Cereal Thumb

A couple of weeks ago, my sister was in a play at her high school, and it was very funny. She was spectacular in it, as she always is. She has real stage presence, and she throws herself into her characters.

After the play, I rode in the car while my dad took my aunt home. Then, we came back to the school to pick up my sister, and one the way we ate single-serve cereal boxes, dry, which someone had thrown onto our driveway in some sort of marketing scheme. That isn’t shady at all. Anyway, since my aunt lives less than five minutes from the school, this took about ten minutes, so my sister was still puttering around and getting ready to go. That part doesn’t matter, though, because of what happened next.

I climbed out of the passenger’s seat, and shut the door casually behind myself with one hand, closing my thumb in the door as I did so.

I yelled non-words and dropped into a crouch, ready to fend off the lion or whatever, and began to spin around my thumb, as though it were glued to an immobile stake in the ground, hopping as I went.

I could hear my dad pause on his side of the car, and knew that he was waiting to see if this was a real injury or just one of those I-bumped-my-wrist-a-tiny-bit-too-hard things. As I began to rise in pitch as I yelled (mostly an assortment of nonsense with “Oooh no, ohh no,” thrown in) he came around the truck.

When he saw me spinning, he crouched down too, and did that I’m-not-touching-you thing people do over an injury with their hands (to fend off the carrion birds, I guess) and asked to see my thumb.

I opened my hand, which was clenched around the injury, and squealed, because it hurt, and there was blood. My dad hissed at me, and unlocked the car door to get some (clean?) napkins from the center consol thing. I wrapped them around my thumb, and managed to get up to follow him into the auditorium, in search of ice.

He strode up the aisle with purpose, and I followed behind him, hunched over my injury, making that high-pitched sound through the nose, like a dog, unaware that there were other people in the room. We made it to the lobby, where one of my sister’s friends was talking loudly on his cell-phone.

My dad had to ask him twice for ice, which is understandable, because that’s a weird request, but then he saw me, and scurried off to grab an adult (the drama director). She went behind a door and came back with a huge plastic shopping bag (the kind for like, microwaves or computer monitors) with about a cup of ice in it.

I wrapped this around my thumb and sat in a metal folding chair behind the card table where they sold concessions during the play, and made that sound. Another friend of my sister’s, who I assume saw me come in earlier, while I was in my pain haze, came up into the lobby and said,
“Apricot, are you oka-- you need to stop smiling like that. It’s creepy.” And then he shuttered. Of course, he didn’t call me Apricot, he used my name.

“I can’t,” I said, grinning. “It hurts too much.”

“Well it’s terrifying,” he told me, and went back into the theater.

My dad came over to the chair and said, “Let me see your thumb.”

I opened up the plastic and wet paper napkins to reveal a very ugly thumb, still making those irritating stuck-pig sounds.

“Whelp. You’re going to lose that nail,” my dad said.

And that’s when I burst into tears. My head fell back, and I started sobbing.

My dad sighed to himself, shook his head, and started down the aisle to get my sister.

Who thought I was carrying a dead bird in a bag, crying over the corpse.

It’s been a couple weeks since this happened, and the cuticle died completely, all the way down to the base of the nail. It does indeed look like I’ll be losing the nail, but it no longer looks quite as bad as it did, y’know, when it happened.

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On an unrelated note, the boyfriend has started a new blog about his jewelry making, and I highly recommend it.

http://rolandgridley.wordpress.com/