Grasping for Life

Despite their impeccable EMT timing, Reedamon and Tepler couldn’t save the cranked up waif in the charter school bathroom. The waif went down spitting, clawing and snarling, and then, as if suddenly aware that all of their ministrations were intended to help, not hinder, went frighteningly stiff and compliant. That was how they knew she beyond their help, even though they had been on the block when the dispatch came in and made it to the tenth-grader in record time.

“Lift!”

A candidate for accutaine followed his classmate’s stretcher all the way to the ambulance. Tepler held her arm out as stiff as the pre-corpse they’d just loaded and barred his entry.

“I’m.. I’m her friend.”

His lime-green painted fingernails traced nervous circles around an unseen object in his jacket pocket.

“Visiting hours at the hospital,” Tepler closed the doors without telling him which hospital, and Reedamon rapped his knuckles twice on the cab partition. Lights spinning, sirens blaring, the ambulance touched off and cut into the parting uptown traffic.

The EMTs relaxed and sat down on either side of the stretcher. Reedamon set a glass ashtray on the waif’s chest and accepted one of the two Camels Tepler had tapped out of the pack. For several blocks they said nothing, just smoked and felt the ambulance slow down.

Reedamon glanced incuriously at the motionless body, and then reached down with his taped digits and lifted her pale hand by the ring finger.

“Jesus, would you look at the size of that stone! Is it real?”

“Forget it.” Tepler exhaled hard, inhaled, and blew her bangs out of her eyes. “At her age?”

“Don’t know, Annie,” Reedamon held it higher, turning it to and fro, as if an appraiser’s experience could manifest in the motion. “Looks pretty sweet.”

Tepler blew at her bangs again, lest the strands slinking their way back into view consider defiance. “Fine. I’ll have a look.”

Stabilizing herself by clutching the latch of one of the medicine cabinets, she bent over the waif and picked up the hand. She was not surprised to see the girl had painted her nails lime-green.

“Che,” she said. “Use your pen light on it.”

He did.

“Ooo - hold it steady - you might actually be right.” She dropped the hand and plucked the ashtray from the waif’s chest. “Scratch it against the bottom of this.”

Reedamon lifted her hand again, but this time it tightened into a fist around his taped fingers. He screamed and doubled over in time to catch the fist and his tender fingers in the face. He fell back against the air tanks and shuddered, still conscious, but stunned with surprised tears creeping down his cheeks.

Tepler tried to catch the wrists of the flailing girl, but she only had one hand free against two, and the green nails lacerated her arms every time she let a wild limb fly past. She let go of the latch and immediately fell on the patient, getting cut a few more times before she could pin down both arms. Then it was necessary to evade the girl’s gnashing teeth. By bobbing up and down on the shocks of the ambulance, the shocks of the stretcher and the biological equivalent in the patient and EMT’s arms, Tepler saw the girl’s furious dumb face like a midnight moviegoer in the first row of seats. She craned her neck as much as her body would allow to escape it.

When she felt the tension sinking out of her opponent she opened her eyes and saw that her partner had recovered enough to put an oxygen mask over the girl’s face. Once the waif’s eyes were half lidded, she carefully extricated herself and staggered back, not daring to turn away as Reedamon quickly wrapped her bleeding forearms, favoring his un-taped fingers.

“Do you think she heard us talking about the ring?” He whispered into her ear, also not willing to take his attention off the patient.

Tepler shook her head slowly, feeling the intensifying sting in her arms. “No way. She’s still crazy high.”

“I was ninety-nine percent certain she was dead.” Reedamon’s voice was returning to normal.

His partner rapped on the cab partition three times in rapid succession, and the ambulance picked up speed. “Yeah, me too,” Tepler took one last, sad look at the diamond ring on the green-tipped fingers. “So, I guess we take Miss one-percent to the hospital and become heroes instead.”