Page 162 of Finding Us

“And? What happened?”

I’m prepared for Garret to lie to his dad, but instead he says, “I didn’t make the team. At least not yet.”

“Not yet? What does that mean?”

The salt and pepper shakers slide even faster between Garret’s hands. “I’m having problems with my shoulder and Coach won’t let me compete until it’s better.”

Pearce takes the salt and pepper shakers from him. “When did this happen?”

“Tryouts were the other day. Like two days ago maybe?”

“Not the tryouts. When did you start having problems with your shoulder?”

“Oh, um, it started in January, but it got worse in February.”

“And you didn’t tell anyone?” Pearce sounds both mad and concerned.

“I thought it would go away. But it didn’t so I’m going to see a specialist next week.”

“Who? Who are you going to see?”

“I don’t know. Some guy the coach recommended.”

Pearce sighs. “Garret, you should’ve told me this. You should’ve told me as soon as you were having pain.” Pearce checks behind our booth to see if anyone’s listening. Nobody’s around us, but he still lowers his voice. “You could’ve gone to the clinic. You know they’re better than any specialist you’ll see elsewhere.”

He means in the real world, where the rest of us don’t have access to fancy doctors with treatments only the rich and powerful are allowed to have. The “clinic” is code for the secret medical group I learned about last year. I still don’t know that much about it.

“Yeah, well, it’s too late now,” Garret says. “I’m sure this guy is good enough. I don’t need the clinic for this.”

“You don’t know that, Garret. You don’t know what’s going on with your shoulder. This wasn’t a sports injury. Your coach doesn’t know that, so sending you to a specialist who treats sports injuries is not going to help you. Is that who this specialist is?”

“I think so. I think he handles all kinds of injuries, but there was some stuff about sports injuries on his website.”

“And what do you plan to tell this man? You can’t tell him the truth about what happened.”

“I’ll tell him I shot myself cleaning my gun. It’s the story we told everyone else.”

“When he runs the tests on your shoulder and assesses the damage, he’ll know it wasn’t from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

“Maybe he won’t be able to tell.”

“Even so, he’ll ask for your medical records. And you can’t give him those.”

Pearce is right. We can’t tell this doctor what really happened. We can’t tell him about the clinic. We can’t tell him anything.

“So what are you saying, Dad?”

“How bad is your shoulder? How bad is the pain?”

Garret stares down at the table. “Pretty bad. It’s not continuous but when it hurts, it really hurts.”

I wrap my arm in Garret’s and scoot closer to him. “You didn’t tell me that.”

Pearce sighs again and rubs his chin. After a long silence, he says to Garret, “Cancel your appointment for next week.”

“What? Why?”

“I’ll get someone out here to take a look at your shoulder and run some tests.”

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