Joe. Her name is Joe. Whatever her name is, Wade said, stepping closer. You might want to tell her to keep her mouth shut. About the evaluation thing, about whatever she thinks she knows.
She didn't do anything, Paige said, her voice shaking now despite her best effort to hold it steady. You know, she didn't. Something shifted in Wade's face. a flicker of anger that had been simmering for days, looking for somewhere to land. "You don't want to be involved in this," he said, and he reached out. Not violently, not at first, just a hand closing around her upper arm, gripping harder than a warning needed to grip.
"Understand?" "Let go of me," Paige said, trying to pull back. He did not let go right away. He held on a beat too long. hard enough that Paige gasped. Hard enough that when he finally released her, stepping back with a short, humorless laugh, red marks bloomed across her skin where his fingers had been, and a sharp, hot pain ran up through her wrist where she had twisted trying to pull free.
"Just relay the message," Wade said, and he and Cole walked off, laughing about something else already, already moving on to whatever came next in their afternoon, leaving Paige standing alone in the breezeway, cradling her wrist shaking. She did not go to Joe right away. She was too frightened, too embarrassed, too unsure what would happen if she said anything out loud. She went instead to her own dorm room, wrapped her wrist in a bag of ice from the hall freezer, and sat on her bed crying quietly for a long while before she finally worked up the courage to text Joe three words. Can you come?
Joe was there in 11 minutes. She did not raise her voice when Paige told her what happened. She did not ask a dozen frantic questions. She sat down beside Paige on the bed, examined the bruising forming along her forearm with the careful practiced attention of someone who had been taught a long time ago exactly how to check for real injury under stress and asked only the questions that mattered. Does it hurt when you move your wrist like this a little?
Can you make a fist? Paige tried wincing. Yeah, it just aches. Okay, Joe said. It's probably not broken.
We'll get you to the health center tomorrow to be sure. for tonight. Keep the ice on it 20 minutes at a time. True to her word, Joe walked Paige to the campus health center the following morning before their first class, waiting through the whole appointment in the small lobby with its outdated magazines and quiet humming fluorescent lights. The doctor confirmed what Joe had already suspected, a sprain, not a break, though the bruising along Paige's forearm would take a week or two to fully fade. "Do you want to report what happened?" the doctor asked gently.