Fireball (Cheap Thrills 1)

Yet again there was nothing but silence from the person in there with him. A little further away from where I was, I could hear a deep voice talking quietly about soft tissue damage and began praying that it was my doctor with the x-ray results.

That’s when the kid pushed Sheriff Bell over the edge. He’d only just said, “Hey, Siri…” when the sheriff stalked past me and pulled the curtain back.

“Hey, kid, what are you doing? These people are in here for private stuff because they feel sick. You repeating everything loud enough for the world to hear isn’t helping, neither is asking your phone to answer the questions you’ve got,” he snapped at him and turned his attention to the young woman sitting down with her phone in her hand. “And you should be keeping him in check instead of taking photos of yourself, using whatever the shit that is on social media to add sparkles to it.”

Fucking kill me now! He had a point, but in my experience, if someone was as into taking selfies of themselves that they’d do it in the ER, you didn’t mess with that. I’d taught in schools, I’d seen how protective and obsessed they got over them. Something which was proven just then.

“It’s not sparkles, it’s a filter. People want to see what I look like, so I’m showing them. It’s not against the law to do it, I’ve got rights.”

“She always does that,” the kid told everyone, moving his loud commentary off the sick people and onto the woman with him. “She wakes up in the morning and starts taking photos.”

“I do not,” she hissed at him.

“Yeah, you do. Every morning it's ‘fresh morning face, who dis?’ And you don’t even look like you in those photos. Everyone says it. That dude who came to take you out last week didn’t even recognize you cause you don’t look like your photos.”

“He didn’t say that,” the woman stood up, revealing to me that it was a young woman in her late teens. “He said that I looked better than the pictures he’d seen online, and that because of that he knew he was out of my…”

“No, he said you used some shit on them that took sixty pounds off, made you look older, made your nose smaller, and that he didn’t want fake,” the kid listed it all in an overly deep voice. “He also said it was false advertising because you didn’t even have your real eye color seeing as how you used those fake color stick in things in your eyes,” he repeated in the same voice. Not missing a beat, he turned to look at the sheriff and asked, “What’s false advertising?”

Taking a step back, the sheriff glanced over his shoulder at me like he was looking for me to come and save him, but he could keep looking. His eyes narrowed at the big grin I shot him, and then he turned back to face the little boy and the girl who was turning purple. What can I say, both males had gotten in the way of those selfies. No fake news there, that shit was serious.

Out of patience, he laid it out for them. “You – stop repeating people’s business. It’s not cool, and one day you’ll understand why when someone does it to you. And you,” he pointed at the girl. “When you have a minor in your care, you pay attention to them, especially when there’s shit around that’ll hurt them or someone else. Your phone can wait, your photos can wait, your whatever can wait. Know who can’t wait? The safety of the kid. Do I make myself clear?”

After a round of ‘yes, sirs’, he whipped the curtain shut again and walked back around the bed so he was facing me again.

“Wow, you’re just a charmer, aintcha?”

Crossing his arms over his chest, he glared down at me. “Thanks for the help there, fireball.”

Shrugging, I refused to rise to the nickname again, and instead focused on educating him. “You have a badge, I don’t.”

We were interrupted just then by the doctor who’d been looking after my hand since the nurse had brought me down here after Jose had the baby.

He immediately launched into my results, not looking up from his iPad. “Ok, Ms. Newton. The x-rays don’t show any broken bones, so it looks like,” he looked up just then and saw that I wasn’t alone anymore. “Oh, hey, Sheriff Bell. How’s it hanging? Was that you I heard laying it out before?”

Leaning over, he shook the doctor’s hand, and replied, “How’d you guess. Feeds my furnace when people focus on taking selfies instead of watching kids entrusted into their care. Especially when said kid is repeating shit he shouldn’t be loud enough for everyone to hear. See a lot of things go wrong because people are looking at the screens of their phones instead of where they’re meant to be looking, it’s like a red rag to the Townsend’s ornery bull.”