Maya Thompson felt her eyelids drooping as she drove home. She shook her head to wake up and turned up the music, forcing herself to sing along. It had been a long day of classes and a longer night of studying. She was glad to be done for the week, and ready to enjoy a weekend with friends, relaxing, and, of course, writing the term paper due next week before clinicals started. She’d known going to school to become a nurse would be difficult, but she had underestimated her ability to bounce back after a night of little sleep.

She thought of her plans for the weekend. Maybe have some friends over. Maybe drink a little. Maybe take a few days all to herself and just sleep. She didn’t often have the house to herself, but with her aunt vacationing in Europe, the place was all hers. But that also meant Aunt Beth wouldn’t be there to cook dinner as she usually did.

Maya would stop and get food before reaching home. That way she would be all stocked up for whatever this weekend turned out to be. She turned left at the next light and drove to the grocery store.

The old cliché about college kids eating nothing but pizza and fried food was understandably true. Who had time—or money for that matter—to be buying groceries and cooking, planning meals and sitting down to eat them? She was all about the fast and on-the-go meals right now. She loaded her cart with frozen pizzas and pizza rolls, frozen burritos in individual packages, and several bags of tortilla chips. With some salsa, they made for the perfect studying or paper-writing snack.

She headed back home, trying to decide which frozen pizza to eat tonight. The garlic and chicken or the supreme with stuffed crust? While sitting in a line of traffic at a stop light, Maya tapped her fingers on the wheel, still singing along with the radio. She looked over to her right, down an alley that lead to a parallel street. It was an alley used only for trash pickup and probably for workers to step outback to grab a smoke. Cars wouldn’t go that way for fear of driving too close to a dumpster or being stuck on the other side with no view of oncoming traffic.

So the fact that a car squealed its tires driving out of the alley caught her attention. She kept watching, long after the car was out of sight. Something was not right here. Something was lying in the middle of the alley. The more she looked, the more she was sure. Not something. Some one.

A person was lying in the alley, not moving. Her heart jumped and her palms were sweating. She might break out into full-on panic mode any moment if she kept looking. No, no, she reminded herself. This was different. It wasn’t the same. But the problem was, it looked much the same.

When her parents had died, it was the result of a horrific car accident. Maya had been behind them, driving with a friend as they all headed home from a high school football game. Their car had been hit so hard that her father’s body had been thrown from the driver’s seat—despite his seatbelt. He lay on the street’s shoulder, slumped over and not moving until the ambulance arrived.

When she looked at this alley now, she saw that night all over again. Saw the car’s brake lights, heard the smash, saw her dead father on the road. And this body looked exactly the same. But this wasn’t her father. It couldn’t be because both of her parents had died in that accident.

A loud honk behind her made her jump, and she tore her gaze from the alley. But no one seemed to be doing anything about the body. Without thinking much about it, she turned into the alley.

She watched the body for a moment. It was a man. He wore a dark jacket and had dark hair. She couldn’t see much more of him from this angle except that his jeans were dirty and torn in an unintentional way.

She got out of the car and slowly approached. No one else was around. Whoever was in the car was long gone.

“Hello?” she called out, hoping he would respond.

He didn’t. She dashed to his side and looked him over.

She wasn’t a nurse yet. She still had a year of schooling to complete and hadn’t even started her clinicals yet. The hands-on hard part was still coming. So she didn’t really know what she was doing, but she had some knowledge beyond what a person on the street might know.

He had several contusions and many cuts that were actively bleeding. He’d passed out and was probably already passed out when he landed on the pavement, judging by the unnatural position he was lying in. He’d been beaten. No way to tell how bad the injuries were. He might be bleeding internally. He might have broken bones. He might have a concussion. Any of these injuries would warrant a trip to the emergency room.

There were no other vehicles in the alley. The car that took off must’ve dumped him and left. Unless they’d pulled in, beat him up, and left. Either way, he had no way to get anywhere and being unconscious, couldn’t exactly call 9-1-1- himself. She was his only hope at this moment.

She knelt down close to his face and listened. His breathing was steady, though a little labored. His pulse was strong.

“Can you hear me?” She didn’t want to move him, but she adjusted his head so that his neck was straight and not twisted painfully. “Hello?”

His eyes moved under his lids. That was a good sign.

“If you can hear me, squeeze my fingers.” She put her hand around his and waited for his squeeze. Eventually, it came. Weakly, but he’d moved.

She pulled out her phone to call for ambulance. The screen was blank. The battery was dead. She’d meant to charge it on her drive home, but she was so tired after her last class that she’d forgotten.

“Do you have a phone? Mine’s dead.”

He didn’t respond.

“I’m just going to check your pockets for a phone, okay?” She patted him down, but found nothing. Not even a wallet. He must’ve been robbed, then.

“I’m going to go into one of these businesses to call for an ambulance and I’ll be right back, okay?”

“No,” he mumbled.

“What did you say?”

“Don’t call.”

“Don’t call an ambulance? You’re seriously injured. I’m not a doctor, but I am a nursing student. Though, I think anyone could see that you need medical intervention. You might have a concussion or internal—”

“Don’t call.”

Maybe this was more than a mugging. He might have some connection to something bad and didn’t want the police involved. Her stomach tightened at the thought, but she couldn’t just leave him here.

She looked at him again. He was young. Maybe only a year or two older than her. He didn’t look the tough-guy type. He looked like… well, like a student she’d see on campus. But that didn’t mean anything, she reminded herself. Students on campus did bad things, too, and hurt people. It didn’t mean it was safe to be around him.

“Why don’t you want me to call an ambulance? Is it because you don’t want the police involved?” she demanded.

He nodded slowly.

She let out a growl of frustration. “You could die, you know that? If you have internal bleeding or a brain hemorrhage, you could be dead before morning.”

“Not that bad,” he managed.

His eyes fluttered open—the one that could open. The other was swollen shut. He tried to push himself up.

“I wouldn’t sit up if I were you,” Maya warned. “You might get dizzy and—”

He sat up. She watched him and waited.

“Okay. How do you feel?”

He stared at her blankly. “Like a million bucks.” His words were slurred slightly and garbled, not from being drunk, but because his lip was cut and puffy.

“You need medical attention.”

“Leave me,” he said.

“No way. You’re hurt badly. I’m not going to just walk away.”

He dug around inside his jacket and took out his fist holding a wad of cash. So much for the mugging theory. He shoved it at her.

“Take this,” he said. “Leave. Don’t tell anyone.”

She blinked at him a moment. “Is it that bad? So bad you won’t get medical help?”

“Please. Go.”

“I don’t want your money. That’s not why I stopped. I wanted to help you. That’s what medical professionals do.”

“I’m refusing medical attention.”

“Oh no.” She shook her head. “I’m not letting you do that. It doesn’t matter what you did. The EMTs don’t need to know the truth. They only need to know what your injuries are so they can treat them. We can lie. Make something up that doesn’t get you into trouble.”

He glared at her. “I give you money to walk away and instead you tell me you’ll lie for me? Why?”

She shrugged. “I want you to get the help you need.”

“Then you fix me up.”

She shook her head. “I’m not licensed. I’ve only been in school a year. I’m not actually a nurse yet. I don’t know what to do.”

“Is that your car?”

“Yes, but—”

“I suggest you get in it and go before someone sees you here.”

“Okay. On one condition. You come with me.”

He raised an eyebrow and pushed himself to his feet, leaning against the brick wall for support. “You’re one crazy chick.”

“I just don’t want something to happen to you because you didn’t seek medical attention. I would feel terrible forever.”

“Forever?”

“Forever. I don’t even think I could take my Hippocratic oath knowing I had just walked away and let you suffer. Please. It would be good experience for me.”

He barked out a chuckle. “You are one crazy chick.”

“Yeah, you said that already. Come on.” She put her shoulder under his arm to help him stumble to the car.

Once she had him in, she drove quickly to her aunt’s house. Not so quickly that she’d get pulled over. That would defeat the purpose of his not wanting the police involved. But they got there fast enough.

She got him inside and laid him down on the sofa. She tried to recall the triage process from the little she’d learned about it. “What hurts?”

“Everything,” he grumbled.

“Your head?”

He nodded.

By the time she was done listing body parts, she determined that he wasn’t exaggerating. Everything was hurting him. He’d been hit and kicked many times. She pulled up his shirt and inspected him, made him take his jeans off, and checked out his body.

There were no bruises that appeared to indicate internal bleeding. When she checked his pupils, they dilated as they should. No brain damage then. He wasn’t coughing blood, and he was able to urinate. Again, no blood there.

Once she was through assessing all she knew to assess, she determined that he had no serious injuries. She got out the Tylenol and several ice packs, along with a box of bandages and some bacitracin to clean his cuts.

He lay still as she worked. He didn’t flinch when she cleaned his cuts. He took the pills without question. He didn’t complain when she wrapped bandages around his wounds.

She plugged in her phone to charge. There was a possibility that he might take a turn for the worse. Even if she had the house phone to use now, she wanted to have her phone on her at all times.

“I hope every patient is as easy as you,” she said, chuckling.

“Told you it wasn’t that bad.” His head dropped back and he was asleep.

Sleep was good. He needed to rest. She did make a note of the time so that she could make sure he woke and didn’t have a concussion.

Maya covered him with a blanket and went into her bedroom to get some sleep. As she pulled up the covers, she tried to erase the image of her dead father and this man lying on the ground.

When the EMTs arrived at her parent’s crash, she had watched in awe as they went to work. It was a flurry of activity and phrases shouted that she didn’t understand then. Now she knew what it all meant. She knew everything they had done to try to save her parents. Seeing that, and experiencing the staff at the hospital afterward, was what made her go into nursing in the first place. She wanted to be a lifesaver, too. She wanted to help people. And tonight, she had.