Me, Me & You

Chapter 4

One does not wake up in a hospital; the hospital wakes you up. Even before the morning reveille, patients milled about, pacing up and down the dormitory, their bare feet smacked against the linoleum. They shifted in their beds, coughed, sneezed, brushed against linens, and whispered to one another. All subtle, yet the noises woke me every day.

I usually rolled over in the bed and pulled the cotton sheet over my eyes until one of the nurses pressed on my shoulder, asking me if I were awake. Back at home, my dad always left for the quarry earlier than I even got up for school, so I never had a parent wake me for anything. Heat from the pads of the nurse's fingers pressed into my shoulder and made me uncomfortable.

I groaned and shifted under her touch until she stepped away and unpeeled myself from the bed. As I aggressively rubbed my eyes, the nurse glanced at my activity schedule, which was written with others' schedules on a communal whiteboard.

"Looks like you have painting today. Did you want to take a shower first?"

"Pee first," I grumbled and shuffled over to the bathroom before she could talk to me again.

I'd lost track of how many days I'd been here. Five days? Seven days? Long enough to have developed a routine.

I took a slash, and while I washed my hands, I checked out my face in the mirror. Yep. Still ugly. My hair stuck up in multiple directions, making me every barber's nightmare. Every single one commented on the number of cowlicks I had and the swirl on the base of my neck, which one dubbed Hurricane Archie. My smooth baby face still looked like that of a tween. I hated it. I wanted to spit on it but my mouth was too dry.

Tilting my head to the side, I lapped up water from the faucet, collecting as much as I could in my mouth, and sprayed it at the mirror. As I watched the water drip off the edge of the glass, I had to admit that didn't make me feel any better.

For morning ablutions, I ran some water through my hair in an attempt to slick back the untamable locks and splashed my face to get the remaining grit out of my eyes. I was in the hospital and ill: I didn't have to look good—pretty sure depression is a pass.

Then I thought about Luna. Should I at least try to not look...well, crazy? Would she keep away from me if I looked like a teenage hobo? We'd only met a couple days ago. I gaze deep into my reflection's eyes.

"Nah." I turned from the mirror and left for breakfast.

The oatmeal dripped off my plastic spoon and back into the bowl. Usually Luna beat me to our usual place in the cafeteria, but today was a first. I scanned the cafeteria for a flash of silver from a wheelchair, but the only one belonged to an elderly patient. I raked my memory for anything Luna might have said about arriving late. Anxiety rose in my chest—what if she left the hospital? Was I alone again?

The cacophony of in-patients diminished as they finished breakfast and slipped to the common rooms. With a mechanical rattle, the kitchen crew closed the metal shutters and packed in their equipment. I poked at my oatmeal to find it had coagulated like jelly in the bowl. Luna still hadn't shown up. I tossed my tray and left without eating a bite.

Feeling listless, I checked the rec room. A group of adults were playing a game of pingpong and were really getting into the match. In another corner, two guys fought over the television remote. A nurse frantically tried to placate the angrier of the two but was too short to reach the clicker, which the winning man held high into the air.

A cheered erupted from the table tennis game and a white ball bounced off the floor by my feet and zoomed across the room while one of the players chased it. The noise was too much. I couldn't relax. And Luna wasn't here.