Authors: Megan Squires
Trav’s shoulders pull up and he situates
himself in his seat. “Sit, Ran. We’re here.”
I blink my eyes. “Where?”
Ran slumps down next to me and wraps his hands
around the metal frame of the stretcher I’m draped across. He stabilizes it as
we rock over a speed bump and coast into park. “We’re at the hospital.”
I expel a hot sigh of relief. “Oh good,” I
smile, my head spinning like I’ve just completed a dozen pirouettes en pointe.
“That’s exactly where I was headed.”
CHAPTER TWO
I hate hospital gowns. They’re terrifying.
They’re always faded, so I suppose they wash them, but I’m pretty certain the
one I’m wearing is at least a decade old because I can’t even tell what the
original pattern was to begin with. Looks something like flowers, but it could
be cats for all I know, it’s so old and worn.
And they don’t have backs to them. Mortifying
problem number two. Worse than that, with my luck, the last person to wear mine
probably
died
in it. Hospital gowns
completely suck.
But I guess my clothes sort of do at the
moment, too. My skinny jeans had to be cut off of me, though I don’t remember
much about that. I don’t remember much of anything, really. Especially not how
I got the six-inch-long, three-inch-deep laceration in my upper right quad.
When I came to after the accident, I’d assumed the warm liquid on my forehead
was the result of a cut from all the glass that coated me like enormous shards
of glitter. I’d never suspected it was from the steady seeping of my leg wound
dangling above me, releasing copious amounts of blood; the steady flow of a sink
faucet twisted on.
I think I blacked out—well, I know I
did—because all I remember is arriving at the hospital and saying
something to Ran about how this was all really convenient since this
destination was in my plans for the evening anyway. Then everything receded
completely, sucking away any knowledge of what was going on around me as I lay
there, totally unconscious, while the rest of the world continued on its merry
way.
Now I’m in a sterile, stark-white room. Not the
ER anymore, so they must have transported me at some point. I glance to the end
table next to the bed, hoping to find my cell phone, but it’s not on it.
There’s a large pink cup with a bendy straw in it and I’m tempted to take a
drink, but who knows if it’s even mine. They reuse these stupid gowns. I
wouldn’t put it past them to reuse their beverage cups, too.
“Miss Carson?” A slight woman with salt and
pepper gray hair peeks through the crack in the door. “Are you awake?”
“Yeah,” I murmur. I think I am at least.
She skirts around the bed and comes up to my
side, fastening a blood pressure cuff around my bicep. She squeezes several
times and the device hisses as she watches the hands spin on the wall nearby.
“And how are you feeling today?”
“Today?” I glance toward the window and see the
rays of light slicing through the metal blinds. They create horizontal lines
across the parallel wall, like some type of striped, illuminated wallpaper. “As
in, I was admitted yesterday and you want to know how I’m feeling
today
.”
She gives me a sideways glance. “Yes, Miss
Carson. How are you
today
?”
I huff a gust of air that lifts my hair from my
face. “I’m fine today.”
“And your leg,” she continues, recording
something in the binder that’s hooked over the foot of my bed. “Is it causing
you any problems?”
I lift the crisp sheet off my lap and glance
toward my thigh, but it’s bandaged in several coils of flesh-colored medical
dressings. “It’s fine, too. Err—I think it is. I can’t really feel it.”
“Miss Carson, you were in a serious car
accident yesterday. How is your pain level on a scale of one to ten?”
I shake my head. “One to ten?”
“Yes—one being a paper cut, ten being
your leg cut off.”
“Holy crap! Talk about your extremes,” I blurt,
drawing my chin back into my neck. The nurse doesn’t blink. “It appears like I
still have all of my limbs, so I’d say a five. What’s that compared to?”
“To a deep laceration. And since that’s what
you have on your leg, I’d say that’s appropriate.”
“Well good then. I’m glad I match up.”
She shoots me a quick, humoring smile as she
continues writing in my records. “Is there anything I can get you for now, Miss
Carson?”
I push with my hands against the thin mattress
and scoot upward in the hospital bed, but the muscle in my right leg is
completely dead, and the act takes much more upper body strength than it
normally would. “Yes,” I reply, still trying to situate myself in the bed. She
comes to my side and grasps my arm to assist me. “Can you send my brother, Mike
Carson, in?”
Her grip tenses and her fingers dig slightly
into the flesh on my bicep, just enough to leave five little crescent marks on
my skin. “No one has spoken to you?” Her eyes are wide and her lips quiver,
though she tries to mask it. Talk about your terrible bedside manner.
“No, no one has spoken to me.” I give her a
stern look that she attempts to avoid by staring down at my arm like she’s
assessing something. “Spoken to me about what?”
“I’ll go find your father, Maggie.”
“I asked for my brother,” I clarify, but before
I have a chance to ask what is going on, she’s out the door, and I’m left in
the cold room alone, feeling numb, like I’m dangling upside-down all over
again.
***
“Maggie Girl.” He breathes into my hair and the
hot air should warm me, but chills my scalp all the way down to my toes
instead. “Don’t you dare do that to me again, do you understand?”
Do I understand? No, of course I don’t
understand. I still have absolutely no idea what is happening here, why I’m the
one in this hospital bed, and why no one seems to want to give me a straight
answer about Mikey.
“Dad,” I speak, my voice soft not because I’m
trying to be quiet, but because it’s the only volume that comes out when I open
my mouth. Even if I tried to talk louder, I doubt I’d be successful.
“Seriously, what’s going on? Where’s Mikey?”
Dad purses his lips and his straight brow knits
together. I’ve seen this look on him before. It makes an appearance when he’s
searching for the right words to say—the perfect delivery for a speech
he’s already prepared. He had the same face nine years ago when he told us Mom
wasn’t coming home.
“Mikey is down the hall, Maggie.” He doesn’t
add anything to the statement, but the words weigh down on me like a stack of
heavy books, only I don’t know the information that’s held within their pages.
“He’s fine.”
“You’re a terrible liar.” I stare straight into
his gray eyes and the red veins that web through them indicate nothing about
this is fine. People don’t cry when things are fine. Forty-year-old men don’t hide
their tears behind clenched eyelids when everything is fine. “What the hell
happened yesterday, Dad? I got your text, and now both Mikey and I are laid up
in hospital beds. What’s going on?”
Dad
closes his eyes completely—an even worse sign than when he merely
tightened them—and I know I don’t want to hear the words he’s about to
say. Like when you’re a kid and you thrust your fingers in your ears and stick
out your tongue, trying to avoid the very real confrontation that is bound to
take place. I want to do that now. If I wasn’t so sore, I just might attempt
it.
“Maggie Girl,” he sighs. That’s another
indicator of bad things to come. He’s pulling out the childhood nicknames. Not
a good sign. “Mikey had an accident during the game yesterday.”
I recall the text. “Yeah, I know,” I say,
nodding. “A concussion. Stupid linebackers. And seriously, Mikey’s got to be
ready for them next time. That’s his fourth sack this season. He’s going lax on
us, Dad.”
Dad’s eyes well and his front teeth sink into
the flesh of his bottom lip. “Mags.” In one swoop, he draws me into his
shoulders and presses his lips to my forehead. I wrench back from the sudden
action, but feel the spill of his fresh tears across my cheek and my breathing
cuts off as the room spins around me.
“Oh no…no, no, no. Dad—please tell me
Mikey is okay.” My heart has catapulted into my throat; I can feel the beats
echoing loudly in my ears like the kick of a bass drum. “He’s not…he’s
not—”
“Oh goodness no, he’s not dead, Mags.” Dad
pulls back and breathes a relieving sigh, but the tears continue to run streaks
down his cheekbones, sliding across jaw without letting up. “But he didn’t have
a concussion like we thought.”
I shake my head. “No?”
“He blacked out.”
“Oh yeah? Well, tell him he’s not such hot stuff—I
blacked out too, you know. Multiple times. And I might have even told a random
guy he had a nice face. Tell Mikey he doesn’t get all the limelight,
mm-kay
?”
“Maggie.” Dad’s voice remains chillingly
monotone. The walls in the room feel much closer than they did moments ago.
“They’ve found a tumor, Mags.” His voice catches. “Mikey has a brain tumor.”
CHAPTER THREE
“Will you stop that?” He groans and chucks his
pillow at me. I catch it easily in my lap since I’m seated in a wheelchair, and
I lob it back at him with all my upper body strength, which honestly isn’t
much. The pillow hits him upside the skull—probably not the best choice
in landings based on the information we’ve just received.
“Stop what, dork?”
He folds the pillow behind his back and settles
in, his thick neck craning upward and his broad shoulders relaxing slightly. He
looks way too massive for the tiny hospital bed, like those circus clowns
crammed into tiny cars. “Stop looking at me like I have some kind of disease or
something.”
I cock my head to the side. “Well, you sorta
do. You know, cancer and all.”
“Shut up, stupid.” He groans again. “They’re
not even 100 percent sure it’s cancer. It could just be a tumor. A lot of times
that’s all it is.”
“It’s not a toomah,” I imitate, channeling my
best Arnold Schwarzenegger voice possible.
Mikey cocks a brow. “Kindergarten Cop?”
I nod, fingering the edge of the bed sheet in
front of me. There’s a loose thread that I wrap around my finger until it
breaks off and creates a threadlike ring around my index knuckle. “Yep, that
one’s a classic.”
“You realize that came out before we were born,
right?” Mike seals his eyelids shut. I don’t think he’s slept at all in the
last twenty-four hours. The purple bags hooked under his eyes clearly give that
away.
“That’s what makes it a classic. You can’t call
a movie a classic if it came out during your lifetime.”
“What about Titanic? That’s a classic and we
were around for that one.”
I lift up the Diet Coke can from the bedside
tray and take a swig. The fizz tickles my nose and I scrunch it up to bite back
the tingling sensation that gathers at the bridge of it. “Okay—I take
that back. Anything involving epic, historical disasters can be considered
classics.” I take another gulp of the soda and my eyes burn from the
carbonation. “So in that case, the footage from your game against Westmoore
last week counts, too.”
Mike laughs a deep, pained chuckle. “That
hurts, Sis, that hurts.” His hazel eyes stretch open, and then soften slightly.
“How’s your leg?” Mike’s voice embodies an uneasy tenor that I’ve never heard
out of him before. I don’t like it. And I don’t like that it sends shivers up
my spine.
“My leg is fine.” For all I know, the injury
could be the size of a splinter. I’ve yet to actually see—or
feel—the real damage. They have
me
so hopped up on drugs and
it
so
carefully wrapped that if it weren’t for the fact that I’m in a hospital
wearing this ridiculous, backless frock, I’d think my leg had just temporarily
fallen asleep.
“I wanna see it.”
I shake my head. “I have to keep it covered up
until they come around to change the bandages later. But I’ll take a pic with
my phone for you if you want.”
“You don’t have a phone anymore, Maggie.”
Damn. He’s right. Apparently, during the crash
my cell, previously perched delicately on my thigh, was sent through the
windshield and crushed into a million pieces under the tread of a passing semi.
Better it than me though, I suppose.
“Let me borrow yours. I’ll take a pic and you
can use it as your background wallpaper.”
“Gross.” Mikey crinkles his nose in disgust.
“Did you not get the memo that you’re supposed to be a girl?”
I roll my eyes at him, deliberately slow so he
can get the full effect of my annoyance. “I got the memo. There just were too
many instructions so I decided not to follow too closely.”
“At some point you’ll have to turn into a
woman, you know. Nineteen sounds like a good age, don’t you think?”
“I am a woman, Mikey. I’m just not a
girly-girl. But I’m not a dude, make no mistake of that.”