Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters in this story.
Alright, everyone, I wasn't going to continue this, but I had a lot of requests from reviewers, so I decided it would be best. Everyone thank smilebackwards for this update, cuz I totally used her...or his...ITS...lol it was an anonymous review...idea for the continuation of this plot. That's right--smilebackwards had the idea to have Dr. Cox find JD in this chappie, NOT ME. I just wrote it up. So thank him/her/it. Lol. Fanfic is so impersonal.
I was two seconds away from beating my head against the register. It was seven thirty, past the dinner rush, and nobody was in the freaking McDonald's anymore. I wondered vaguely if it were possible for the smell of greasy, manufactured burger to embed itself in the hairs of my nostrils so as to torture me for the rest of my god forsaken life, but I was interrupted by my manager.
"Perry, if you're not going to do anything productive, start mopping the floor," the pinhead ordered.
I rolled my eyes. "Yes, sir," I said sarcastically. I knew he wouldn't fire me. This dump was desperate for employees during tourist season; it took any idiot to realize that. Besides, the manager was—what, three years older than I was? Four at the most.
Nonetheless, the mopping began. I yawned. I didn't give a crap about anything this far into a shift. Okay, it was only ten hours, admittedly. How was I going to make it through my internship if I couldn't handle ten hours in the fast food business without falling asleep? I hoped that maybe medicine would be a bit more interesting than the crap I dealt with here. Otherwise two hundred thousand dollars worth of education had just gone down the one of the toilets I kept "forgetting" to clean.
Thunder clapped outside, and I groaned inwardly. My car recently began leaking (I have a theory that God hates me, but unfortunately there's no way to prove that until I get to meet the Big Guy myself…which is, at this rate, unlikely, seeing as Satan's already claimed me for his own), and now the seats were going to be all wet.
I checked the clock. Thirty minutes left and I was off, letting the night-shift suckers start.
The door jingled open. I didn't look up until I heard a yelp and saw a kid sliding towards me on the wet tile.
I sighed, sticking the mop in the bin of murky water. "Look at the sign, kid," I said in a monotone.
"S-sorry," the kid said shakily, rising to his feet. His arm was tucked awkwardly to his side and he was completely drenched from head to toe. He looked around ten or eleven, a skinny shrimp. I felt a little bad for him, mostly because I knew there hadn't been a sign for him to watch out for, but other than that I didn't give a crap.
He took a seat at a booth in the corner, his feet dangling, not even tall enough to touch the ground. I turned my attention back to the floor and saw a watery red stain—funny, that hadn't been there a second ago. I mopped it up, though, not really thinking about it.
A couple of minutes later the kid started to cough. I glared over in his direction. He was interrupting my need for complete and absolute silence and I was about ready to kill him. "Hey, kid, you can't just sit there and get the tables all wet unless you're planning to actually buy something," I told him in irritation.
He looked up at me in slight alarm, wondering for a moment if I had been talking to him. I got that a lot. Customers were appalled at my attitude sometimes, but what the hell did I care? So they decided they wouldn't come back to this McDonald's. What did it matter? They were on vacation; they'd leave in two days for their houses in Connecticut or Oklahoma or something and never think about it again.
"That's right, buddy. No loitering allowed."
He bit his lip. I noticed the kid was shaking slightly, still wet, his face pale. I sighed. Did this mean I was supposed to care? I wasn't even a doctor yet.
He took two quarters out of his fist. "I'll have fries." One of his arms was still tucked oddly into his side, shielded from view, but I figured it would be rude to ask if it ended up being some deformity. Believe me, I'd learned that the hard way more than once.
I took the quarters from him and grabbed fries, sticking them on his table. He looked at them but didn't touch them.
"You gonna eat those?" I asked once I had finished my mopping.
"You can have them," he offered.
I shrugged. Free food was great, but eating someone else's food was even better. I looked around and made sure the coast was clear, then sat down across from the kid and started eating the fries.
"It's late," I mentioned.
The kid nodded at me.
Some people just can't take a hint. "So where are your parents?" I asked, practically spelling it out for him.
He shrugged. "Dunno."
"Alrighty," I said, "what are you doing here, then?"
He shrugged again, staring at the tabletop. Did he realize how rare it was for me to talk to anyone? I was practically gracing this kid with the mere act of my speaking to him, and he was blowing me off. Believe me, any twenty-four-year-old who gets blown off by a preteen considers it a blow to their ego.
"Are you on vacation here?" I asked impatiently.
He shook his head. "No, I…long story," he said, shrugging again.
"You know, if you keep shrugging like that, people will think you're a buffoon who doesn't speak any English beyond one word answers and extremely vague, nonsensical statements instead of the gangly ten-year-old nuisance you most likely are," I badgered him, wondering if he understood a word I was saying. He didn't react, just kept staring.
"What the hell's your problem?" I finally just flat out asked.
He shrugged for the billionth time, then grinned at me. His eyes were big and sad, though. I never really knew the meaning of "puppy dog eyes" until I was looking at this kid. A mop of wet brown hair was sticking to his forehead and his eyes were wide and almost frightened-looking, but he went right on grinning.
I scoffed. "Use your words, pipsqueak." The look was not going to work on me.
"What the heck is your problem?" he countered a bit hesitantly.
"Nice," I said sarcastically. "Real nice. We've got ourselves a smarty pants here." I looked at the clock. My shift was over in five minutes. "Why don't you just go home?"
His face really was as white as a sheet, and he was still shivering. It wasn't even cold outside. Yeah, it was raining, but this was Florida in the summertime. It never got cold.
"I will," he said, still sitting there.
"Well?"
"In a minute."
I looked over at his awkwardly hung arm for a second. What was he trying to hide? Did he steal a piece of gum from the mini mart across the street or something?
And then I saw it. His dark blue shirt was wet, so it wasn't easy to see, but there was a darker rouge color forming around the spot where his arm was pressed to his shirt. I thought back to the red on the floor and realized it must have been his blood. No wonder the kid was shaken up.
I grabbed his arm. He yelped at first, obviously reluctant to be discovered, and tried to pull away. Unfortunately for him, having not yet reached a hundred pounds, I easily won the three millisecond battle.
"Yikes," I muttered. Most of the skin from his forearm to his shoulder was raw and bloody, looking completely disgusting. I cringed and looked up at his face. He was certainly looking a little more freaked out now that he was staring at it.
"Leave me alone," he muttered, wrenching his arm back when I loosened my grip.
"You can't go out like that," I protested. "Use your head, brainiac. How the hell did that happen? Did you get jumped by a Disney character gang or something?"
His cheeks turned an indignant color red. "I almost got hit by a car," he said through grit teeth, "but I jumped out of the way before it hit me." His eyes were starting to water. Damn it. I hadn't meant to make the kid cry.
"Look," I said, sighing. I hated being charitable. "Why don't I drive you home? Your mom or dad can check it out."
"You can't!"
"I can't what?"
"Drive me home," he said hurriedly. "I'm not allowed…to talk to strangers," the kid said, clearly lying.
"Right. Because I'm an extremely dangerous man who possibly has twelve guns in his car labeled 'to kill ten-year-olds.'"
"I'm eleven."
"Whoop-dee-doo. I'm driving you home. Believe me, your parents aren't going to be mad."
"My parents aren't there."
"Well, where are they?"
"I don't know..." he trailed off, staring at his shoes. He was dripping blood onto the floor by now, and his face was sickly tinged. He looked a bit shaky on his feet. I knew what I had to do—I just wish that I didn't have to be the one to do it.
I checked the clock. My shift was over.
"C'mon, we're going to the emergency room," I said, grabbing him by the good arm.
"No!" he yelled. "I can't. I'll get in trouble. My brother…"
"Will live." I dragged him out the door, asking myself and Satan in hell one more time why these sorts of things always seemed to happen to me.
YEAH JDA! Lol. Again, thank smilebackwards for the beautiful idea here. If ya didn't get that blatantly obvious memo planted right above the beginning of this chapter, then...scroll back up and read it again. Lolzers. REVIEW.