Edison took off her sunglasses. She blinked her eyes and shook her head and the dizziness subsided. “What're you doing?” she asked.
Jordan leaned further out the window. “Mr. Pip is dangling from the tree branch. He's going to fall if I don't grab him first.”
“How’d he get out there? Why is he out there?” Edison said.
“I kicked him. It was an accident,” Jordan said defensively. “This is all your fault.”
“It’s my fault you kicked the cat out the window?”
Jordan threw a leg up on the window sill and reached out again. She still needed another four inches. She held on to the window sill with one hand and leaned out further.
Edison dashed across the room and grabbed Jordan by waistband of her shorts. “What're you doing?”
“I'm going to rescue him. What does it look like?” Jordan said.
“You're three stories up! It's too dangerous!”
Jordan looked over her shoulder at Edison. “You want to do it?”
“No.”
“Okay then, shut up and let me go.”
“Meow!”
“Okay, okay, but be careful.” Edison turned loose of Jordan's shorts. She stood back, watching fearfully, and making whimpering noises.
Jordan turned until she was sitting on the windowsill with her legs outside. Very carefully, she pushed herself to her feet, balanced on the sill, grabbed the lattice on the outside of the house with one hand and reached toward the tree branch with the other.
“Meow!”
“I'm almost there, Mr. Pip,” Jordan said.
Edison bit her fingernails as Jordan leaned further and further. She breathed out a sigh of relief as Jordan's hand grabbed Mr. Pip by his scruff.
“Thank God,” Edison muttered.
Crack!
“Oh no,” Edison amended.
Jordan was slowly moving further and further away from the window – the lattice was peeling off the house.
Edison ran for the window. But she was too late. Jordan and Mr. Pip plunged three stories. Edison covered her eyes and screamed.
“For God’s sake, stop screaming,” Jordan yelled from below.
Edison un-peeked her eyes and looked out the window. “You’re alive!” she said.
Jordan lay spread-eagle on her back in the dumpster they had rented for the construction project they called home. Luckily, she’d landed on carpet padding that they’d removed from the den. Mr. Pip sat regally on Jordan’s chest. Without so much as a thank you, Mr. Pip leapt out of the dumpster, leaving Jordan covered in dust.
“You’re welcome,” Jordan said. Then she noticed her bloody hand. As is the way with injured body parts, she didn’t notice the pain until she saw the blood. Then she screamed. She surveyed the area and saw the piece of glass from the broken shower door. After she finished screaming she called up to Edison. “Will you please bring me a towel?”
“Why? Did you pee your pants?”
“No, I’m bleeding,” Jordan yelled back up at her.
Edison turned and ran out of the room, panting, “ohmygodohmygodohmygod!”
Amy Meets Jordan
“What do we have here?” Amy asked.
Jordan looked down at her bloody shirt and answered, “A ruined shirt and a really bad home first-aid job.”
Meet Dr. Amy Stewart. Amy was too-short, too-brown, too-fat and too-smart. That's what she thought anyway. She still pictured herself the way she looked as a sophomore in high school. Since that time, Amy had shed twenty pounds, gotten contacts, highlighted her hair and made good use of her brains. But when she looked in a mirror, she still saw her old self. It was like reverse alchemy. Her mirror turned gold into lead.
The first time Amy laid eyes on Jordan was in the emergency room at University Hospital. Amy sat on the rolling stool in a curtained off cubicle and surveyed her patient. To say that Jordan was good-looking was an understatement. Amy thought Jordan was perfection personified – speaking purely from an anatomical viewpoint. Not that Amy was much of a judge of anything other than medicine, but to her this woman with the sculpted body and long dishwater blond hair looked like one of those Olympic volleyball players everyone went gaga over. In short, she was the type of woman Amy despised. Well, maybe despised was too strong a word. Loathe? No, she didn't loathe Jordan just because she was the type of woman that stared out at her from magazine covers, made a sports bra look sexy and made her feel inadequate and homely and invisible. Hate? No, she didn't hate Jordan either, not exactly. She hated the idea of Jordan. Amy hated that there were women out there who looked like Jordan and made women like her feel like something you had to scrape off the bottom of your shoe.
Jordan asked, “You look like you're going to be sick. You're not going to throw up over a little cut and some blood, are you?”