Chapter Fifty-Seven
Fifty-Seven
Needless to say, we had to rush Chevy to the emergency room at Brooklyn Hospital. We were all convinced that she was pregnant and just in denial, because if you opened up the dictionary and looked up the word denial , you were sure to find her picture right next to it.
When they rolled her into the examination room, we followed—yes, all three of us—refusing to let Chevy out of our sight.
Chevy was green, and each time the doctor pressed down on her stomach she spewed more vodka and wine.
Dr.Chin was the attending physician’s name. He was a handsome, deeply sun-kissed Trinidadian with slanted eyes and a long silky ponytail. If Chevy weren’t on her dying bed, she would have been pushing up on him.
Dr.Chin pressed some more and then asked Chevy, who seemed to be swinging in and out of consciousness, if she had fibroids.
Chevy just groaned and threw up. So he turned his attention to us. “Do you know if your friend has fibroids?”
Noah made a face and turned away. I shrugged: who knew what Chevy had? She was so secretive about shit.
Crystal was the one who said, “I don’t think so.”
The doctor considered us for a moment and then went back to examining Chevy.
“Well, there are a lot of small lumps in her lower abdomen that could be fibroids, but the problem is that the lumps are also prevalent in her upper abdomen,” he said thoughtfully.
“I’m going to have to send her down for X-rays. ”
“You don’t think she’s pregnant?” Crystal asked.
The doctor snapped the gloves off his hands and discarded them into a nearby receptacle. “If she is, that will come up in the blood test.”
We were all then hustled out of the examining room and into the waiting area. “She should be done with the X-rays in about a half hour,” the doctor said before he disappeared behind the green curtain of another exam area.
We just sat there, quiet, for a while, watching people come and go, until finally Noah looked over at Crystal and me and said, “Miss Girls, I have a confession to make.”
It’s amazing what being around sickness and approaching death can do to a person. Noah spilled his guts about his heterosexual escapades.
At first we thought Noah was just being humorous, trying to shed some comedy on an otherwise dismal situation, but when we saw the tears in his eyes, we knew he was telling the truth.
“Why didn’t you tell us this before?” Crystal said, digging into the pockets of her tracksuit in search of a tissue.
“How could I tell my girls something like that? It’s so embarrassing.” He sniffed.
“You should never feel embarrassed about telling us anything,” I said, and I meant it.
“You shouldn’t have had to go through something like that alone,” Crystal said, trying hard to keep a straight face.
Noah peered at her through his tears. “What’s so funny?”
Crystal’s face was twitching uncontrollably. She was fighting hard to remain serious. “What is so funny!” Noah demanded, his voice filling with anger.
“I’m sorry, Noah,” Crystal blurted out behind a roll of laughter. “I just can’t imagine you and a woman…you know, getting it on!”
Now I was laughing too—it was a funny mental picture.
“Well, I did,” Noah said, snapping his fingers and twirling his head on his neck. “And I was good!” he said before joining in on our laughter.
After we’d composed ourselves, Crystal turned her attention to me. “Now that we’re confessing here, do you have anything you want to clear your soul of?”
Noah’s eyebrows climbed his forehead. “What you hiding?”
“Nothing,” I said, a little too quickly.
“Earlier today she was walking down the street like an escaped convict.”
“ Whaaaaaaat! ” Noah shouted. “Who you hiding from, Miss Girl?”
I really didn’t want to get into this. I mean, as fucked up as Noah’s situation was, mine was simply unbelievable.
I took a deep breath and said, “I got the head honcho of my weight-loss program chapter out to kill me.”
Noah and Crystal looked at me, back at each other, and then they doubled over with laughter.
“I’m serious,” I said, folding my arms across my chest and turning away from them.
Crystal wiped at her eyes and looked at me. “C’mon now, Geneva. I know you have a wild imagination, but out to kill you?” she said, and the giggles started up again.
“I think those brain freezes from all of that goddamn ice cream you’ve eaten have affected the part of your mind that separates fantasy from reality,” Noah whispered through a grin.
“Okay, don’t believe me,” I said and dug into my pocketbook for my pack of Newports. “I’m going outside to have a smoke.” I stormed off, leaving my snickering, insensitive friends behind me.
—
Three cigarettes later, I had resigned myself to the fact that Noah and Crystal were not insensitive. I mean, what I said did sound ridiculous. I laughed at my reaction, tossed the butt of the cigarette to the ground, and turned and started back toward the glass hospital doors.
As I stood waiting for the elevator, two large white men dressed in navy blue from head to toe suddenly appeared beside me.
The elevator doors opened and we stepped aside to allow an elderly man being pushed in a wheelchair by a young woman to pass.
“After you,” one of the men said to me.
I mumbled a word of thanks as I stepped into the elevator and moved to the back wall.
The men stepped in and took up the space in front of me. They stood at attention, their shoulders touching.
“Floor?” one said to the other.
“Five,” the other responded and then turned around a bit and looked at me. “Ma’am?”
“Um, I’m going to five too,” I said.
The doors slid closed and the elevator began to climb.
Once we got to the fifth floor and the elevator doors opened again, the two men turned to face each other, leaving a wide gap for me to pass through.
“After you, ma’am.”
This day just keeps getting weirder, I thought as I stepped between them. As I passed, my eyes caught hold of the shiny brass badges that hung from chains around their necks. The badges had big blue letters pressed into their center that said dea .
I heard the little girl in me moan, Oooooohh, you’re in troubbbbbbble!
I walked toward Noah and Crystal, but my eyes were on the DEA agents, who were marching past the nurses’ station and back toward the exam rooms.
“Are you okay?” Crystal said, a wisp of a smile still on her lips.
I shook my head yes, my eyes still on the men, even though I couldn’t understand why I was so bothered by them.
“Miss Girl, can you tell me again about someone trying to kill—” Noah had started to chide me, but I put my hand up when one of the DEA agents reappeared, asked the nurse something, and then turned and looked directly at us.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
The agent marched over to us and said, “Are you with Chevanese Cambridge?”
Noah’s and Crystal’s eyes were pinned on his badge. They nodded their heads slowly up and down, and then I knew that they were feeling that same uneasiness that I was experiencing.
“Come with me, please,” he said and turned on his heel and marched away.
We followed him into an empty examination room, where he told us to have a seat; he then left, pulling the green curtain closed behind him.
We all exchanged looks and did exactly what we were told. There were only two chairs in the room. Crystal took one and let Noah take the other, because it looked as if his legs had turned to rubber.
“What the hell has Ms.Drama gotten us into!” Noah snarled.
Crystal looked at the curtain and then back at Noah. “Shhhh,” she hissed at him.
We were separated from the next room by a soft retractable wall, which offered about as much privacy as the hospital curtain that enclosed us, so we were able to hear the entire conversation going on between Dr.Chin and the agents.
“The X-ray revealed foreign matter in her stomach. Looking closer, I realized what it was, and that’s why I called you guys.”
“You did the right thing,” one of the agents said.
“How much longer?” the other inquired.
“Shouldn’t be too much longer now. We gave her a double-strength enema,” Dr.Chin said.
We all shook our heads in disbelief.
“Am I hearing what I think I’m hearing?” Noah whispered. Crystal and I just nodded.
“Why are they holding us, though?” he said.
“They’re probably going to say we were her accomplices,” I blurted out.
Noah’s eyes bulged. “I can’t do no time! I am too pretty, and you girls know what happens to pretty boys in prison!”
“We haven’t done a thing. We’re innocent,” Crystal said, and I was surprised at the calmness in her voice. “If Chevy has done what they’re suspecting she has, it is all on her.”
A moment later we heard another voice say, “We’ve extracted all of the foreign matter, Dr.Chin.”
“Put the bowl down here,” Dr.Chin said. “Hmm, just as I thought. Condoms.”
Noah made the sign of the cross on his chest, squeezed his eyes shut, and began silently to pray.
It was eerily quiet for a few minutes on that side of the wall, and then one of the agents announced, with great disappointment, “It’s sugar.”
Noah, Crystal, and I looked at each other in disbelief and said, “Sugar?”
After an odd moment of silence that was followed by some embarrassed clearing of throats, the curtain enclosing us was snatched open.
“I don’t know what your friend was planning to do,” the agent started, blanketing us with an icy stare, “but whatever it was, I suggest you all think better of it.”
We all exchanged looks.
“You’re free to go for the moment, but know that Big Brother is watching all of you,” he said as he tapped his left eye with his index finger.
Noah was the first to scamper nervously past the DEA agent, and Crystal and I followed close behind.
Dr.Chin was standing in the hallway, watching the agents march toward the elevators.
He had a dumbfounded look on his face, and when he looked up and saw us approaching he turned and started to walk quickly in the other direction.
“Your friend is in room 203,” he mumbled, before snatching a clipboard from a passing nurse and demanding that she follow him.
“Punk,” Crystal said.
We took the stairs down three flights and after some time found ourselves standing in front of room 203.
Chevy was propped up in a hospital bed, snoring, a Tide commercial blaring from the wall television.
I picked the remote up from the nightstand and turned the volume down.
“Wake up, heffa,” Noah yelled as he gave Chevy’s arm a nasty jab.
Chevy’s eyes rolled and her lids fluttered open. “Hey,” she said, giving us a sleepy smile.
“Hey, nothing. Do you know what—” Noah started to screech, but Crystal pulled him away from the bed.
“None of that matters now,” she said in a soft voice, then turned her attention to Chevy. “How are you feeling?”
“Well,” Chevy said, smacking her mouth like a geriatric patient, “I did feel like someone had stuck their hand up my ass and pulled a grown person out of my stomach, but after the Percocet, I feel fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnne as wine,” she half slurred, half laughed.
“I bet you do,” Noah huffed.
“Tell me something, Chevy?” I asked, coming to stand beside her. “How many of those condoms did you swallow?”
Chevy’s face strained with concentration as she fought with the wall the Percocet had put up in her mind. “Oh, oh yeah, I remember,” she said, trying to raise her head, “forty!”
“Forty!” Crystal yelled.
“Damn fool,” Noah mumbled as he shook his head.
“Well, what the hell did you tell them when they asked you why in the world you’d swallowed them in the first place?”
A stupid grin spread across Chevy’s face and she blurted, “I said, ‘Haven’t you heard? It’s the newest craze in appetite suppression!’?”
That was Chevy for you—always thinking on her feet!