Candy Read Free Page B

watched her now as she put the drink on the table and lowered her mouth to the straw.
    “Are you sure that’s all you want?” I asked.
    She nodded, sucking hard on the straw, drinking with the breathless concentration of a child. I unwrapped my burger and started to eat. I wasn’t really hungry anymore, but I was glad to have something to do with my hands. Nervous hands are hard to disguise when they’re idle. I chewed and swallowed, wiped some relish from my lips, glanced at my watch…
    “Meeting someone?” the girl asked.
    “Not really,” I said.
    “Sorry?”
    I coughed, choking on a bit of lettuce, realizing the stupidity of my answer. Not really, I’d said, not really… How can you not really be meeting someone?
    God…
    “You all right?” the girl said.
    “Yeah…I’ve got a— huh-uhh —excuse me. I’ve got a doctor’s appointment.”
    “You’ve got a what?”
    “You asked if I was meeting someone…”
    “Yeah?”
    “I’ve got a doctor’s appointment.”
    “Oh, right—I thought you meant that’s why you were coughing.”
    “No…that was just…I was just coughing.”
    “Right,” she nodded, smiling to herself. “That’s that sorted out, then.”
    “Yeah…”
    She went back to her Coke for a while, and I picked a few crumbs from my burger and fiddled around with the napkin, folding it and twisting it and wiping my fingers with it, all the time listening to the sweet little slurps from across the table. Then we both looked up and started speaking at the same time.
    “Where are you—”
    “I don’t usually—”
    “Sorry,” I said. “After you.”
    She smiled. “I was just going to ask where you’re going. I didn’t know there were any doctors around here.”
    “Pentonville Road,” I told her. “It’s a private place…”
    She raised her eyebrows, as if to say, Private, eh? Well, well, well, but she didn’t say anything, just nodded quietly and bit into her doughnut.
    “My dad’s a doctor,” I explained. “He knows other doctors, you know, friends of his…”
    “Right,” she said through a mouthful of doughnut.
    “It’s quite handy sometimes…”
    “It must be. What’s the matter with you?”
    I pulled up my sleeve and showed her the lump on my wrist.
    “Ugh!” she said. “What’s that? ”
    “It’s nothing really…just a lump. It’s called a ganglion.”
    She laughed, spitting out bits of chocolate. “A gangly what? ”
    “Ganglion—it’s like a…like a muscle thing…” I was trying to remember what Dad had told me about the lump. He’d explained it all to me, drawing little pictures and everything, but I hadn’t really been listening. “It’s something to do with the fluid from your muscle,” I told the girl. “It kind of leaks out and forms this lump—”
    “Why?”
    “Why what?”
    “Why does it leak out?”
    “I don’t know.”
    She’d finished her doughnut now and was digging out lumps of ice from her Coke, popping them into her mouth and sucking them.
    “Can’t your dad fix it?” she said. “You said he was a doctor…”
    “He’s not that sort of a doctor.”
    “What sort is he, then?”
    I blushed, as I always do when this question comes up. “He’s a…uh…he’s a gynecologist.”
    She didn’t laugh, or smirk, or make any jokes. She just crunched an ice cube and looked at me. “A gynecologist?”
    “Yeah…this other doctor, the one I’m going to see, he’s a specialist—”
    “A lump specialist?”
    “Right,” I said, smiling.
    Her face changed when I smiled. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but it was almost as if a layer of skin had sloughed away, revealing another face, an even prettierface, hiding beneath a mask. “That’s the first time I’ve seen you smile,” she said, looking into my eyes. “You ought to do it more often. It looks really nice.”
    My head crumpled under the strain of the compliment, and I had to look down at the table. My skin was so hot I could hear it