word I said? Grow up, I believe, is my point."
"Are you really this nervous about a date night with Lucas?" Meredith asked me once Bailey was gone, Cristina trailing after her, likely to make sure she was on Hahn's service this week.
"Yeah, aren't you two good again?" Alex raised a brow at me.
"Good again?" Izzie frowned at Alex's question, as did Meredith. "Wait, when were you and Lucas not good?"
"We're fine." I assured all of them, lying through my teeth as I chose to ignore Izzie's question.
"Wait, are you guys going to..." Izzie trailed off, her eyes widening. She didn't have to finish her question for all of us to know what she was going to ask, if Lucas and I were going to have sex tonight.
"I'm not going to answer that." I shook my head. "And, if we were, I'd probably be a lot more nervous. I mean, what if he expected me to be experienced?"
"He won't think that, trust me." Alex interjected.
"What is that supposed to mean?" I crossed my arms as Izzie, Meredith, and I all eyed him.
"It's just that you don't have that... slutty look to you." Alex shrugged. "There are some girls that you look at and can tell that they're just there for the sex, money, or something like that, and then there are girls that you can tell don't look at things like that. Those are the ones that people usually avoid in bars, except for Lucas apparently."
"Wait, we've both picked guys up in bars." Meredith gestured between Izzie and herself. "Are you calling us sluts?"
"If the thong fits." Alex smirked at them before he got up, leaving the locker room.
"Why did you go out with him again?" Meredith asked Izzie.
"I don't know." She shook her head.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*
"What do we got?" Derek asked later that morning as he joined some us down in the ER, all of us having been paged for the incoming trauma.
"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.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
"I promised this kid life gets better after high school." Derek sighed that afternoon as we operated on Danny, working on removing the pencil from his eye so he could stop the bleed. "He deserves to see that."
"He's got a good friend. That's something." I pointed out, referring to the girl, Marissa that had refused to leave Danny up until he was brought into surgery. "That girl has been by his bedside all day."
"Yeah, but even so, those cliques, they're miserable." Derek said. "He just needs to know it passes eventually."
At Derek's words there was a laugh, causing us all to look over at one of the scrub nurses.
"Sorry, Dr. Shepherd." She apologized.
"What's so funny?" Derek asked.
"I'm just not sure we've come as far as you'd like to think, clique-wise." She shared her opinion with all of us.
"We?" Derek questioned her word choice.
"The hospital." She explained.
"You think the hospital's clique-y?" Derek asked as he looked closer at Danny's head. "Oh, damn. The artery's burst."
"His brain is swelling. It's cutting off blood supply." I said as we tried to suction.
"Okay, push eighty grams of mannitol. Okay, let's go." Derek instructed.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*
"You look like you just ate a lemon." Derek commented when he found me ordering a coffee from the coffee cart outside the waiting room downstairs. "Are you okay?"
"No, no I'm not." I admitted.
"Beth, what happened with Danny in surgery, it wasn't our fault." He told me, resting a comforting hand on my shoulder. "We did everything we could for him, once that artery blew, there wasn't much of a chance that he'd wake up."
"I know," I nodded. "I know that, but it doesn't really help with the fact that I had to see a seventeen year old boy die today. And I know, technically he's not dead, but he's never going to wake up again, so it might as well be the same thing. That boy, he was an outsider in school and we promised that he'd be able to see that things change outside of high school, that cliques don't matter. Now he'll never be able to see that for himself. It just.... It sucks."
"Dr. Shepherd. Dr. Watley." We both looked over to see Marissa making her way over to us, still not knowing that her best friend was never going to wake up. "I know Danny's parents aren't gonna be here for a couple more hours, but could I at least see him? Please."
"All right, come on. Let's- Let's go sit down." Derek sighed. I looked at him in surprise, but didn't hesitate to follow him as he began to lead Marissa back towards the waiting area. Derek and I sat down on either side of her, a few of the other students glancing our way as we did so. "See, the, uh... When I removed the pencil, the artery burst. When the brain swells that much, it has nowhere to go. The hemor-"
Derek didn't get the chance to finish before Marissa started to cry, realizing that she had lost her best friend, that she'd have to go back to school without him. I pulled her into my arms, holding her as she cried for Danny, other students looking our way at the sound of her tears. As others watched us I could see looks of understanding filling some of their faces, realizing that one of their fellow students had died. I had to bite my tongue as I saw looks of grief on some of their faces, knowing that none of them really knew Danny, not like I knew Marissa did.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Once Marissa had pulled herself together, I took her to Danny's room so she could sit with him, see with her own eyes that he was gone now. I watched as she sat by his head while Lexie and I stood at the feet of the bed, working on his chart.
"It's so sad." I glanced over my shoulder at the sound of an unfamiliar voice, spotting two girls standing right outside the door, looking in at Marissa and Danny. "I used to walk by his house every day."
"He was in my algebra class, I think." The second girl said. I tried my best to ignore the girls as I walked over to Marissa's side, hesitant to talk to her, knowing that she was grieving for her best friend.
"Marissa," I whispered. "I know that this seems impossible right now, but you will get through this. Danny would've wanted you to."
"You don't know what he would've wanted." She shook her head. "You're just like them. You're a prom queen, and you're trying to act like you know what it's like for me. You have no idea what it's like."
"I wasn't prom queen." I told her as I walked around to the other side of the bed. "I was the girl in the cheap clothes that lived in a tiny apartment and worked two jobs to help her mom pay the bills. I was the quiet girl in class that no one talked to because I didn't look like the other kids, I didn't have the nice clothes or the manicures, I was the one that no one talked to. And when I was around your age, I lost my best friend, too. But I got through it. You will get through this."
"I'm gonna write a letter to his mom and dad." One of the girls by the door said to her friend.
"That's really beautiful." The other girl nodded.
"Get out." I told the girls.
"What?" One of them frowned at me, confused.
"Get out." I repeated myself. "You're not even supposed to be in here."
"She's here." The girl who wanted to write a letter pointed out.
"She's his friend, his best friend." I reminded them. "Go away. Go."
"I'm sorry." Marissa began to apologize to me. "I didn't mean to-"
"It's okay." I assured her. "You just lost your best friend. It's- It's the worst thing in the world."
"Dr. Watley." Lexie followed me out of Danny's room.
"What?" I asked as I turned around to face her.
"I just wanted to say that I'm- I'm sorry about earlier, when I was talking about the cliques and how I didn't get people like Danny." She apologized. "I didn't mean to offend you or anything. And I know that you didn't say anything about it, but, just now, it kind of showed that I might have offended you before, so I'm sorry."
"You have nothing to apologize for, Lexie." I tried to brush her off, but she wouldn't let me.
"The last time I was on your service, I thought you were a bitch." She admitted to me. "You were rude and mean, so I was confused. Natalie, Ian, Wesley, and George all told me that you were a nice doctor, that you were fair and didn't judge people, unlike the other residents. Then, when you acted like that to me, I got offended and judged you."
"Is there a point to any of this?" I asked her.
"The point is, when I'm going through a hard time, I act differently. I get mean and push people away." She said. "And I think you do the same thing. I don't know what you were going through the other week, and it's none of my business, but it's clear that there was something. And it's clear that there is something going on today, just like there's something going on with me. So, if you need to talk to someone, I'm a good listener. I know that you have other people, friends, that you'd probably rather talk to, but I'm here too. And, since you're my boss, it's like I can go around telling other people, not without being afraid that I'm going to lose my job or get stuck on scut for a month."
"I heard that your dad was in the ER today." I told her when she went to walk away, stopping her. "I don't know much, just that he came in here drunk with a cut on his hand, needed a few stitches. If you need to talk to someone about that, I'll listen. I mean, God knows Meredith won't, but I will."
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
"Beth?" I looked up from the chart in front of me to find Derek standing in the doorway of the conference room I'd holed myself up in a couple of hours ago. All I had wanted to do was be alone so I had slipped away to go over Danny's chart again, still making sure to keep an eye on my pager.
"Yes?" I sat up straighter in my chair. I could see the slightly downward twitch of his lips, clearly noticing how tense I was.
"Didn't your shift end half an hour ago?" He asked, stepping further into the room to close the door behind him.
"Um, yeah, I just wanted to make sure Danny's chart is all in order. So that his, uh, parents don't have a hassle." I stuttered slightly, trying to quickly gather up all the papers to put them back in order. I did my best to keep my eyes on the papers in front of me as I heard him walk towards the table, pulling out the chair beside me and taking a seat in it.
"Bethany," he reached out, resting one of his hands on top of my own. I looked up at him, able to see the worry clouding his eyes as they scanned over my face, likely able to see all of the cracks that had formed the past few weeks. "What happened? What's wrong?"
"I messed up, Derek." I admitted, pulling my hand away from his to rest my head in it. "I royally fucked up."
"What happened?" He asked me again.
"I made a mistake and..." I shook my head, forcing myself to look up and meet Derek's worried gaze once more. I could feel all of the emotions I'd been trying to hide the last few weeks surging to the surface, tears beginning to blur my vision. "And Lucas left."