Sisters: Butterflies at Graduation [book two]

Chapter Six

Dedicated to @YerAlcoholicDad because of the gorgeous cover on the side! Thank you! I love it! (I will upload the second cover you made into the next chapter).

Chapter Six

I already know something's wrong.

As if coming home four months early hadn't prompted warning sirens, my sister isn't acting like herself. She grips me so hard I think I'm going to choke. She doesn't speak, squeal, jump up and down at the excitement of arriving home.

I look over her shoulder at Mom. She wears the same expression she wore when Michele first arrived home from the hospital. Standing to the side, his hands tucked into his pockets and still carrying a rucksack on his back, Chris has the same solemn expression.

"What's wrong?" I say, pulling away. "How long have you been home?"

"I'm just so glad to see you Haley," Michele says. Her eyebrows have knitted together, her lips part slightly, her eyes have watered with tears.

"Why are you guys home so early?" I say. I turn to Mom and Chris for some sort of explanation.

Dad enters the room, holding the landline phone at his waist. "I just rang Dr Cole. She has a cancelled appointment at two o'clock."

"W-what?" I turn to Michele. I'm about to nestle my fingers into her hair, to find the lump in the lower part of her scalp that wasn't there before the accident, but I resist. "Has something happened? Are you okay?"

Michele doesn't reply.

"Why has an appointment been booked with Dr Cole?" I say. Mom picks up her cardigan from the back of the sofa and brushes passed me.

"Come on, let's go," she says. "It takes at least half an hour to reach the centre."

Dad nods and the two of them walk out of the room, closely followed by Chis. "Why won't anyone tell me what's going on?" I protest. Michele clutches my hand and pulls me to the front door.

She says, "I'll explain on the way."

We bundle into the car. Mom drives. We haven't been to the centre in months.

"Did you hit your head?" I say, and Michele smiles even though I'm not joking, even a little bit.

"I've been getting these weird dreams," Michele says. "They're always of people I know, of holidays we've been on and us as kids and I'm always in the point of view of myself."

"What does that mean?"

Michele purses her lips and stares at the floor. "I had a dream about the time I won an award at the Science Fair," Michele says.

"When you experimented on the absence of light and water on different types of plants?" I say.

Michele's face lights up. "Exactly! I won a blue ribbon and I named the cactus I experiment on Snowy because the tips of its spikes were white and-"

"You gave him to me!" I finish.

"Yes!" Michele grins. "See? All I remember from before the dream was that I won an award at a Science Fair when I was in middle school - not because you told me but because of the ribbon I found in the memory box I gave you."

I don't recall ever telling Michele that story because it didn't seem significant. It was just a Science Fair, it was just a blue ribbon, it was only a cactus. I gulp but instead of the air travelling down my oesophagus, it goes straight to my head. "Is it coming back?" I dare to say. "Is your memory coming back?"

"I don't know."

I look out the window. "How many dreams have you had?"

"A few," Michele says. Her hands are shaking. Chris holds one of them. "I can't wait to see Dr Cole, I'm so excited."

All the hope I've kept bottled inside simmers to the surface. I'd imagined Michele for months telling me this precise news. I'd long discarded it as a mere delusion because I'd accepted that this was Michele, the Michele she is now.

A flood of excitement runs through me, to the tips of my fingers and to the tips of my toes.

I catch Mom's eye in the rear-view mirror. She isn't smiling. She sends me a look that I know is telling me to calm down, that the possibility of this meaning anything is next to none. But then again, it can't mean nothing. It has to mean something.

* *

I had been to the Neurotrauma Healthcare Centre only twice before. Once, when Michele was transferred here when she first woke up and again when she knew that Dr Cole was going to tell her that her memory was probably never going to come back. Now, eight months later, we arrive into the reception of the same institution, hoping for the opposite verdict.

The walls are white-washed, the only colour originating from the navy blazer tucked around the receptionist's shoulders and the yellow-tipped leaves of the potted plant in the corner. Healthy living magazines scatter the side-tables. None of them are new. I've read them all before.

Dr Cole greets us in the waiting area. She wears a white lab-coat, a pair of black glasses perch at the end of her nose and grey, shoulder-length hair frames her face. Michele explains the situation. Dr Cole listens, nods, frowning hard.

Then she cues for Michele to follow her. Chris asks where she's going and I say they're going to scan her brain and find out what's happening. We continue to wait and I take my time getting to know Chris because everything takes longer than it should.

I find out that he was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia. He has a younger brother called Troy and a younger sister called Zoe. I tell him that I would love to meet him, that I'm sorry that my stay in his home-town was short-lived. He tells me that it's not my fault, and I realise that I have a habit of apologising to people unnecessarily.

He proceeds to tell me about his love of the ocean. I find out that he's twenty-five. He has a degree in marine biology and quit his job at the local aquarium to accompany Michele around Australia. He pauses before he says that his grandfather had a stroke when he was seven, and that, for a while, it looked like his family wouldn't have a place to live after the divorce.

I now know that his favourite film is Die Hard, he hates seafood (oh, the irony) and is the only person I've encountered that has openly said that he doesn't get why my family doesn't like pineapple on pizza. Huh.

Almost an hour after Michele's departure, Dr Cole enters the room again and leads us to her office. It's a smaller, cramped version of the reception. She begins to spout locations of the brain and the intricacies of the human anatomy that sound so distant and alien to me it's almost like I'm sitting in Spanish class.

The long winded version takes long enough (with a picture of Michele's newly scanned brain up on a projector for us to gawk at and frown) but when Dr Cole cuts to the chase with a version that every day people understand (and by everyday people I mean people who don't have a PhD in neurology), I realise that she doesn't really know, either.

Everyone knew Michele was an anomaly from the beginning. She wasn't meant to survive the collision. She wasn't meant to make it to the hospital yet she did. She lay in a coma for weeks. And when she woke up, she shocked even the most experienced of doctors. She wasn't meant to survive but here she sits, eight months after the accident, with an even more astounding puzzle.

The dam in her brain is breaking. The wait is finally over.

I rest my elbow on the arm of the chair in Dr Cole's office, tears sliding down my face and the corners of my lips upturned into the tiniest of smiles.

Dr Cole doesn't know what's going to happen, how long it'll last but that's okay. It's happening and that's what matters. We leave the centre no better informed but my head's in the clouds.

It was what I'd been hoping for eight months ago. It's like finding a dollar in a pocket of a pair of jeans I haven't worn in a while. But my sister is the pair of jeans, and the dollar is worth every memory she lost in the accident.

Hello everyone! Unfortunately this is going to be the last update for a little while because of exams. I know, it sucks but afterwards I'm going to have the whole summer to write!

If you have any banners/covers/artwork then please inbox me or send them to my email: no_hullabaloo@hotmail.co.uk because I love receiving them!