Callie scrolled through Twitter as she walked to the MARTA bus stop. The eel historian had gone silent and the Kiwi zoo keeper was asleep tomorrow, so she went to Facebook.
Drug-seeking canines were not Callie’s only creation. Since 2008, she’d been lurking on the assholes she’d gone to high school with. Her profile photo showed a blue Siamese fighting fish who went by the name Swim Shady.
Her eyes glazed over as she read the latest shitposting from Lake Point’s illustrious class of 2002. Complaints about schools closing, wild deep-state conspiracies, disbelief in the virus, belief in the virus, pro-vaccine rants, anti-vaccine rants, and the usual racism, sexism and anti-Semitism that plagued social media. Callie would never understand how Bill Gates had been shortsighted enough to give everybody easy access to the internet so that some day, these jackasses could reveal all of his dastardly plans.
She dropped her phone back into her pocket as she sat on the bench at the bus stop. The dirty Plexiglas enclosure was striped with graffiti. Trash rounded off the corners. Dr. Jerry’s clinic was in an okay area, but that was a subjective observation. His strip-mall neighbors were a porn shop that was forced to close during the pandemic and a barbershop Callie was pretty sure had only stayed open because it served as a gambling front. Every time she saw a wild-eyed loser stumbling out the back door, she said a small prayer of thanks that gambling was not one of her addictions.
A garbage truck sputtered black exhaust and rot as it slowly rocked past the bus stop. One of the guys hanging off the back gave Callie a wave. She waved back because it was the polite thing to do. Then his buddy started waving and she turned her head away.
Her neck rewarded her for the too-quick turn, tightening the muscles like a clamp. Callie reached up, fingers finding the long scar that zippered down from the base of her skull. C1 and C2 were the cervical vertebrae that allowed for one-half of the head’s forward, back, and rotational movements. Callie had two two-inch titanium rods, four screws and a pin that formed a cage around the area. Technically, the surgery was called a cervical laminectomy, but more commonly it was known as a fusion, because that was the end result: the vertebrae fused together into one bony clump.
Even though two decades had passed since the fusion, the nerve pain could be sudden and debilitating. Her left arm and hand could go completely numb without warning. She had lost nearly half the mobility in her neck. Nodding and shaking her head were do-able, but limited. When she tied her shoes, she had to bring her foot to her hands rather than the other way around. She hadn’t been able to look over her shoulder since the surgery, a devastating loss because Callie could never be the heroine pictured on the cover of a Victorian mystery.
She tilted back against the Plexiglas so she could look up at the sky. The waning sun warmed her face. The air was cool and crisp. Cars rolled by. Children were laughing on a nearby playground. The steady beat of her own heart gently pulsed in her ears.
The women she’d gone to high school with were currently driving their kids to football practice or piano lessons. They were watching their sons do homework, holding their breath while their daughters practiced cheerleading routines in the backyard. They were leading meetings, paying bills, going to work and living normal lives where they didn’t steal drugs from a kindly old man. They weren’t shaking inside of their bones because their body was crying out for a drug that they knew would eventually kill them.
At least a lot of them had gotten fat.
Callie heard the hiss of air brakes. She turned to look for the bus. She did it correctly this time, angling her shoulders along with her head. Despite the accommodation, pain shot fire up her arm and into her neck.
“Shit.”
Not her bus, but she’d paid the price for looking. Her breath stuttered. She pushed back against the Plexiglas, hissed air between clenched teeth. Her left arm and hand were numb, but her neck pulsed like a pus-filled sac. She concentrated on the daggers flaying her muscles and nerves. Pain could be its own addiction. Callie had lived with it for so long that when she thought of her life before, she only saw tiny bursts of light, stars barely penetrating the darkness.
She knew that there had been a time long ago when all she’d craved was the rush of endorphins that came from running hard or riding her bike too fast or flipping herself diagonally across the gym floor. In cheerleading, she had flown—soared—into the air, doing a hip-over-head rotation, or a back tuck, a front flip, a leg kick, arabesque, the needle, the scorpion, the heel stretch, the bow-and-arrow, a landing spin that was so dizzying all she could do was wait for four sets of strong arms to basket her fall.