Becoming Johanna by C. A. Pack Read Free Book Online Page B

give you the invoices I’ve been working on. You can’t leave
until I give them to you with explicit instructions. And I can’t
give them to you until I’m done with them.”
    Johanna sat down and
waited. She watched the long hand on the clock slowly make its way
to the quarter hour, and then to half-past, before Lucinda finally
handed her a large pile of paperwork. “All of these have to be
double-checked for accuracy, and then each customer has to be
called with the price and must agree to it in advance of
shipment.”
    Johanna stared at the
invoices. “This will take more than one afternoon.”
    “ That’s your problem,”
Lucinda said as she grabbed her bag and raced toward the door. She
turned before exiting. “And you’d better get them done,” she said
with a scowl before finally leaving.
    Johanna gritted her teeth
as she headed to the bank to cash her check. She had already wasted
a half-hour of precious time waiting for Lucinda. She would be
lucky if she had any time left to eat.
     
    She cashed the check and
concentrated so intently on counting the money in her hand, she
didn’t see a car pulling away from the curb. The driver hit
Johanna. The crisp twenty dollars bills she’d clutched in her hand
moments before shot into the air, and the wind scattered them
about. Johanna couldn’t have chased them down even if she wanted
to. The impact had knocked her down and broken her leg. The car
sped off. A small crowd gathered around her. One person called for
an ambulance, while another ran for a police officer.
    As the ambulance crew
lifted Johanna into the back of the vehicle, a woman approached
them and handed Johanna three twenty-dollars bills that she and her
children had retrieved.
    “ But this is only sixty
dollars … ”
    “ The rest got away,” the
woman answered. “Either the wind carried your money off, or passing
opportunists did.”
    Johanna didn't know what
to say. She felt her lower lip quivering.
    An onlooker admonished
her. “You could say ‘thank you.’ She didn’t have to give the money
back to you. No one else did.”
    “ Thank you,” the injured
girl whispered.
     
    An emergency medical
technician wheeled Johanna into the busy hospital on a gurney.
Every seat in the waiting room was taken. Wheel chairs and gurneys
occupied with waiting patients lined the walls. A worker grilled
Johanna with personal questions and asked for her insurance card.
Johanna explained that she had none and was given another form to
sign—stating she would be responsible for paying back the cost of
medical treatment. She felt overwhelmed. Her head began to swim and
she fainted. A while later, she felt a nurse tapping on her face
and saying her name over and over. The odor of spirits of ammonia
made her gag.
    “ Where am I?” Johanna
asked.
    “ You’re still in the ER.
We can’t start treatment until you finish filling out these forms.”
The woman shoved a pen in Johanna’s hand and held a clipboard up to
her face. “Sign here,” she said, pointing to the appropriate line,
“and here.”
    Johanna scribbled her name
and closed her eyes, wishing more than ever that she had never run
away from the orphanage.
    Doctors fitted a cast to
support Johanna’s broken leg, and she was given a pair of crutches
and a small container of painkillers. The staff seemed reluctant to
let her go without the help of family, but after Johanna told them
for what seemed like the one-thousandth time that she had just
moved to the neighborhood and had no family, they agreed to put her
in a taxicab.
    The good news was the
hospital would bill her.
    The bad news was she
didn’t think to write down the license plate of the car that hit
her. Still, the police might have it. She would have to track it
down, when she could.
    Her immediate problem
would be getting to work. She couldn’t afford to take cabs every
day, and she couldn’t ask Derrick or Amaranda to help when she owed
them both money. She thought about losing the