With Friends Like These... by Gillian Roberts Page B

woman said. “Yo, Ralphie, you can go in now,” she told the man with the rag on his head. “An’ don’t you bleed on my floor again!”
    He grinned and went through the swinging doors.
    “My good woman,” the elegant man in tails said. “Is it at all possible to speed this process along?”
    “Not really,” she said.
    A pale and bulky man who looked like a refrigerator with red hair was steered in by a small lump of a woman who spoke around him, in the general direction of the desk. “He’s hurt. He was with the guys, and you know how they fight when they have a little too much to drink, and—”
    The red-haired man tilted forward and smashed down onto his face.
    “That’s what I mean,” his little pilot said calmly.
    The woman behind the desk buzzed someone.
    The elegant man in tails turned to our group. “Now we all know that old joke. First prize: a week in Philadelphia. Second prize: two weeks in Philadelphia. Third prize: three weeks. But I ask you, what precisely did we win? The booby prize?”
    His cadaverous companion still sniffled about her impending end.
    The film student/critter consultant also looked concerned. “I’m getting vibes from my babies. They need me. I have to get back to Connecticut,” she said.
    “Babies?” The man in tails pronounced the word as if it were foul. “How many do you have?”
    “Dozens!” the young woman said, perking up. She was definitely the happiest person in the emergency room. “Not people babies,” she chortled. “Critters.”
    “Is that like varmints?” the receptionist asked.
    “Nonhuman companions. That’s what the language Nazis call them these days.” The sophisticate in the tuxedo raised an eyebrow.
    The girl in black blinked and wrinkled her forehead. “Critters,” she said in a small puzzled voice. “Doggies and kitties. I have this gift.”
    I didn’t want to hear what the man in tails would make of her telepathic talents. Luckily, Sybil Zacaharias once again erupted and averted doggy-shrink redux.
    “This whole business is completely and utterly ridiculous!” she said, quite loudly. “Disgusting, too. I’ll bet Lyle did this out of pure spite. Poisoned his own damn self and set it up to look like it was one of us. It would be just like him, especially now that I know he was losing his job.” She chuckled, a bit madly. “That’s what those stupid, saccharine invitations should have said: It’s my party and I’ll die if I want to.”
    Her son looked at her as if she were a mutant life-form.
    “Get it?” she asked.
    “No offense,” my mother said, “but that’s a bit…hardhearted, don’t you think?”
    I was still plodding through the form when a young Asian woman in a white jacket came out holding a clipboard. “I’m Dr. Lee,” she said. “And you are the…poisoned?” She looked at us, one by one. “What is it you’ve taken?”
    We shrugged.
    “Why do you think you were poisoned?”
    “Because a man at the party we were at said he was.”
    “Said?”
    “Then he died. Or something. He certainly got sick.”
    “And we ate the same food.”
    The emergency room doctor, or resident, took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, probably wishing for a nice, comprehensible knife fight or heart attack. “What, please, are your symptoms?” she eventually asked.
    Janine cut to the chase and begged for a stomach pump while the dancer and a grumbly male voice overlapped one another with dire signs and my mother dithered, saying she actually felt fine, and Sybil Zacharias said the words patently ridiculous at least twice.
    The doctor put up a hand. “One at a time!” She pointed at me. “What are your symptoms?”
    I shook my head. “I don’t have any.”
    She scowled. Then she asked each of us in turn the same question. Aside from boredom, hunger, and being pissed off, the worst we came up with was shortness of breath, dizziness, and nausea.
    “Those could all be symptoms of anxiety, which is understandable if a