“Jessica, it’s you!” she says, her face breaking into a wan smile. She only met me yesterday, but she treats me like an old friend.

“Francesca,” I correct. Yesterday, I took her to Nuclear Medicine for her appointment, for which she was an hour late, and it turned out that she had to reschedule for today. She asked me if I would be here to show her the way again and I couldn’t find it in myself to say no, even though it meant showing up an hour early.

“I just get so nervous, you know? I was up all night last night, I couldn’t sleep at all, and I’m too nervous to eat. But you’ll help me, won’t you?” she says to me, plaintively, as we start to walk down the hallway, pushing ourselves against the gray-striped wall (always gray for Guggenheim M.C. Level) so that a stretcher can pass by.

I offer to take some of her bags. She is carrying five or six shopping bags packed with food and what I think are some sort of religious texts, and they bulge out around her like satellites, forming a corona around her waist.

I take her down the hallway to Nuclear Medicine; she continues talking all the way, telling me over and over again how nervous she is. From what I can gather, she needs some sort of bone scan with something radioactive injected into her system first so that the doctors can watch it decompose. In her position, I’d be frightened out of my wits, but I don’t tell her that; I’m afraid I might make things worse.

When we finally go through the double doors to the Nuclear Medicine Department, she immediately transfers her attention from me to the receptionist.

“What are you going to inject into me? Is it going to hurt? Isn’t that stuff poisonous? Who’s going to do it? Is it a doctor? Is it going to hurt? Are you sure that stuff isn’t poisonous? What is that stuff exactly? Is a doctor going to do it?”

The T.V. is playing some sort of soap opera and there are a few people seated in chairs near it, pretending to pay attention. The chairs are lilac like the walls, a sickly, sticky color that looks to me like the smell of too much perfume, and they are bolted together in a long row. I sit in one and arrange her bags and she sits down next to me.

“I’m so afraid,” she confides, and although I’m all of sixteen and a spastic sixteen at that, and she must be at least fifty, I feel like the elder.

“I can’t stand this; it’s really going to hurt,” she continues, her face pinched with anxiety that I instinctively want to remedy.

“I’m sure it won’t be so bad; it won’t hurt too much,” I tell her impulsively.

When I realize what I’ve said, I want to grab my words by their tails, hunt them down letter by errant letter and stuff them back inside my mouth. I swore I’d never use those words, no matter what the circumstance; I’ve just never understood them, I’ve even thought them cruel. The lie inherent within them has always seemed to me to preclude their use with a straight face. They’re very accidental words, it appears, spilling out like water out of a tub when you leave the tap running for too long.

I look at this woman, a forlorn island in an ocean of shopping bags, and I begin to see myself; my own face is echoed in the set of her lips, tight and quavering, and in her soft, desperate eyes, in her bravado and aggressive interrogation.

My I.D. badge is still shiny and new, but the acrid stench of hospital has woven itself into my clothing past any chance of removal, drawing me into its folds until I am a small and subtle part of the great organism, and people turn to me for direction.