Hidden Heirs and Fallen Crowns (Complete)

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Unfortunately, that ‘no time’ turned into several weeks. My body was taking an agonizingly long time to recover, and, more unfortunate to say, I found that a few weeks turn into a whole month.

“Zed? When can I go back home?” I asked him for the millionth time.

At first, he tried asking the doctors, but got fed up with the usual answers of ‘We still need to find the cause of Miss Levee’s incidents.’ Now, he just says ‘soon’ or ‘ask your Mum’ or ‘I don’t know!’ 

Jasmine and Zed were forced to go back to school a few days after I had woken up. I can’t say they were exactly celebrating, but there was nothing they could do about it. They came back every day after school without fail, though.

Mum tried to stay as long as she could but she, too, had to go back sometimes to take care of the zoo at home. She kept on catching Will with his hand in the cookie jar, or watching Bumba’s horror films. Bumba … well, I’m not going to go there too deeply. She gets on Mum’s nerves about twice a day, and is sent to her room twice as much as that. She got excluded from her school once already since I had gone into a coma. I think it was because of something she bought into school. I hoped it wasn’t illegal.

And … me. I’d say I wasn’t not doing too badly, except for the fact that I was going through a nervous breakdown at having to stay in the hospital for so long. It’s not all that bad (please ignore mum’s previous descriptions of it- she’s had bad experiences of hospitals.) I just can’t cope with having nothing to do all day. If you’re going to count staring out of the window as having something to do, then I’d be busy all day. I really didn’t count that as an occupation. To cheer me up, Mum gives me some money and I go and buy myself chocolates and stuff, but that only happened after I was ‘unthawed’ enough to walk, which was three days ago.

Before that, like I said, I pretty much didn’t have anything to do. 

Jasmine and Zed tried to keep my spirits up, too. They’re really fantastic. I don’t think I  would have been to come back for three weeks solid, but I guess what kept them coming was the new parts of my body that they found functioning  again every day.

The day after they had started school, I could just about twitch my little finger. That had got them really excited, as you might have imagine.  Zed even started singing. A nurse had to come and tell him to be quite and not disturb the other patients, but even that didn’t work. I had to tell him that it was only my little finger and that it was nothing to get excited about. We had a whole debate about if it was something worth getting excited and he won.

I hobbled down the corridor to the little sweet shop with Jasmine. Zed would meet us a bit later because he had lots of things to do, but I didn’t mind. When we got to the little window with the doughnuts and muffins and éclairs, I sighed.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Don’t you have enough money with you?”

“It’s not that,” I told her. “It’s just … every time I see the éclairs, it reminds me of the day that I came to your house with Zed. It seems like so long ago.”

She tried to cheer me up. “Don’t worry! As soon as you’re well enough to leave, we’ll start those Karate classes again. OK?”

I smiled and nodded but, inside, I thought to myself, ‘When will they let me leave the hospital? What if they don’t let me leave at all!?”

“Of course they will!” exclaimed Jasmine. I looked at her, puzzled.

“How did you hear me? I was thinking!” I said.