Scene 8 - October 15th

Exterior Hospital, Evening

Quinn Kaufman

When I went to visit Dad again the following day, I ran into a friend on the steps outside. Devon Durandel was one of the doctors at New Venice General Hospital, where dad checked in for his occasional relapses. During their residency, Devon had often been Dad’s attending doctor. We ran into them less often now that they had finished their residency and were specializing in Neurology, but it was always nice to see them.

“Hey, Quinn!” they called as I approached from the nearby bus station, dropping the apple they had been eating into a nearby bin. “Good to see you, dude. How’ve you been?”

“Premed is kicking my ass as usual,” I complained, hugging them. “You know how it is. What about you?”

“Same old, same old,” they said. “What brings you here? Don’t tell me David had another relapse!”

“I won’t tell you, then,” I said with a smirk.

Devon laughed. “I should drop in on whoever’s overseeing his care and make sure they’re doing it right.”

“It’s Mark Yaffe.”

“Ah, he’ll be fine then. Yaffe is a good guy.” They smiled at me, then jerked their head towards the basketball hoop a little ways away. “Fancy a game?”

“You know I suck at sports, Devon,” I reminded them.

“So do I. It’s nice to play someone at my level once in a while.”

I laughed. “Okay, one game.”

We grabbed a basketball from a nearby bin and squared off. Devon and I had tussled before on occasion - along with neither of us being very athletic, we were also around the same height, so it was a pretty even match. Or at least, they usually were.

Today, however, I was having an incredible streak of luck - I was handling the ball with grace and ease. It almost floated into my hands, always went where I wanted it to go, and on the rare occasions that Devon got ahold of it I could almost snatch it out of the air without looking. Within a few minutes I had spelled out H-O-R-S-E and won, without them getting a single letter.

“You’ve been holding out on me, Kaufman!” they complained. “Did you get bitten by a radioactive spider or something?

“No, although...” I paused. Weird things had been happening all day, ever since I had worn the PA4 the previous evening - the frisbee that I caught without looking or even paying attention, the eraser that I had tracked also without looking, and which had leap into my hand despite my reach not being enough, this game... “Listen, I’m sorry to dunk on you and run, but I gotta go. I just remembered something important I need to talk to my Dad about.”

“Alright,” Devon said agreeably, returning the ball to its bin. “Tell David that I wish him a speedy recovery.”

“I will,” I called over my shoulder as I rushed into the hospital.