Injured (a short story)

I

The glasses clink and Jake’s almost shatters. The whites of his eyes flash wide. Georgy’s teeth flash white.

Both feel like the entire cafe is looking their way. None are.

“So, all your hard work’s finally paying off then?” She asks.

”Looks like it.” Jake pulls the glass into his chest and examines its edge for chips. They’re on the outdoor balcony of the Oyster Shell Cafe, the breeze is one notch cooler than pleasant. He rubs the goosebumps that have risen around the shoulder of his singlet.

“When will you find out if you made the team?” Georgie leans back in her seat and corrects a stray hair that’s escaped her tightly pulled bun. The messy six year old who Jake used to lock inside cupboards, is unrecognizable beneath this business suit and prosecco glow.

“They announce the squad on Saturday at three.” Jake downs the last of his drink. Probably the last drop of the stuff he’ll have till finals night. Georgie reaches out and squeezes his hand.

Her fingers look like a child’s in his. All of her clothes, right down to her steel rimmed glasses look like they were picked out for her by a corporate designer.

When did this happen?

Then again, she probably doesn’t recognize much of her gangly big brother on the other side of all the creatine and deadlifting he’s ingested since those days.

“You gonna tell Dad?”

Jake looks up. The slip of language half priming him to expect the little sis of his youth to be sitting resurrected before him.

“It was his dream before it was ever mine,” he says..

Georgie’s crafted eyebrows shoot up her forehead. “You’re actually planning to give him the pleasure then?”

Jake looks away. The waves are crashing lethargically against the beach behind them as if they’ve lost their love for it. A sad thin foam creeps up the black sand then flees back into the surf. He draws in a breath that expands his chest to gorilla proportions. “If I didn’t tell him, it would kind a make it all…” His throat malfunctions. “It would make everything we went through as kids…pointless wouldn’t it?”

Georgie scoffs in a way she never did before law school. Jake has often wondered what the unseen academic who’s way-of-life rubbed off so heavily on his little sister, looked like.

Glasses? A certain way of holding their drink? Was it just one, or was that way of holding yourself just in the air they breathed at that place? The clothes, the mannerisms, the way she talks, the spite…

She shakes her head so another strand of blond falls free. “No. This is the best way to send him a message.” She cups his hand with her second set of miniature fingers. “If you tell him right away, he’s going to feel vindicated. He’s going to assume it was all owing to the way he raised us.” She’s frowning now. “All that “whiplash” bullshit. Toughening us up for greatness.” She rolls her eyes.

Jake studies his double knotted laces. He’s rarely confronted by this level of seething aggression on or off the field. Certainly not in the eyes of someone who might be mistaken for a librarian.

Georgy has pulled her hands away and is balling them into fists—her skin shines white from the pressure. “You achieved this dream on your own Jake! Both of us did! We got to where we are in life in spite of him, not because of him. Don’t ever forget that!”

This time the other patrons of the Oyster Shell are looking Georgy’s way. This time she’s oblivious to every one of them.

II

BUZZZ!!!

“Up! Shoes on out the door!”

4:30 AM

Time to run. Time to study. All before school. The way to get ahead.

Georgy leapt out of bed. Already in her running gear.

The stress of thinking about getting changed, never matched the discomfort of simply sleeping in her clothes.

“Jake! When will you be like Georgy? Get up!”

This praise did not land as praise on Georgy’s bare singletted shoulders. She jogged on the spot to warm her sleep weary limbs. Her feet pattering against the floorboards outside Jake’s bedroom.

“Where is he?” grumbled Jake between sleepy movements.

Georgy looked around. The hallway was dark. Only the searing sterile of the two bedroom lights. No Dad though.  Never a good sign.

“Tell him I’m feeling—”  

Georgy didn’t get to hear the end of this sentence. A bustling frame threatened to knock her down the hallway if she didn’t move. A bustling frame hauling something that required two hands to grip.

“See if this helps you wake up any.”

A splash. A squeal. An ice and water-soaked bed. An exacerbated flu. A week off school and running and study and the senior formal and the date he’d spent months working up the courage to ask Christina to go on.

III

The surface of Warburton Pond has turned from blue to orange in the time that Jake’s been sitting here. It’s turned from a wet land to a pond since he used to run laps of it as a boy.

They dammed it after the big flood. Sold the town on how it could be put to better use as a reservoir. Jake missed the wildlife though. These aspirin commercial park ducks and the geese they introduced just aren’t the same as the things that used to move among the wild reeds of before.

He dumps the two-punnet espresso holder in the bin when he sees the first after-work dog walker enter the gate.

Georgy insists up and down that she likes the wetland better as a pond. Jake suspects this is her way of coping with the unchangeable. She has a point. Jake tries hard to look at the pond in the same way.

His tense chest releases when it comes face to face with Georgy’s sternly clenched jaw, laser straight stride and vein starred pupils. Like a juvenile chimp ceding ground to its alpha counterpart, any flicker of stress he’s been feeling rolls belly up.

“Hard day at the—”

“Don’t want to get into it. How’s the rehab going?” What began as a no-time-to-waste stride, slows as Georgy checks herself and lowers her gaze to Jake’s left knee.

He kicks out his jogger pants in a half jig as he shows off his mobility. “Better than I could have hoped for.”

He lowers his eyeline towards the limb, like a parent blown away by their unexpectedly talented child. “These exercises I’ve been doing…” He bites his lip and sets off ahead, counting on his fingers as he does so. “My vertical has jumped six inches above what it was, pre-injury. The time off has given all my other niggling injuries a much needed chance to heal up, and…” He takes in a breath. “The tactics edge I’ve picked up from all the tape study I’ve been doing—!”

Infected by her brother’s good mood, Georgy develops a skip of her own. A family of ducks scatter, drawing a frown from a cardigan wrapped woman who’s arm full of bread only now becomes visible to the siblings.

“So, you think the coach might give you a second shot then?” Georgy chases the trace of a smile on her brother’s close shaven cheeks, quickly followed by a turn of the head. “What?” She presses, grabbing at his arm.

He pulls away in the manner he might have done at age twelve, laughing—almost giggling.

Fists balled, though smiling, Georgy marches him to a dead end on the pond’s edge. “What are you holding back from me?”

He basks in the tension for the time it takes a duck to gulp down a whole bread crust before letting the smile spread wide. “I got the call up!"

Georgy’s arms are around him before he can add the words, “I’m a Sea-Eagle.”

The spotlight is back on Jake’s knee again the moment she’s let go of her embrace. Toggling between the ceiled lips of his joggers and his grinning face, Manley’s most silver tongued solicitor begins to stutter. “I, I….Your…your physio must be a miracle worker…” Her forehead compresses. “When you called me that afternoon and breathed the letters ACL…I honestly thought the dream was over.”

Jake nods and clicks his fingers at a dalmatian snuffling at the leg of a park chair. “Me too.” The dog’s owner pulls it out of reach, Jake takes the moment to look into his sister’s sharp blue eyes. “I’m not a fan of tempting fate like this, but…” he swallows. “But I almost think I’m better off after this injury than I would have been without it.”

Georgy nods knowingly. “It makes perfect sense. Some of my worst clients have turned into model citizens after they’ve worked the twelve step program.” She places both hands to her hairline and pulls her fringe like she’s giving herself a facelift—a Georgy original this one—something she’s always done when reaching for a pre-thought-out idea—no law school influence here. “Obviously drug abuse is a different kettle of fish to an injury. But, I guess there a parallels in having no choice but to follow those little rituals, staying in the routine and mindset of minute progress—” she draws in a breath and gazes out across the flickering, sunset kissed pond. “Even after the injury or addiction has been beaten, it gives a person a type of momentum that carries through the rest of a person’s life. So you’re right. Though you’d never wish misfortune on anyone…there is a blessing hidden in it—”

Georgy’s face falls as she turns to find her brother miles away. A sister knows when she’s been ignored. The solicitor in her steels up as she spots the cell phone pressed to Jakes ear.

“Who are you calling— No Jake!”

“Hi Dad…you there? Yea good. Sophie’s good as well.” Georgy’s brother turns his back to her. Even if, from lat to lat this back is equivalent to that of two men standing side by side, to think this would be barrier enough to hide his next line is very Jake. “I’ve ahhh… I’ve got some news for you.”

IV

Georgie’s eyes fall to Jake’s knee. He’s a different Jake, this side of the injury.

Of course he is.

The vibration of her buzzer going crazy in her pocket sits her upright and sends her somewhere else for a moment.

4AM. Time to run. Time to study. The only way to get ahead.

The buzzer doesn’t stop.

Of course it doesn’t.

She stares at the knee some more.