This is a short nonfiction story I wrote for my Nonfiction Workshop class this semester. I hope it makes you laugh. At me.
The Nerd Wound
All athletic people are alike; each unathletic person is unathletic in their own way. I have never been athletic, but I have never really cared. I grew up running around the textbook publishing company my grandfather started, sneaking donuts from board meetings and accepting quarters from employees for punching the button for them in the elevator. I was in third grade when my parents sold the company, and by then I was running around the classical school they’d started, where I read the Iliad in fifth grade and wrote nine thesis papers before I graduated. College came next; I chose a small liberal arts university in Alabama, where I ran around rereading all the classical texts in the school’s honors program. I hadn’t realized the program was a big deal until I arrived. It wasn’t actually that big of a deal, I knew, but it had my favorite books, a place to discuss them, and people who liked discussing them too.
I was indeed unathletic in my own nerdy way—classically trained, and content with my prowess fully in the classroom and not on the court. I have never been athletic, nor have I been seriously injured, and the two are, of course, correlated. Growing up, my friends would sprain their ankles or break their collar bones or lose a limb, whatever. I wouldn’t. So when I got out of the shower one afternoon, home for Christmas break from my sophomore year of college, I was startled to see blood all over my towel and arm. I traced it back to the side of my hand, which was bothered, apparently, and had decided to throw a fit.
Though I saw the blood, I didn’t feel it. It was all up and down my right pinky, sliding to my wrist, dripping onto the white tile floor. I pride myself on my stoicism, so I didn’t scream and didn’t faint and grabbed a tissue and wrapped my finger in it. By the time I had put clothes on, the initial Kleenex was soaked through. I had only seen this much blood in movies—the amount that happens when that one character gets shot and bleeds all over their green uniform, and someone presses a white cloth to the wound (always white, to accentuate the blood), and by that time, the poor soldier dies looking like a christmas tree, the white of the bandage replaced with a vibrant red. The doctor gets there too late to know what to do, so he does nothing, and then the soldier never makes it where he was trying to go.
I was not on a battlefield, though. I was not in a movie. I was in my childhood bathroom: light green wallpaper with butterflies, two mirrored walls facing each other, white floor and white sink and white towels. But according to the movies, they wouldn’t be white for long. So I tossed the juiced tissue into the trash, held my finger over the porcelain sink, and watched blood drop and drop and drop into the sink. I looked at the opening on the side of my finger. This was not what fingers are supposed to do. I didn’t know much about anatomy, but I knew an inordinate amount of blood when I saw it. Something was very wrong.
This bleeding went on for the week before Christmas and continued the week after. Every day, my finger would bleed for about ten minutes. I would stand at a downstairs sink and stare at the soup stain on the kitchen tablecloth or the dog bed in the corner covered in small white hairs. I would redden a dozen tissues if I tried to leave my station. The wound—I always used this word, because it might be the only time in my life I’d get to—was about the size of the end of a pencil. It didn’t look much different from a blister or a callus, or a cross between the two. It was nondescript—I didn’t notice it except for 10 minutes of the day—and it was threatening to ruin everything. This is not what fingers are supposed to do.
This routine was fine with me. If I was going to bleed out, there wasn’t much I could do. But my parents were concerned. Their concern was fine with me, but its manifestation made me concerned: I could not go to the doctor. if I took this to the doctor, and it became a big deal, then I might not be able to get on my flight. It was the week after Christmas, and my flight took off in three days. And my flight was my wages, my payment for the job whose work had given me this bloody finger in the first place.
Pinky fingers don’t matter. They’re at the end of the list, not even good for delivering insults or holding love promises. Being on the end means that they’re on the edge, the closest finger to the rest of the world. And until I had an impact-activated blood fountain attached to mine, I never realized how often pinkies run into things. Doorframes, tables, any hard surface. But until this strange wound surfaced only one surface mattered—the page.
I write. I write for my sanity and for my GPA and to keep the postal service in business, and most of it begins on clean, white paper. I have always been a good student, and I hold my pencil exactly how Miss James taught me in Kindergarten and Mrs. VandeBrake re-taught me in first grade. Still. But still, apparently I write too much or too hard or have pinky fingers that weren’t made for such stressful working conditions—my poor little finger just gave out. I had hurt my pinky from writing too much. And I had written too much for all my days and days spent doing homework for the honors program, the program that was going to take me to Italy.
All thirty-seven of us had been waiting for months. Since we got our letters in March, letters that said we, the forty of us, could have the classrooms with coded doors and could register first for classes—ever since that day we had put Italy on the back burner and left the stove on red. The deal was that the program would fly all of us to Italy after our first three semesters. After the first one started, we didn’t know if we’d make it that far. One semester in, almost all of us dropped out. The second semester over, two of us actually did. The third came and went, and we lost one more with it, but thirty-seven of us had reminded each other of Italy enough times during late-night study sessions and failed papers and shelves of reading that thirty-seven of us had made it. And now I was three days away from flying to meet my friends in Atlanta, and my pinky was in my way.
I wanted to ignore it, in case it was cancer or something that required a four-day treatment, but my mom made me go to the dermatologist. My dilemma was not the P.A. who looked young enough to still be in undergrad—she was competent and seemed nice enough. My dilemma was my flight, one day later, which would take me to Italy. I had earned that flight, and I was not going to miss it for some damaged vein or tumor or whatever was going on with my finger. I still didn’t know. I just knew that in three days I would be in Rome, even if I had to bust out of this office and a three-day treatment, even if they had to amputate my pinky to get me on the plane in time.
Turns out, all she had to do was laser it and burn it and stitch it and I was fine. Just a long sniff of burning flesh, just a small white bandage, and just one stitch left in my finger to take out once I got there. What the heck.
I didn’t care. I didn’t have cancer. I wasn’t going to be kept from Italy by an injury to the most insignificant part of my body. Three days later I was on the plane. A few more days passed and I took a deep breath and snipped a stitch, alone up in that hotel bathroom in Rome.
I knew athletes got hurt a lot. They walk into the cafeteria with ice wrapped to their arm or leg and the blase attitude of having earned their pain. Even their limping looks like a saunter with the matching backpack a punctuation on their forms. I, on the other hand, looked like a Victorian wash-up, with my pinky extended, waiting for a teacup as imminent as Godot. I looked at my pinky a few weeks after I got back. My hand had done its job, gotten all my papers written, but even then my pinky finger had tried to make a mess of it. Right where my skin dragged the page was a blood vessel, and after enough writing it burst like a broken fire hydrant. The thing that got me to Italy almost kept me from it. Nerds get wounds, too.
I don’t mean emotional wounds. At all. The story of my pinky finger does not matter to me or to anyone else. Nerds get actual, literal wounds. And as it turned out, the nice P.A. had been a little too nice, and I had to go back to get it fixed another time, and she still didn’t fix it, and the third time I had to go to the real doctor. The last time, when the older guy did it, my finger looked like a zombie had taken a bite out of it—the hole was deeper than a pea and as black as charred squash. After a few weeks it turned white again, and I ignored it until last week, when I hit it on something, looked down, and caught my breath. But then I let it go, because I didn’t have Italy to get to, just class.
