Waiting rooms are all the same. No matter the doctor or hospital, they’re the same. The chairs are uncomfortable, all in tight rows so you’re pressed against strangers. Even if they aren’t overly tidy, there’s that sterile, empty feel that has nothing to do with cleanliness. Too-bright walls, too-bright lights, too-bright smiles from the brochures on the walls. On the tables are usually a cup full of pens, old magazines, a box of tissues. Sometimes a jar of mints. I always take one, if there are mints. I don’t eat them. They sit at the bottom of my bag with all the receipts and gum wrappers. But I take one anyway. Mom used to say, if there’s free shit, take it. But I don’t think that’s why I take them. It just makes me feel a little better, after each visit. Like the whole thing wasn’t a total loss. Even if I know deep down that it was.

“Do you want a mint?" I ask my sister.

“No.” She wrinkles her nose, glancing up from her cell phone. “They’ve probably been there forever.”

“I don’t eat them,” I tell her.

She gives me an odd look, but I don’t explain, and she doesn’t ask. There was a time when I told Phoebe everything, every dumb thought I had, but that was years ago, when all we had was each other. Now she has Joe and the baby to take care of. A family she chose. Sometimes I wonder which is more real, the family you’re born into or the one you build on your own.

I shift in my seat to try and peer at Phoebe’s screen, but I can’t see what she is typing or to who.

“You don’t have to sit here, you know. You can just pick me up after.”

“No, no,” says my sister, looking up with a sudden fierceness that startles me. “I want to be here when they run through the results.”

“Technically, I already heard the results on the phone last—”

“But that wasn’t good enough, was it? They said they couldn’t find anything wrong, but obviously something’s wrong.”

I hold my bad hand—the left one, the numb one—closer in my lap instinctually. Even in a hospital full of people with ailments, I feel a hot pulse of shame in my throat. Wrong. I want to hide my bad hand under my jacket, away from notice, like it has somehow failed. I guess it has, in a way. This last scan was supposed to be the answer. Finally, after months of physical therapy and bouncing around to different specialists, after x-rays and examinations, poking and prodding, I was approved for an MRI. Expensive, even with insurance, but it would, I was promised, at last reveal what was wrong with my hand. It did not. 

Everything looks normal, Dr. Castellano’s assistant told me on the phone. She was a perfectly pleasant woman merely passing on information, but I couldn’t help but feel an accusation in her tone. As if I was lying, or holding out on them somehow. As if it was all in my head and I was wasting everyone’s time.

“They weren’t being mean or anything, just translating what the scan said. I probably made the whole thing seem more dramatic when I told you about it.”

That was definitely true. I exaggerated, but only because I called Phoebe immediately after, crying, and felt like I needed to come up with a valid reason for it. And I figured that, yeah, I just had a disappointing but reasonable chat with the doctor’s office on the phone, didn’t account for the overwhelming spiral of emotions I was feeling after hanging up on Castellano’s assistant last Thursday. If Tommy was there, he would’ve given me shit for my reaction, but he isn’t around anymore. I tell myself I’m glad about that.

“I don’t care how mean anybody is. I want them to do their jobs.” Phoebe huffs, tapping her nails on the wooden armrest between us. 

I joke, “This is why Mom never went to doctors.”

“Mom never went to doctors because they told her to stop drinking and she didn’t want to. Plus, you know. Money.” 

I look out the window, still smiling a little. “Remember how she thought red Gatorade would cure anything?”

“Even a burst appendix,” my sister mutters, and neither of us say anything after that.

A voice calls out a name that isn’t mine, and an elderly man shuffles from the waiting room toward the front desk. All the rest of us shift and sigh and continue waiting our turn. I watch people come and go, their features laced with varying levels of anxiety or weariness. They should just assign us a number instead of bothering with a name, I think. More straight-forward. More honest. Sometimes it irks me, the way that people in scrubs and doctor’s coats tend to look at you like a problem and not a person, but maybe it’s an inevitable symptom. Maybe after looking at hundreds of scans, everyone starts to look similar. We all want to be individuals, but are we really all that special, that unique? It’s like me, seeing all the similarities in the waiting rooms I’ve sat in over the last eighteen months. Could it be that, in the ways that matter, people are all the same too?

In my lap, I fist my good hand, then slowly unscrunch my fingers. I do this a few times. I can feel the tingling beginning of an episode, and I hear the tinny phone voice in my head tell me, everything looks normal. I realize that Phoebe is watching me. I try to keep my right hand moving to ward off the oncoming prickles of numbness but I can feel them starting to sink into my flesh like icicles.

I surge to my feet when my name is called. Phoebe follows close behind, and the nurse gives her a weird once-over and then looks back at me.

“You’re over eighteen, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” I answer. “Yes. I’m twenty. But it’s okay, she’s my older sister.”

“And you feel safe disclosing your medical information with her in the room? We should really have you sign something just to have it on record…”

Phoebe rolls her eyes, and for a minute, the wrinkles fall from her face and she looks exactly like she did at sixteen. For a moment, she isn’t coordinating carpools to daycare or what Joe wants to eat for dinner, she’s just my sister. My sister who loves me, and only me.

“Sure,” she says. “I’ll sign whatever.”

“No, I mean that I need Cassandra’s signature.”

I shake out my good hand, which isn’t acting so good lately. “I’m gonna have to do it quickly,” I tell the nurse, voice wobbling. “My right hand is—yeah. It’s not just the left one anymore.”

I say this as if she has any clue what that means. But she has no idea about my hands, about who I am, and just gives me a universally sympathetic look and hands me a pen. I scratch out my signature. I still have feeling in my right hand so my handwriting looks all right. I wonder how long that will last, how long until my good hand becomes like the other one. 

Dr. Castellano was scheduled out for months when I asked for another appointment, so we’re led to an unfamiliar room. I sit on the patient table and Phoebe on the stiff chair in the corner. The doctor is late. I close my eyes, breathe, and keep moving my right hand, scrunching and unscrunching the fingers in the way the physical therapist showed me, until he shows up.

“Tell me of your condition,” implores Dr. Moore, a man in his forties with a mask over his mouth to cover his bland smile.

I grind my back teeth, gathering my thoughts. I have recited this same speech for doctor after doctor, feeling more foolish, more desperate each time.

“Shouldn’t you know that already?” asks my sister, eyeing the man dubiously.

“I’ve skimmed the notes. But why don’t you tell me yourself, Cassandra?”

“Okay,” I say. “Um. Well, my hands get numb sometimes. It started as just my left one, and the first episode was about a year and a half ago. My fingers started tingling like two years ago, but I thought that was just, I don’t know, from writing too much. I’m in college. Lots of note-taking. So, yeah. I thought it was just fatigue or something. But then my whole hand went numb. Totally numb. It would come back, the feeling. But then the periods of numbness lasted longer and longer—”

“When did you go to your general physician?”

“Uh, after like three episodes of numbness coming and going, I think. She did an examination, and thought it was a pinched nerve and told me to rest the area for a few weeks. Thankfully it was summer then and school was out, so I could. And I did. But it didn’t help. So she seemed kind of unsure, and sent me to physical therapy. And I tried that for a while, and it didn’t help, so they referred me to a bunch of specialists who did a bunch of different tests, and then to here, and the MRI—but Dr. Castellano’s assistant called and told me they couldn’t find anything.” I took a gulp of air. “Nobody can find anything wrong. And it’s getting worse. My left hand has been numb for ten days straight, which is the longest episode so far. And…and it’s starting in my right one. It hasn’t gone fully numb yet, but the tingling…”

I flexed the fingers of what I had gotten used to calling my good hand over the last year, and felt a swell of fear rising in my chest when I couldn’t straighten them all the way.

“She’s scared to drive. And that’s her writing hand. How is she supposed to go to class?” Phoebe demanded, and I winced.

“Yes,” said Dr. Moore, like I was a particularly interesting puzzle. He was looking at his laptop. “The MRI results you received last week are correct. No broken bones, no tendon or ligament issues, no nerve damage. No swollen joints, no—”

My temple throbs. “Everything looks normal, I know.”

“Hm. It says here you reported pain and numbness. If you don’t mind me asking, how can something be both painful and numb? Can you describe that to me? And on a scale of one to ten, how painful is your hand?”

I try to remember what I told the other doctors. Truthfully, I have a hard time putting pain into words. Assigning a number to it must be easier for other people, since they ask it all the time at hospitals. But I never know what to say. I know that one is very low pain and ten is very high pain, but all the middle is so murky. 

I hesitate, and catch Phoebe’s eye. I have always thought she has a very bird-like face, not unattractive, but severe and pointy all the same. Mine is round, less pretty, and freckly, like dad’s. We don’t look related, my sister and I. But she practically raised me. And now she’s raising a baby with a husband who ignores me whenever I come over for dinner. Joe. Nice enough to his wife, but as for me, he gives me these subtle looks sometimes, not cruel, but sort of restless and even evasively sad, like I’m a tote bag full of books that Phoebe has been meaning to donate but keeps putting off.

My sister raises her thin eyebrows and I realize I haven’t answered Dr. Moore’s question. I wonder if the way she thinks about pain is different from the way I think about it, how I feel it, and I wonder how any of us can agree on something enough to even talk about it. It’s a wonder language doesn’t fall apart at the seams.

“Uh.” I clear my throat. “A six, I guess. I don’t know, how it can be numb and hurt at the same time. It just does. I can’t move it, it’s numb, but it’s also like it’s being stabbed all over with sharp little needles.”

My voice sounds small but urgent, like I am begging to be believed.

He hums thoughtfully. “Well, usually in the case of unknown pain, I suggest an injection of cortisone into the site to see if that has any impact, but the numbness…and you’ve been to physical therapy? Because I’m happy to refer you.”

“Yes. For over six months.”

“It didn’t help,” Phoebe pipes up, and I’m so frayed I almost scream at her to shut up, that I can handle it, that I’m not a kid anymore.

But another part of me is relieved to finally have someone else here with me, as if I need back-up to prove to the doctor I’m not just crazy.

“Well, there’s not many options left. There is a type of surgery we do where I can peel back the skin just to have a look. Sometimes even these fancy machines don’t pick up everything.” Dr. Moore chuckles, then starts typing.

I imagine the skin of my hand cut open like a flower and feel vaguely nauseous. 

“Is there anything else? Anything?”

“Do you remember if there was a specific event preceding your condition?”

I shift on the table, the paper crinkling under my jeans. “No. There wasn’t a fall or injury. That should be in the notes, that there’s no clear cause.”

“I mean, was there anything emotional going on at the time?”

Emotional. The word blinks in my head like the dive bar’s light outside my apartment window. The kind of searing brightness that shows up even with closed eyelids. I think about Tommy, all those things he shouted at me when we broke up. I think about the bruise he left on my cheekbone that one time, how I touched it the next morning in the mirror like it was a sticker on my face. Emotional.

When I don’t reply, Phoebe says, “I’m not sure. Did you break up with Tom around that time, Cas? I had just given birth, so I can’t really recall. Was Tom before or after—”

“This is real!” I burst out. “I’m not making it up!”

I wish I could shove the words back into my mouth. I can’t even look at Phoebe. As a child, I used to fake being hurt. And not the way most kids act sick to get out of school or soccer try-outs. Mom would be hungover on the sofa and my sister would be doing her homework at the table or talking to her friends on the phone, and neither of them would look my way, would answer when I called their name. I didn’t have any friends, anyone else to play with, anywhere to go. So I would stand there in the room, feeling angry and cold enough to scream. Instead of screaming, I would shut my eyes and fall to the ground. I didn’t catch myself either—I really committed. Sometimes I came away actually hurt, having hit my knee on a piece of furniture or cut my tongue on my teeth, but both Phoebe and Mom, though half-stumbling, would rush over to check on me. 

To this day, my sister doesn’t know I faked the fainting. It was just a stupid cry for attention, but it feels unforgivable. What right did I have to be so greedy? My sister was already the one who packed my school lunches and signed my report cards and tucked me in, who took an after-school job in high school to pick up the slack when Mom forgot about the bills. That should have been enough, but it wasn’t. I pretend to faint all the time, just so they would come over and hold me and cup my cheek and say my name softly. Phoebe would pet my hair, crouched on the floor, and Mom would tip red Gatorade into my mouth ever so gently, more gently than she ever was any other time, and I would feel so loved in those brief minutes that even though I knew it was wrong, I kept doing it until the end of middle school.

“No one is accusing you of anything. We’re just trying to get to the bottom—”

I am embarrassed by the sting in my eyes but I can’t seem to blink them clear. “Well, I guess there is no bottom! It’s bottomless. I just keep falling and falling and nobody can tell me what to do to make it stop. You just keep offloading me to different doctors like a faceless carousel and yet nobody can figure out how to fix me, or even what’s wrong. But there is something wrong, no matter what the tests say. There is.” 

Phoebe crosses the room and I realize that I’ve stood up. She reaches down to take my right hand, my good hand, but it’s numb. They’re both completely numb. 

I hold my hands protectively to my chest as I blindly follow my sister out of the treatment room, through the winding hallways.

“Come on, Cas. These guys are all pricks. They gaslight people, especially women. I read about it online. They don’t care, they just want to make money. Surgery, just to take a look.” My sister scoffs. “Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah,” I respond hollowly. “Pricks.”

All of a sudden, we are back in the waiting room. It looks the same, like I never left. I am almost out the door when I realize that I forgot to take a mint. I turn back to stare at the jar full of little clear wrappers holding little white candies. I go for it, even though Phoebe, keys already in hand, is calling for me. I sniffle, trying to use my arms to press my dead hands together and grab one, but I accidentally send the jar careening to the carpet. A woman sitting nearby rushes over to help, and in her haste, steps on the scattered mints. I hear them crunch under her shoe, one after the other, like an echo.

“Come on,” Phoebe says to me softly, pulling me back to my feet and smoothing a hand over my hair.

Silently, I follow her out the door.

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Calais Mustoe lives in Vermont. She is currently working on her first novel.