Second Overtime | JENSOO & CHAELISA

Chapter XXIII

The orthopedic clinic smelled like antiseptic, printer ink, and the kind of old magazines nobody picked up unless they were desperate.

Jisoo was absolutely desperate, not for the magazines but for the door to finally open.

She sat in the waiting room with her crutches propped beside her chair and her good knee bouncing so fast the whole row of plastic seats trembled with it. Her fingers tapped against the armrest in a rhythm that had no pattern. Three taps. Pause. Two taps. Pause. Five taps. Stop. Start again.

Across from her, a little boy with a cast on his arm stared at her like she was the entertainment.

Jisoo stared back.

He looked away first.

"You are scaring children now," Irene muttered beside her.

"I am not."

"You just had a staring contest with a six-year-old."

"He started it."

Irene lowered the brochure in her hand and gave her a look. The brochure was about knee injuries, but Irene had been holding it upside down for the last ten minutes. Jisoo had not told her. There were only so many battles a person could fight before test results.

On Jisoo's other side, Jin sat with his hands folded in his lap, trying very hard to look calm.

He was failing.

Not in any obvious way. Jin had always been the steadier one, but Jisoo knew him too well. She saw the way his thumb kept rubbing against the side of his index finger and how often his eyes moved toward the hallway Dr. Kang had disappeared into.

They had already done the scans, the X-ray and the MRI.

Jisoo had spent the whole time staring up at the inside of the machine and trying not to think about basketball.

She thought of it anyway.

The squeak of sneakers, the slap of the ball against the hardwood. Lisa shouting for the pass. The burn in her lungs in the fourth quarter. The weightless second before a shot left her fingers, when the whole world seemed to hold its breath with her.

Then she thought of the fall, the sound her knee made and the pain she felt afterwards.

Jisoo squeezed her hands together until her knuckles hurt.

Three months.

Three months of physical therapy, ice packs, braces, pain charts, and everyone telling her not to rush when rushing was the only thing she knew how to do.

She had done every exercise, even the stupid ones.

She had lifted her leg when it shook. She had bent her knee when it felt like her body was refusing to belong to her. She had gritted her teeth through pain that made her eyes water and then lied when Irene asked if it hurt.

She had rested and she had obeyed, even if she didn't want to because she knew that her future depended on it.

And now Dr. Kang was in his office, looking at pictures of the inside of her knee, deciding whether all that restraint had meant anything at all.

"What if it's bad?" Jisoo asked.

Neither Irene nor Jin answered right away. That was how she knew they had been thinking the same thing.

Irene set the brochure down carefully this time. "Then we deal with it."

Jisoo hated that answer.

Not because it was wrong but because it was the answer people gave when they were scared too.