Page 51 of The Friend Zone

I put on my headset. “What?” I hit the button to open the bay doors and turned on the lights.

“You’re a dick in a jar. Chris Rock? ‘Break in case of emergencies.’ She had an emergency, dude,” Shawn said. “If you start getting all stage-five clinger, she’s gonna replace your ass and get a new jar.”

Brandon laughed. “I think what he’s saying is to give her space.”

Javier opened up the laptop. “Normally I’d disagree with any and everything Shawn says, but as an old married guy with two grown daughters, I have to agree with him. It’s too soon. Let things happen naturally.”

Javier looked at the laptop and got the specifics for the call. Vague. Sick person, possibly unconscious.

More bullshit.

A toothache. Drunks. So, so many drunks. Hell, this call was probably a drunk. “Sick person” was the universal code for “no idea, but probably someone shit-faced.”

I closed the bay door behind us and fired up the sirens.

Shawn didn’t drop it. “Hey, maybe she’ll get a brown jar next. I got a jar she might like.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, turning onto Victory. “They make jars that small?”

The guys laughed and Javier talked to his screen. “I met the love of my life at nineteen. Never got to play the field. Kind of wish I did. Be single. Date around in the meantime.”

“I’ve dated around,” I mumbled.

Nobody was like Kristen. Witty, beautiful. Smart. She made me laugh. I loved talking to her, loved seeing what she thought about things. Over these last few weeks, she’d become my other best friend. And dating around wasn’t an option—it was a waste of time.

We pulled up to a tired apartment complex. When we got inside, I was right. More bullshit. A lady pretending to be unconscious after a fight with her husband. She wanted him to think he’d given her a heart attack. A nice little guilt trip.

These theatrics seemed to be a relatively common affliction here. I’d gone on five calls like this since I’d gotten to California. Someone pretending to have a medical emergency to get attention. A waste of time and resources.

We didn’t get calls like this in small-town South Dakota. We got a fraction of the calls they did here, but when we did get them, they were legitimate. People didn’t call 911 unless they needed to fucking call. They didn’t use us as props for their dramas. Small-town people had pride.

I couldn’t wait to tell Kristen about this shit. She loved hearing about my calls. It was the first thing we caught up on when I would come back over after a shift. She’d have something hilarious to say for sure. Last week I’d single-handedly wrangled three drunks into the back of an ambulance, and she’d called me the Idiot Whisperer.

On the way back to the engine with the crew, I spoke low to Brandon. “How do you stay so fucking patient with these people?”

Brandon shrugged. “It’s just the job. You do your best to educate them when you can.”

“Does it work?”

“No,” Shawn said with a laugh, and Javier chuckled behind him.

I shook my head. “You know, I considered the Forest Service before the move. I’m starting to think I should have looked more into that.”

Shawn snickered. “What? You wanna be a fucking gardener?”

“The Forest Service isn’t that bad,” Brandon said, loading his gear back into the engine.

“Not having to deal with people?” I said. “Being outside, in nature? What’s not to like?”

Shawn climbed into the engine. “You’re just fucking clearing brush. Smokey the Bear shit.”

“And that’s worse than this?” I asked. “We just revived a woman who wasn’t unconscious. At least I’d be actually accomplishing something.”

I climbed back into my seat and put on my headset. Javier had snagged someone from the complex about the trash in front of the fire hydrant, so we all sat and waited.

Fuck. What was I doing with my life? Did I really want to do this shit for the next twenty years? I didn’t know if I had the patience. Sure, I got to go on some cool calls sometimes. I delivered a baby last week, and I put out a car fire. But most of it was crap like this. And the probation made it worse.

I could have applied for the Forest Service. Maybe tried Northern California. Lived near wine country and the redwoods where I could have hunted and owned some land.