Should I Stay?

Chapter 7

They just moved me out of the recovery room into the trauma intensive-care unit, or ICU.

It's a room with about a dozen beds and a lot of nurses, who constantly bustle around. In the middle of the room are some more computers and a big desk, where another nurse sits.

I have two nurses who check in on me, along with the endless round of doctors. One is a man with blond hair and a mustache, who I don't like that much. And the other is a woman with a skin so black it's almost blue and she has a really sweet voice. She calls me ''sweetheart and love'' all the time and straightens the blankets around me sometimes.

There are so many tubes attached to me that I cannot count them all. No one, aside from the doctors and the nurses, has been in to see me.

A nurse speaks to Gran and Gramps in hushed sympathetic tones. She tells them that I am in "grave" condition. I'm not entirely sure what that means -grave. On TV, patients are always critical, or stable. Grave sounds bad. Grave is where you go when things don't work out the way you want I think.

''I wish there was something we could do,'' Gran says. ''I feel so useless right now. We're just waiting.''

''I'll see if I can get you in to see her for a little while,'' the nurse says. She has frizzy gray hair and a coffee stain on her blouse, her face is kind.

''She's still asleep from the surgery and she's on a ventilator to help her breathe while her body heals from the trauma. But it can be helpful, even for patients in a comatose state, to hear the voices from their loved ones.''

Gramps grunts in reply.

''Do you have any people you can call?'' the nurse asks. ''Relatives or close friends who might like to be here with you. I understand this must be quite a trial for you, but the stronger you can be, the more it will help Lucy.''

I startle when I hear the nurse say my name. It's a like reminder that it's me they're talking about. Gran tells her about various people who are on their way right now, aunts, uncles. I don't hear any mention of the one that I needed and wanted to see the most.

Harry.

I wish I knew where he was so I could try to go there.

I have no idea how he's going to find out about me. Gran and Gramps don't have his phone number. They don't carry cell phones, so he can't call them. The people who would normally give him that information, are in no position to do that.

It didn't start out so smoothly with Harry and me. I think I had this notion that love conquers all. And by the time he dropped me off from the Ed Sheeran concert, I think we were both aware that we were falling in love.

I thought that getting to this part was the challenge. In books and movies, the stories always end when the two people finally have their romantic kiss. The happily-ever-after part.

It didn't quite work for us that way.

It turned out that coming from such far corners of the social universe had its downsides.

We continued to see each beside the music wing and school, but these interactions stayed platonic, as if neither one of us wanted to mess with a good thing. But whenever we met at other places in the school -when we sat together in the cafeteria or studied together- something was off. We were uncomfortable. One of us would say something and the other would start to say something else at the same time.

''You go,'' I'd say.

''No, you go,'' Harry would say.

The politeness was so painful and really awkward.