It had been raining all week, which was weird. It hardly rained at all that year, and never in winter.
When Gatsby came into history, his shirt was wet, and there was mud on his shoes and in his hair. He looked strange, and smaller than usual—pale except for a little scrape, raw and bright on the point of his chin. He was dragging his backpack by the strap, letting it hang down so that it bumped along the floor as he walked. When he dropped into his seat, it looked awkward.
“Sorry, Mister T. Unavoidable.” Which is what he always said when he was late, but his voice cracked a little. He kept opening his mouth like he wanted to say something else, but couldn’t make the sound come out.
When he saw me watching him, he stared back and raised his eyebrows. But when he saw that Valentine was watching too, he ducked his head, fumbling one-handed with his backpack. He looked sick, but sicker than normal.
Valentine leaned across the aisle. “What’s wrong—something’s wrong. What’s wrong with your arm?”
“Nothing.” When he took out a pen, he was shaking.
After roll, Tully told us to work on our final projects while he ran down to the library. He told us to behave ourselves, but not as though he expected that we wouldn’t.
After he was gone, Valentine turned to face Gatsby. “Something’s wrong.”
Gatsby looked away and said very carefully, “I kind of hurt my shoulder.”
Valentine was out of her desk now, standing over him, hands on her hips. “I want to see.”
He shook his head.
“God damn it, Gatsby. Let me see it.”
She grabbed him by the collar and yanked hard, and he shut his eyes, biting off a short, harsh cry.
She looked down inside the gaping neck of his shirt, then let him go, backing away stiffly, her arms at her sides, her voice high and quick and breathless.
“Ohmygod.” She said it in a rush, like it was all one word. “Jesus.”
He didn’t say anything, just nodded. He looked very tired.
“So, who did that? Who did that?”
He reached out with his right hand, his good hand. “V, I—”
She twisted away, skipping back. “Got in a fight. You got in a fight, Gatsby. What—was it over some petty drug bullshit? Did Shark-Boy tell you to ‘stand and recognize,’ some shit like that? You better $%&@ ing recognize this, Gatsby. You are on probation. You are not supposed to fight anymore.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it again.
“Take off your shirt,” she said, looking terrifying.
He got to his feet and tried to pull his T-shirt up one-handed, but he was shaking bad. When Valentine reached for him, he nodded and sighed.
She was careful with him, turning his body instead of his arm as she pulled the shirt over his head. He was wearing an undershirt, white cotton. His whole torso had a skewed look, crooked and slumped on the left side.
He stood with his eyes closed, taking deep breaths as Valentine raised the undershirt.
“This will hurt,” she said as she twisted it up and away from his shoulder.
Everyone was watching now, and a few people gasped. I sat perfectly still, hands clasped on my open book. I was thinking, How? How can that lump be white, when the skin all around it is bruised so deep it looks black? And then almost immediately, That’s bone. It’s white because it’s bone and I’m seeing where his bone has almost punched right through the skin.
It was the truth, too. The perfect curve and the spooky blue-white color of the ball-joint were clearly visible under his skin. All around it, the blood feathered just below the surface, making a bruised halo.
“Jesus, Gatsby,” Valentine said, letting him go. “That looks pretty bad.”
He nodded wearily. “I know. But it ain’t so bad. I mean, I still walked in here on my own, right? I’ll be okay.”
“But what are you going to do about it?”
“It’s not a big deal,” he said. “You just have to pop it back in. It’s easy. Just pop it back in there.” He smiled and it looked fake. “Come on. Before Tully gets back.”
“Can’t you go down to the office? Someone in the office could do it, right?”
“No,” he said. “Not without asking what happened.”
“Oh.” Valentine’s eyes were winter-blue, like ice floes. “Well.”
She helped him stand against the wall. Then with one hand, she cupped his elbow, and with the other, she reached for his shoulder, cringing, sliding the heel of her hand under the joint.
“Okay, now listen,” he said. He spoke slowly and clearly, looking into her face. “If you don’t do this like you mean it, it won’t go back in. I mean, don’t worry about hurting me. You have to just do it as hard as you can, and I’ll try not to move.”
“Oh, God.” Valentine was wincing, looking horrified, but she didn’t take her hands away.
Gatsby leaned his head back, closed his eyes. “Okay, now do it. But do it fast and do it right. ‘Cause I don’t think I can take if it you have to try again.”
“Hold still,” she whispered. Her hair hung down past the middle of her back, straight and shiny and very blond. “Please, please hold still.”
She was moaning under her breath as she lifted his elbow and slammed his shoulder against the wall. I’d never seen anyone turn gray before, even though I’d read all these war books and Gothic mysteries. I hadn’t actually believed them. The blood drained out of his face in a rush, leaving him a dirty, clammy color. His lips went white, his arms turned chalky. I could see the blue map of veins running under his skin, but he didn’t make a sound.
Valentine stepped back and Gatsby slumped against the wall, cradling his arm against his chest. They were both shaking a little.
“I’m sorry,” she said weakly, holding out her hands like she was stopping traffic, like she might catch him if he fell. “I can’t get it. Are you okay?”
He sort of laughed, but it was very quiet, and sounded more like he was clearing his throat. “Hurts so bad, I can’t decide whether to puke or pass out.”
“Sit down,” she said, pushing on his good shoulder. “Sit.”
Slowly, he slid his back along the wall until he was kneeling on the floor. He was breathing in long, sighing gasps, like he’d been running a long time and was finally allowed to stop.
It’s weird to think that I was there for all this. I was watching, fingers laced, not moving or looking away. I wanted, more than anything, for a grown-up to intervene, take it all back—the blueblack bruise, the lump of bone, the scrape on his chin.
When Tully finally came back in, everyone froze like we’d been caught doing something awful. He gave us a long, shrewd look, but didn’t say anything.
After awhile, Pixie and I went up to his desk side by side, not holding hands, but almost like we wanted to. There was still no sound on our final project, even though we’d recorded the whole thing three times and we asked him what we should do. We just kept acting like nothing was wrong.
Gatsby came over and stood patiently beside us, still cradling his arm, still white in the face. I looked up at him and he smiled, but his eyes had a dull, flat look. I thought it must be shock. The lump under his shirt was grotesque.
“Mr. Gatsby,” Tully said, raising his eyebrows. “Something seems to be troubling you. Are you hurt?”
Gatsby’s grin was sheepish. “I kind of messed up my arm. Nothing bad, but Mister T, can I go down to the office? It won’t take long.”
Tully looked at him closely for the first time. “Gatsby, what’s wrong? Why do you need to go to the office?”
Gatsby said, as if it were the most casual thing, “I just need to go down and get my shoulder popped back in.”
And Tully nodded. He looked like there were a lot of things he wanted to say, but in the end, all he said was, “Would you like me to write you a pass?”
“That would be nice,” Gatsby told him.
It was so weird—just the whole thing. I sat with Pixie and Trung, debating our presentation order in strange, hushed voices. Everyone was working on their projects, like everything was normal. Except Valentine’s hands were shaking and every time she said anything, it sounded like she was about to cry.
#4 was holding onto the corners of his desk and when I turned towards him, he looked up suddenly—a raw, peeled-open look that made me think of that day in the bus circle, the way he held his hands away from his body. I stared back at him, because it was uncomfortable, but at least it was something I recognized. I was just so relieved that at least someone minded.
After maybe ten minutes, Gatsby came back. He was still holding his arm against his chest, but the lump was mostly gone.
“V,” he said. “You gotta help me get my stuff together. I can’t do it by myself.”
Valentine began putting Gatsby’s books away. “Are you leaving?”
He nodded. “Yeah, they called my mom.”
Crystal looked up hopefully. “Taking you to the hospital, then?”
Gatsby got a weird expression. “No . . . they’re . . .” He laughed a low, nervous laugh. “They’re arresting me.”
“Arresting?” Valentine said in a vicious, incredulous voice. “Jesus, what did you do to him?”
“Nothing,” Gatsby said. “I never did anything to him.”
After he was gone, Crystal put her head on her arms and started to cry. I wondered how much of it was for Gatsby, and how much was just reaction. Trung got up and went over to her. I wasn’t surprised. He was just like that, warm and logical and comforting.
Crystal snuffled and raised her head. She was trying to keep her mouth from trembling. “I thought it would be all right. I saw, you know. I didn’t think he got hurt like that—you couldn’t tell—and he didn’t-he didn’t . . .”
“What happened?” Trung asked very gently.
“Shark-Boy,” she said. She was rubbing her elbows. “And Gatsby could have walked away, but he just stood there, he stood there, the whole time. He didn’t do anything.”
Trung leaned forward and said something soft and noncommittal.
“He always has to be like that!” Crystal blinked hard. “Always trying to be so tough, wanting to hear everybody say it—say, Gatsby, you’re so tough, you’re such a $%&@ ing badass. He could have walked away and it wouldn’t have mattered. Why did he do that?”
Trung said something close to her ear, but I couldn’t hear it. I wanted to. I wanted to hear the reason when Trung said it, because his expression was kind and because he always seemed so smart about people in all the ways I wasn’t. He could always seem to decode tone and gesture, or know what people actually meant.
All afternoon, I wrote down people’s conversations, every single thing that anybody said. My first attempt at a cohesive account was just five pages of neatly-attributed dialogue. I took the pages home with me, and tried so hard to figure out what the whole thing meant, when I was troublingly sure that in the end, it didn’t mean anything. That some things will always have a sheen of chaos to them. They will leave you standing there, rumpled and windswept, shaking your head and wondering what just happened.*
*****
Tell me about injuries: the shocking kind or the messy kind or even the mundane kind. (I have always been mildly obsessed with all the dangerous things that can happen to a body.)
Tell me about chaos or times when everything seemed out of control and you waited for an adult to impose order. Or maybe you imposed order yourself? Those stories are good too—those ones are better.
*I’ll explain the sequence of events next week—because there is a rational explanation. Sort of. But at the time, this was only one of those hectic things that seems completely disconnected from anything real. It was like a dream that happened, and then the next day, we felt strangely obligated to come back and carry on like always.
Brenna Yovanoff 
Wow… That would definitely be a hard thing to witness. Hard because of the injury, sure, but also because of the reactions everyone had.
I have Kyphosis which is basically hunchback that I had surgery for when I was fifteen. Two titanium rods and fifteen screws to straighten my back. That’s not an injury but it was something that brought on teasing that made everything chaotic. When I was in the eighth grade, there was this boy who had language arts with me and he sat behind me. Well he would always talk about how big my back was and he would run his hand down my back without permission which had actually happened to me before when I was in the seventh grade in band so I just ignored it this time like I ignored it then. Then he started slamming his desk into my back. I continued to ignore it even though it embarrassed and hurt me, hoping someone would intervene. Finally, I went to the office and filed a complaint against him and he got a talking to. I probably should’ve done something myself but at the time all I could think of to do was cry to my mom and she told me to tell the office so that’s what I did. Then he stopped and basically ignored me after that and then most of the chaos for me in language ended. Though now I do wish I had stood up for myself.
Thank you for the beautiful stories Brenna :)
Two titanium rods and fifteen screws to straighten my back.
Oh, yikes! Does your back feel better now, though? I hope so <3
Finally, I went to the office and filed a complaint against him and he got a talking to.
Thanks for sharing this story with me. It is not always easy to talk about the indignities of junior high, and I’m really impressed that you went to the office and asked them to do something about it. When I was the age, there’s no way I would have been brave enough to confront the situation at all. Honestly, I probably would have just tried to ignore it and hoped really hard that he would get bored and stop.
Though now I do wish I had stood up for myself.
To me, it seems like you did. I know it’s so tempting to imagine doing the super-hero thing and making someone regret their behavior or take it back, but often, that kind of confrontation requires a lot of practice before it comes naturally (or at all), and it’s not even always the best approach.
Also, what a nasty, vicious jerk! In a perfect world, whenever he thinks back on how he acted, he’ll feel bad and then try to be a nicer person. (In my personal experience, this is not always the case. But right now I’ll pretend, because I really, really like to think that deep down, people genuinely want to be their better selves.)
And thank you for reading my stories! I really appreciate your comments and I think you’re very brave for sharing them (even on the days when you don’t think so).
My back still has a slight curve to it but it’s definitely a lot better, and it feels better too. I still experience pain, especially when it’s cold outside, but it’s worth it. I was at 72 degrees (they measure the curve by degrees) and they perform emergency surgery at 75 degrees because at that point it will start crushing your lungs and other organs, so I was high risk and I’m really glad they decided not to wait anymore and I don’t have to worry my family as much.
I usually would just ignore the teasing, but I was just emotionally done with it all and after telling my mom and getting her support, I guess I had the nerve to go and file a complaint. Thank you so much for saying that you are impressed by me going to the office and saying something. That’s really nice to hear.
It is definitely hard to do the super-hero thing, and it does take a lot of confidence and practice. I’m usually the quiet person that doesn’t really say anything when people are mean spirited, and I’m not the best with confrontation, especially when I don’t know the person. And it’s true, that isn’t always the best approach. Sometimes that just makes things worse.
For whatever reason, some people felt it was okay to touch my back without my permission because it looked so different from everyone else’s back, especially when I was sitting. Or they felt the need to comment on it when I was sitting right there. I hope he’ll feel bad and try to act like a nicer person too. I really like to believe that people want to be their better selves as well. I also really like to believe that people can change, because I like to believe I have changed from when I was younger. Though I do admit, I sometimes have a hard time forgiving people, even though I wish to be forgiven.
Thank you for thinking I’m brave. Most of the time I’m afraid that I’m sharing too much, so it’s nice to hear that you appreciate my comments :)
I still experience pain, especially when it’s cold outside, but it’s worth it.
You know, I almost asked about this. I have a few titanium pins in my knee, which is almost nothing in the grand scheme of metal-to-body ratio, and they *still* drive me crazy whenever it gets cold.
I sometimes have a hard time forgiving people, even though I wish to be forgiven.
Honestly, I think this is just a being-human thing. Forgiveness is one of those completely theoretical, abstract things that can still have such a huge impact on our lives. And sometimes it’s really hard to remember that there’s a whole, complex person behind the cruel asshole whose primary hobby seems to be making other people miserable.
I feel like the more analytical I am about something, the more forgiving I can be—both of others and of myself. I know that’s not how it works for everyone, but I do best when I can get some distance and start looking at all the pieces and psychoanalyzing everyone involved until things finally start to make sense.
Valentine would make a wonderful main character.
Loving people who are only going to hurt you, and themselves is awful. But I think it would be worse if no one loved those people, and no one cared.
Also, it’s quite mean of you to leave us guessing for a week.
Valentine would make a wonderful main character.
Honestly, I think so too. I have yet to write a novel about someone who’s inherently very brave, and she definitely fits the bill.
But I think it would be worse if no one loved those people, and no one cared.
Absolutely! I think that one of the biggest challenges in life is figuring out how to love the people who really need it, without getting sucked down into their mess with them. Like, if someone’s floundering around, you can’t always do a lot for them, but maybe you can help them find the ladder.
Also, it’s quite mean of you to leave us guessing for a week.
I know, I know—but the length of this has already exceeded the imaginary cap I set for myself by . . . quite a bit. And I will deliver the resolution next week. Because I’ve been working very hard these last few months to become a less capricious blogger. Mostly with success.
These posts always seem like a more theatrical, surreal distilled version of the high school experience I had, but this one more than most. Bizarre and disturbing and captivating. I can’t imagine something like that happening, if only because people in my high school, even confronted with real blood, would’ve felt compelled to gossip incessently the second he was out of the room. Entire geometry classes were wasted because there’d been a fight at lunch. I don’t think they were capable of ever pretending something was fine.
It does remind me of a sophomore year math class incident, though, where the kid sitting behind me requested to be excused halfway through a test and admitted it was because his nose was broken. But I think that story related back to a boxing match, and he was a very strange boy… that same year he thought it was a good idea to get ‘Mary Jane’ tattooed in cursive over his heart… for the plant, not a girl.
I’m sure I have other stories about injury and control, but none I can think of at the moment.
These posts always seem like a more theatrical, surreal distilled version of the high school experience I had
Well, I’ll be the first to admit that thanks to hindsight, I get to pick and choose only the best, most cinematic moments :) This one, though, is kind of a special case—even after years, it still feels theatrical and yes, pretty surreal.
My school was a very fight-y one (at least in some circles), and I think the only thing that separated this day from any other was the degree of injury. Because it was so strange and brutal, I think some kind of survival setting or coping mechanism kicked in, so that it felt sort of like being in a dream, like “well, okay. I guess we’re doing this now.”
It only worked on anyone who’d actually seen Gatsby’s shoulder though, because the next day, everyone had an opinion, and they were mostly people who’d only heard things second-, third-, or fourth-hand. The strangest thing, I think, was how no one who’d actually seen him wanted to talk about it afterward. They all acted like there weren’t words for it. So naturally, I became obsessed with tracking down the right way to describe it!
Bad things that happen…my best friend had a lot of family problems. Came to school with bruises, and finally told us that it was her dad. She called me one night asking for help.
I didn’t have a car, so I did the next best thing I could. I called the people I knew that did have cars, and were able to go make a house call.
She said when he went to answer the door, a horde of our buddies were standing on the doorstep with baseball bats asking if she was okay in there.
For some reason, that was the night her dad stopped hurting her. Never hurt her again. I guess spooky goth hoodlums with baseball bats were his worst nightmare.
I’m glad for people who care enough to check on their friends, ignore their protests when they know something is gravely wrong, and do something about it. You never know what you might say or do that could change the course of someone’s life, or possibly save it.
I’m glad for people who care enough to check on their friends, ignore their protests when they know something is gravely wrong, and do something about it.
This is such a hard thing, and such a true one, especially in high school, when you can love your friends dearly and be completely willing to help, but you still don’t have a lot of experience knowing how to do the grown-up thing.
I think your friend is very lucky to have had so many people ready to intercede for her and make sure she was okay.
You never know what you might say or do that could change the course of someone’s life, or possibly save it.
Yes—100% yes. It’s so easy sometimes to feel like we don’t have a far-reaching effect on the world, but one person’s passing comment could change someone else’s entire day. It doesn’t cost anything to be kind, or to check in with someone and see how they’re doing, and I don’t think I really understood that when I was in high school, even though I probably would have claimed that I did. It’s funny how much your world-view can change, even while it mostly stays the same—kind of like turning a kaleidoscope.
Tell me about injuries: the shocking kind or the messy kind or even the mundane kind. (I have always been mildly obsessed with all the dangerous things that can happen to a body.)
Tell me about chaos or times when everything seemed out of control and you waited for an adult to impose order. Or maybe you imposed order yourself? Those stories are good too—those ones are better.
I have never broken a bone. I’ve only twisted my ankle once (and that was last year, because I was dumb enough to be twirling around on our hardwood floor). I’ve had either two or three concussions — my family never agrees on how many it really is. I constantly have a myriad assortment of bruises, because of dance. I have three parallel scars on my knee, but I have no idea where they came from. No one believes me when I tell them this.
I have never experienced true chaos. In my family, it is always insane, but it’s an organized sort of chaos. And when things seem out of control, it’s always in my thoughts, and I reorder them by hibernating until I have a break from school, when I can breathe.
I have never broken a bone.
I’m pretty much the same way—a billion bruises, no real injuries (except I’ve broken my nose a bunch of times and wow, can you tell!). I played soccer for 20 years before I ever got seriously hurt. Now I have a bunch of pins in my knee, but that’s my one big one.
I have never experienced true chaos. In my family, it is always insane, but it’s an organized sort of chaos.
This is how I grew up. No matter how raucous or hilarious or unpredictable things were, I always just knew that everything was going to be fine—someone had it under control. I think that’s why school was such a strange transition for me. Suddenly, everything seemed way more orderly on the surface, and way more chaotic underneath, like anything could happen at any minute, and no one would know how to deal with it.
The thoughts thing is funny—I always tried to explain it by saying that sometimes I just had too many, that they all didn’t fit in my head. I have so many notebooks, years and years worth, and all of them are full of thoughts that didn’t fit.
Oh my goodness, it terrifies me to imagine how much pain Gatsby must have been in. I think I almost cried when reading it… This year I broke my first bone, so I’m still a bit…conscious of pain. Speaking of, I broke my collarbone. I was playing a game of basketball, and the girl I was guarding was trying to get a pass, and I was trying to intercept it. Her elbow just collided with me, and it broke. It was painful, and then there wasn’t much to do by way of healing aside from putting it in a sling, and then brace, and waiting. My other painful medical episode was getting my appendix removed, (although it’s not strictly an injury) when I found out I have a “high tolerance of pain” which left my appendicitis undiagnosed, and allowed it to “explode” …
I don’t think I have any good chaos stories to share, thankfully most chaos in my life comes out of books =] And I absolutely love reading your stories (on the blog and in books) and I hope my high school experience is as interesting (if not as chaotic) as yours was.
I think one of the things that always impressed me about Gatsby was his ability to never be defeated by how much things hurt. (Which, sadly, is probably a result of having a lot of practice at being hurt.)
While I’ve had some fairly serious sports injuries, I’ve still never broken a bone *knock on wood* and so I can’t really imagine it. The collarbone, especially, scares me because it just seems so fragile! Too fragile to officially be a real bone.
Honestly, in a lot of ways I feel like my high school experience was fairly typical (notable exceptions being the times there were emergency situations or bad accidents), but because I was coming from a completely different environment, it didn’t seem typical to me. Everything just seemed so amplified. Remarkable, almost. I think if you just keep your eyes open and consider what might be going on under the surface, you’ll find the things that make people (and school) interesting.
Ever time you post another Gatsby entry, a little part of me tears apart for him. I inhaled a sharp breath and had to look away momentarily when I read the part about the bone sticking through. I can’t believe that something this graphic and raw and real happened in your classroom with the other students around. I would have been scared into silence, like I’m sure many other students were.
What stands out most to me in this story, though, is Valentine and her strength and concern mixed together. It makes me wonder what happened in her life to make her that way.
***
And because you asked for injury stories, my most dramatic injury experience happened when playing tag/hide & seek in our neighborhood when I was about 15. We lived in an old historical neighborhood with alleys and sidewalks between houses, so you could run behind and between all of them unless someone had put up a back fence.
I was running alongside a house, wearing terribly inappropriate footwear for the activity (the brown leather Eastland loafers that were hip in the mid-90s Midwest), and tripped on the uneven sidewalk. When I went down, I ripped open both knees, the palms of both hands, my left shoulder, and a bit of my chin. Because everyone was dispersed while playing the game, I had to pull myself together and limp back to my friend’s house alone. Blood had run from my knees down the length of my shins to my sockline before my friend’s little sister discovered me. Even though everything was just a surface abrasion and not deep, the pain was incredibly intense because of the scrape nature of them and the multiple points of injury. It hurt so much that I started to lose my vision, with black spots creeping in from the sides, and I had to be led back to my house across the street, which was only a few hundred feet away. I still have the scar on my left shoulder, and I sometimes see it and lean over it kiss it like my own badge of adolescent honor. ;)
(But if you ever want a more medical-type condition story of pain and yuck, I can share about my corneal ulcer during my first year of grad school. That is the only time I have fainted due to *anything* and it was due to the pain as the bacteria ate through my cornea – nom nom.)
I can’t believe that something this graphic and raw and real happened in your classroom with the other students around
I think this is part of what made the whole episode so surreal—everything about it seemed sort of impossible, like at any moment, it could still just stop and go back to normal.
And Valentine was amazingly level-headed. I’m not sure, but I think she came from a big family with lots of brothers.
Also, your scrape story gives me awful flashbacks of a time when I was 12 and decided to play tag in a parking lot while wearing (best idea ever) a denim miniskirt, a bikini top, and canvas sneakers, no socks.
I know exactly what you mean about the black spots, but that might have been because it all-over hurt so much that for about 20 minutes, I was too shocked to really breathe. I just remember my mom driving me to the grocery store and periodically reminding me to take a breath. She bought three kinds of numbing antiseptic spray from the first-aid section and sprayed me down in front of the store like she was coating me with mosquito repellant. In fact, I’m frankly amazed that I came out of it with no lasting scars!
In fact, I’m frankly amazed that I came out of it with no lasting scars!
I’m amazed too! I’m also impressed by the quick action by your mother with the great antiseptic spray-down. I believe I had to just wince and whine while picking the dirt out of my injuries.