Cassie Alexander: Shapeshifted

“Some of it.” He picked up a rock in our path and chucked it across the street. “But I’ll be the best in the world, eventually.”

I looked around at our surroundings, all cement and hot sun. This was an unlikely place for anything to grow, much less a peerless folk healer. Olympio must have guessed what I was thinking. He puffed out his chest like a pigeon and glowered at me.

We were back at the clinic shortly. “So how far could we walk in this direction?” I asked, trying to rescue myself in his eyes.

He resumed his station outside the clinic door, like a dark cloud against its wall. It must be no fun working all day during the summer, all summer long.

“Only place you should be walking is back and forth from the train.” He’d changed from a sensitive kid who liked attention to a proto-adult carrying world-weary exhaustion and heavy pride. I remembered being his age, sitting on the fence of puberty, not sure which way to jump, torn between desperately wanting people to like me and being angry all the time.

“Hey, don’t shut me out like that,” I complained.

“Why not? I hardly know you.”

He had a point. I didn’t know him either. But I knew his type. I shrugged one shoulder. “I just get the feeling, if we were someplace else we might be friends.”

His eyes narrowed at me, the shy kid still coming through. “Yeah, well, I don’t know how to get to that place from here.”

Catrina leaned out of the clinic, interrupting us, and waved at him. “Olympio, I’ve got your grandfather’s test strips.”

Diabetic test strips. I recognized the box. Olympio snatched them from her hand and gave me a hot look before running off.

Guess for all of his powers, Olympio’s grandfather hadn’t mastered the art of healing diabetes yet.

I stepped back into the clinic. There was a family in the waiting room now, a woman with three kids and a man with gang-looking tattoos.

I waved to the receptionist, who buzzed me into the back, and I reported to Catrina because she still seemed in charge of me. “What now?”

“Now you do some paperwork.”

And that’s almost all I did for the rest of the day, until Eduardo, one of the other medical assistants, introduced himself and rescued me from my desk.

“Come explain to my patient why he needs to take his blood pressure meds.”

I looked at his numbers—150/105, oy!—and started talking as Eduardo translated me.

“No—of course they make your headache feel better. But you need to take them every day, not just when your head hurts. Has anyone in your family died of a heart attack? Or a stroke?” I leaned back against the counter behind me so I’d be eye level with the man. It was important he took his pills, or he’d leave his children fatherless.

From my new vantage point, I could see just inside his collar, to a tattoo on the left side of his neck. I tried not to stare at it while I gave him my blood pressure spiel. Two dark tattooed holes, with ink blood dripping down. They could have been tattoos of bullet wounds, but the fact that there were two of them, and on his neck, made me think that they were supposed to be from fangs.

I wanted to ask him about them, but I knew from working at County that it wouldn’t be right.

Not for white kids, who mostly got anything on them that looked pretty on the wall. The hibiscus that reminded them of their trip to Hawaii, a bird because their spirits were free. But for people who had gang lifestyles, tattoos were a code, and you couldn’t just ask them what things were. And you wouldn’t get a straight answer if you did. I’d had to see three people with clown-type comedy–tragedy mask tattoos at my old job to realize that there was a local gang that used those masks to identify themselves. Before that I’d just thought it odd—and somewhat creepy—that middle-aged men were into clowns.

Vampires were a popular motif among a lot of people. Just because not many people knew that vampires were real didn’t mean they weren’t in the popular subconscious. It wouldn’t have been the first time a gang thought that vampires were cool. I supposed they were, up until you actually met one.

I made sure he understood the reasons he needed to keep taking his medicine, as Eduardo translated his questions back to me, and then we let him leave the room.

“You could have told him all that, couldn’t you?”

Eduardo gave me a sly grin. “It sounds more official coming from you. Some of them prefer to hear it from a gringa .”

I snorted and pushed forward. “Hey—” There was a test tube of blood on the counter behind me. I pointed at it. “What’s that for?” It wasn’t labeled. He popped it into a plastic bag and opened the door.

“You’d have to ask Dr. Tovar.” Eduardo shrugged, shuffling off into the back.

I waited for Dr. Tovar to come by, to ask him about the test tube, but when it hit five fifteen, my urge to go home—and maybe nervousness about the trip, after walking with Olympio—outweighed my curiosity for the day. The part of me that was trying to be rational thought I was overreacting, a little hyper-attuned to the type of thing that mattered in my now very-former life. As far as Santa Muerte went, that elderly woman hadn’t come back. I could find a Three Crosses gang member and ask about their beliefs, but that sounded potentially injurious and I wasn’t likely to get a better answer from them than I already had from Olympio. I’d have to wait and ask Dr. Tovar about the blood tomorrow.

I couldn’t overlook the irony that I was grasping at anything to give me hope when my mother had already given up. Personally, I blamed her belief in a happy afterlife.

When I left the clinic, Olympio was gone. But I could hear the whispering sound I’d heard in the morning. I looked both ways before crossing the street and crouching to look into a storm drain.

“Drop something?” I startled. Dr. Tovar was locking the clinic door. “Or lose a gun? I’m sure there’s half an armory down there, rusting away.” He stood stiffly, his hands in his pockets, wearing his tweed coat on even this hot day.

“I thought I heard something.”

His right eyebrow raised in a question. “I don’t hear anything.” He jerked his head toward the station. “Care to walk?”

While a doctor wasn’t my preferred companion, walking with him wouldn’t hurt. I made sure to stand far enough apart from him that it wouldn’t look like we were together. Even so, ladies returning from the station made clucking sounds as we walked by. I wished there was a way to signal to them that no matter how handsome he was, I was not interested in him, nor would I ever be. At all.

“So how was your first day?” he asked.

“Interesting, except for the paperwork.”

“I’m glad Frank’s wound didn’t make you run away.”

“Am I going to get hazed every day I’m here? Or is that just your regular clientele?” I asked in a way that I made sure sounded like I was joking.

He outright laughed, maybe the first time I’d seen him pleased. I wondered what it would be like to be him, at the helm of a perpetually sinking ship, bailing water with all his might. We might have more in common than I’d thought.

“As regular as the rising sun. Why did you even apply for this job in the first place?” His eyes tried to read me as we walked, even before I could respond.

“If you’d told me this was going to be an interrogation, I’d have walked on my own,” I said with an obviously fake grin. He snorted and I relaxed some. “Really, I just needed a change. I thought I wanted to take it easy, and the sleep clinic was great for that. But easy gets dull.” No need to tell him about my mom’s time bomb or any legends. “Why do you work down here?” I asked instead.