Friends and Foes

Part 2 - Bigger deals

I spent the rest of the day in the infirmary. I couldn't be bothered to go to the rest of my classes and smile like everything was okay. I wasn't that sick, I knew but I preferred to spend the day napping in the nurse's office than sit near Nats as if I could stand her. I couldn't figure out how I was going to do the literature homework without talking to her. And usually, when we fought we only needed a few days to calm down and it'd all be fine but I had only three days to do this homework, and I really didn't want to let Aashiq down, even though she was setting me up to fail. She knew good and well that she'd Googled that poem and it hadn't a drop of significance to her.
Above all else, she had hurt my feelings. It was one thing for us to be upset over the conversation at breakfast, but for her to go out of her way to be unkind, to sabotage me, to threaten me? How could I forgive this? Not that she was the apology type. We had fought before over trivial things. We'd hurt each other before but I loved her so much I apologized every time because our friendship meant more to me than my pride. But now? She'd gone out of her way to be hurtful. How was I supposed to apologize and still have any kind of respect for myself?

In my thoughts, nurse Olsen came in to check my temperature. Becky Olsen was one of the only people in the school who didn't completely hate their job and the students that came along with it.  She was young, in her mid-thirties but with the face of a woman ten years younger and the heart of a woman twenty years older. Her curly brown hair seemed to always fall perfectly around her round face. Her brown skin always sparkled, like there was a warm fire of honey and cinnamon right under the surface of her existence. The same warmth radiated in her personality and her bedside manner. Nurse Olsen was the kindest woman; gentle and well humored; I mean, you had to be to deal with a bunch of delinquents. Her story was a sad one. After the unexpected death of her mother, she'd been sold in exchange for drugs by her father when she was 12. After escaping her captors, she found her way to Saint Ann's as a young teenager of 14. Sister Joan, the head nun at the time, refused to turn her away but instead taught her basic medical training and gave her a place to stay as well as rehabilitated her. By the time she was 18, Ms. Olsen became a nurse and became the youngest person to take over the nursing staff at the school, and for good reason. She was excellent. She could place an IV without you feeling a thing. She was patient but assertive when necessary. But with all the pain and trauma she'd faced in her life, her mental health wasn't always the best. There were times where she wouldn't be able to leave her quarters because the anxiety of what those men did to her would make her lock herself in her room out of fear that they would come and take her back to a life of drugs, prostitution, and abuse. Every day that she could muster the strength to work, she would put every ounce of herself into radiating the kindness and warmth that had evaded her at our age.

"Jo, sweetheart. You still don't have a temperature," she stated as she peered at the thermometer over her glasses

"I... It's not a fever... as such, but I do feel sick, honestly. I threw up." I whined

"I know. I believe you. But with no fever, it's not a stomach bug, so I can't keep you in the infirmary all day or send you back to your room. You know the rules." she said peering at me

"But Nurse Olsen..." I whined.

She let out a sigh and sat at the end of the bed.

"Alright, Jo. I've known you since the day they dropped you off here. It's not like you to let something like this keep you from classes when you are so close to making the honors classification. Why don't you tell me what's really going on?" she said putting her hand on my leg, in a comforting way that made my stomach turn.

"It's... nothing," I said, squirming.

She looked at me in a way that told me she didn't believe me. She stood up and began flipping through my records.