The tall, scrub-suited lady spies me just as I reach the door. “Oh, did they call you already, E-Jun?” She extends both the e and the uhn, so my name sounds stretchy and loose.
I’m so panicked, I want to cry. I want to curl up on the floor and go to sleep.
“Bathroom.” I point.
“Oh, then take this.” She hands me a cup. “We need a sample before we start.”
When I get into the bathroom, I pee first, filling the cup halfway, the acrid scent of urine overwhelming the small room. I flush, and carefully wipe down both the bowl and the floor. Getting down on my knees, I listen to the swirl of the water, and seconds later, the bile comes up naturally, friendly and familiar. There’s not much to it—mostly water, since I’ve yet to eat today.
But just the act is comforting. I heave again, trying to be as quiet as I can, but someone’s knocking, then pounding. My vision is teary, so I flush and stand, washing my hands as fast as I can. My throat still throbs. I have to swallow and breathe to press down the rest of the liquid in my stomach. “Just a second.”
I splash my face and look away from the toilet. I nearly knock over the pee cup as I pull open the door.
It’s the scrub-suited lady. Dr. Neha Arora, her name tag reads. All this time, I assumed she was a nurse.
“E-Jun.” She pronounces my name more normally this time. My mom walks into the corridor, too. She’s wringing her hands, which means they’re onto me, although no one’s saying anything yet. “The nurse is ready for you now.”
The nurse stands behind her. She’s a youngish black lady, also in scrubs, with hot-pink spiky hair. “I’m Ericka. I’ll be administering the radiotracer for the bone scan.” She doesn’t look like she’s graduated college yet, let alone whatever else she needs to legally pierce my arm. She settles me into a lumbering metal chair, my feet flat on the floor for now, checking my heartbeat and temperature. My mom stands around, observing. I wish she would leave—that is, until the nurse brings in a few tubes and a long, skinny needle.
“It’ll only pinch for a second,” the nurse says, and I grimace.
“Want me to hold your hand?” my mom asks, then takes it without waiting for an answer.
The nurse ties what looks like a supersize, superflimsy rubber band around my bicep. I try not to watch what she’s doing—tempted to close my eyes like I used to when I was a kid—but I can’t take my eyes off her.
“Try to relax.” She taps my arm, looking for a vein. When she finds one, she sticks the needle in. It burns and pinches, like the time I got bitten by red ants at the beach in Coney Island. Ericka hums to herself as she attaches a tube to it. She draws a small vial of blood—dark and thick—and then attaches another needle hooked to a metal tube. As soon as she’s done, I feel something cool and creepy climbing through my veins—like someone is freezing me, part by part. I want to pass out then so I don’t have to be in the room anymore. The nurse must sense it, because she tapes the tube in place, then pushes a button and the back of the chair slides down, so it’s almost like a bed. “Just breathe and relax. You can close your eyes if you’d like.”
I do for a few minutes. I can hear the nurse coming in and out of the room, and sense my mom still sitting in the other chair. I bet she’s on her phone, which annoys me to no end, so I lift up my head to look. But she’s just sitting there, staring at me. She immediately comes over, puts her hand on my forehead. “You okay, boba?”
I nod but don’t speak. She hovers. She wants to say something, I can feel it, but it’s all bottled up, like a shaken can of soda, ready to burst.
“What?” I finally say.
“I had a bone scan. Back when I danced.” It’s the first time she’s ever brought up her dancing history herself, so my ears perk up. I’ve tried to ask her about it a dozen times, but she usually won’t talk about it. “Back then, it was so different. That massive machine felt like death, like a coffin.”
That’s what I have to look forward to? I must seem stressed out, because she rubs my face, her fingers gliding over my eyebrows as she smiles. “You’ll be okay. They have open-air machines now, like a tanning bed.” Not that either of us have ever been in a tanning bed. The thought of my mom lying in one, in her skirted one-piece and compression socks, makes me giggle.
She smiles, then frowns. “I had shin fractures—tiny little ones that would’ve gotten worse. Then I got pregnant, and had you.” She smiles, a bit happy, a bit sad. “I knew by then dance was not happening anymore.”
The defeat in her voice makes me want to cry. For the two of us, our tiny little fractured family. But she’s rubbing my cheeks again, and though her eyes are wet, she’s still smiling. “I’m not disappointed, E-Jun. I never had the same love for dance. For me, ballet was an escape—from Korea. And, back then, I was so, so happy, so in love. With a baby, I thought it meant—”
She goes silent there, but I know what she’s thinking.
“I know you struggle, that this is hard. But, believe me, having you, I was happy.” Her papery fingers are on my arm now, not far from where the needle has pierced me, where the coldness begins. “But you like this—here, the needles, so skinny, I can’t take it. It’s killing you, this dream. And it’s killing me.”
She’s holding my hands so tightly, I know what she says is true. If I don’t fix this now, I could lose everything. Dancing, I realize, slowly but surely, is not worth giving up my life for. I nod, and I hope she can see the clarity in my eyes, the determination. I may never be cured, like Nurse Connie said, but I can take control. I can stay the path, and do what I need to do—for myself, for my mother, and for the others who choose to love me.
Two hours later, the bone scan begins. They lay me down on a flat bed, one that I know will go into the huge machine that’s been whirring and spitting in this room for the past half hour, as they prepped me. With its screens and the tunnel-like cavity, it looks like a face with a large gaping mouth, one ready to swallow me whole. Dr. Neha is by my side now, and Ericka is on the other side.
“Shhhh,” Dr. Neha says again. “Relax.”
I am relaxed, because they’ve clearly slipped me some kind of sedative. Everything feels so slow, so soft, the sharpness gone from it all. As the flat bed moves forward, I know I should be panicking. But I just feel tired. I close my eyes and let the machine do its thing, knowing what it will reveal—the things that the physical therapists have been warning me about for months. The miniscule stress fractures in my shins and feet, the ones that cause me those tiny agonies on a weekly basis. The ones that have been getting progressively worse since freshman year. The ones that might eventually end my dancing career. The lack of strength in my bones from poor nutrition.
I know from all the pamphlets Taylor gave me at our first meeting that my eating problems are to blame—the throwing up, the lack of bone-building nutrients, the fact that my period came and went and never came back. I picture the box full of dead toe shoes I’ve compiled over my time at the conservatory, each pair taking its toll. The thought of them makes me shiver, like the butterflies that stared out at me that night, cold, menacing.