Empress of the World Read Online Free PDF

with her jacket, the branches, and my ankle, trying to figure out the best place to secure the splint.
    “You guys, I really don’t think you need to do all this. I’m fine,” I lie.
    “Jesus Christ, what happened to you? I knew this whole hike idea was the spawn of Satan. Are you okay?” Katrina kneels next to me, getting her “Fuck” leggings dirty on the ground.
    “She’s not okay, she’s sprained her ankle. I’m going to get her back to see the nurse,” Isaac says.
    Oh, is that what’s happening?
    “I’m really okay. Just let me stand up,” I say. This is the kind of thing that happens to me all the time: some incredibly embarrassing, entirely stupid accident which reveals that the mere act of walking is apparently too difficult for me to grasp.
    They don’t let me stand up until they’ve finished the splint, and when I do, all the pain comes back, and I almost lose my balance. All three of them reach out for me at the same moment, but Isaac is the closest. He keeps me from falling by grabbing me around the waist and putting one of my arms over his shoulders. We are close enough to the same height that he only has to bend over a little to make a good crutch.
    “Do you want help getting back?” asks Battle.
    “Yeah, we could, like, take turns carrying you or something!” says Katrina.
    “You couldn’t lift me,” I mumble. At the same time, Isaac says, “No, you go on, I think we’ll be okay.”
    My ankle hurts. “Let’s just go,” I say.
    “Make them give you some great painkillers! Then we’ll have a party!” says Katrina.
    Battle is already continuing up the hill, I notice. She turned away from us right after I said that I wanted to go. It’s almost as though my saying that made her angry.
    “Does it feel like you broke any bones?” Isaac asks, as we start awkwardly back down the trail with everyone staring at us.
    I shake my head. “I don’t think so,” I say, “but I haven’t broken any before, so I wouldn’t know. Why are you Red Cross certified, Isaac?”
    Isaac tries to shrug and then remembers that he’s being a crutch. “It’s dumb,” he says. “My parents want me to be a doctor, right? Blah blah blah my son the doctor. And you can’t send your kid to med school when he’s fifteen, so what’s the next best thing?”
    “Oh, I get it. Did you hate it?”
    “No. I really liked it, but I wasn’t about to tell that to the parents. Parents,” he says, as though I should understand immediately what he means.
    After a moment or two, I have an honesty attack. “Actually, I like mine.”
    “You’re lucky,” says Isaac. He sounds almost sad.
    We walk—well, he walks, I limp—in silence for a while, and my mind drifts.
    Why didn’t Isaac want Battle and Katrina to help take me back? It’s obviously Katrina that he has the crush on, so it’s not like he wanted to, like, get me alone or something. Was it some macho boy kind of “I know First Aid and you guys don’t” thing?
    “Do you need to rest?” Isaac asks.
    “No.”
     
    The nurse failed to give me any painkillers suitable for recreation, but I did get a large number of cold packs, of which Katrina highly approves. “Functional, yet stylish, in a very ‘now’ shade of electric blue!” she says, putting one on her head.
    “Don’t ruin that, she’s going to need it,” warns Battle.
    Katrina brought me extra pillows and candy.
    Battle gave me a flower that she picked at the top of the hill. “Since you didn’t get to see the whole field of them, I thought you should at least have one.”
    “Thanks for coming to see me, you guys,” I say. “I felt like such a moron for falling like that.”
    Katrina says sarcastically, “Yeah, well, we were meaning to speak to you about that, you know, we just don’t want to be seen with someone who’s always getting injured, it’s just so uncool.” She rolls her eyes.
    “I fell off the stage once during a dress rehearsal,” says Battle. “I had all these