"Hey," Lindsay said, staring at me with a raised eyebrow as I walked up to my locker the next day. I smiled noncommittally and opened my locker. She cleared her throat, "Um, so." I looked at her out of the corner of my eye. "So," I responded, looking back into my locker. "Uh... what, um, what happened with Nick?" I shrugged, "I just visited him at the hospital. He was pretty bruised up, you know, but he only had one broken bone." She nodded, "So, um, when's gonna be back?" I shrugged, "They let him out of the hospital last night, I think. He'll probably come back tomorrow, he seemed pretty ti-" I stopped as I saw Nick coming down the hallway toward me. I rose an eyebrow, "Or, you know, he might come back today." Lindsay turned, saw Nick, immediately turned back to me, and rose an eyebrow at me. Nick approached us just as I blinked at her, unknowing. "Hey," he said, and I couldn't do anything but blink at him. "Thanks for, uh, coming... to the hospital, you know. You didn't have to do that. Sorry that I was kind of sleeping the whole time you were there." I shook my head quickly, blushing bright, slightly embarrassed that Lindsay knew now that I had stayed there even when he had fallen asleep. At least she didn't know that I had also held his hand the whole time, marveling over how smooth his fingers were, his rounded fingernails, the veins of his hands sticking out like they might explode at any minute. I shuddered now and looked up again. Lindsay was staring at me, both eyebrows up. Nick noticed and quickly said, "Uh... wanna sign my, um, cast?" I couldn't help but laugh at this, knowing that having people sign his cast wasn't something Nick would ordinarily do. Her unzipped his army bag and handed Lindsay a black sharpie. She wrote in careful block letters, small but not tiny, "Lindsay The Great". I took the pen, placed his arm over my right hand, and signed my name on it with my left. I wrote it in a mix between graffiti-type and cursive, massive, over the whole cast, so that pretty much no one else could sign. He laughed, "Well. There you go. Now I'll never forget the important things in life." Lindsay and I both raised our eyebrows at this, and he quickly added, "You shouldn't chill in alleys at night, and you shouldn't let a girl sign your cast afterwards if you do." I laughed and Lindsay fought a grin, her eyes warming, like she was figuring something out in her brain. She smiled at him, "Thanks, Nick. We'll see you later." She tugged on my arm then and pulled me away to class.
"I just don't get it," Lindsay said, shaking her head as she bit into a carrot stick at lunch, "You guys aren't together. You don't like him. You barely talk to each other. So why did you visit him at the hospital? And why isn't he wondering why you visited him at the hospital?" I blushed, "You don''t know that he isn't." She rolled her eyes, "Oh yes, I do. I may be out of your loop, but I'm not clueless." I blushed brighter and looked down, and Lindsay leaned toward me and asked, "What aren't you telling me?" I looked up and wanted to tell her everything. Not just about Nick. But about why I was there in the first place, why I happened to find Nick following me that first night. Why I had insomnia. I wanted to tell her about my parents. I wanted to tell her about my fingernails. About how I worked every day to make sure I didn't start biting them anymore, after all those years where the nibbling was a second nature, a relief, something to distract me from the surroundings that I hated, to make me seem occupied-so that my parents wouldn't turn, see me sitting there, just listening, and decide to let me in on the yelling, to invite me in. It was bad enough I had to witness it, I would die if I was part of it. Instead, I looked up at Lindsay and said, "Um... Santa Claus is a fraud?"
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