Taking His Dare

Chapter Eleven

Chapter 11

I remember the day after the hospital.

No one had talked (to me at least) after we had all gotten home, except for Jake asking if my anemia meant that we were part black, and my older brothers telling him to shut up. I just went straight to my room, but not without everyone giving me one of those hugs that felt like a sumo wrestler was sitting on top of you. We had dropped Rut off, and to say his parents were not pleased that my parents had “rushed THEIR SON to a filthy public STATE hospital because of their neglect towards MY health” was an understatement.

I didn’t know that some hospitals were private.

Anyway, as I was in my room, I looked at the hospital bracelet they had given me. Deidra Blue, it had read. They had gotten my name wrong.  My last name was spelled Bleu, not Blue.

I had rushed down the stairs to see my parents.  I had been so excited to tell them. They were sitting at the kitchen table, Mom with a mug of something and Dad with his head in his hands. I had run over to him and taken his hands off his face, and shoving my wrist with the bracelet there instead.

“Look! Look!” I had been so excited.

“What, sweetie?” My dad asked, studying the bracelet with slight interest. My mom leaned over to see what I was talking about. I showed them.

“Look! The name! My name! They spelled it wrong! They spelled it B-L-U-E instead of B-L-E-U!” I pointed to the letters as I spelled it.

“What about it, darling?” My mother said softly. I hadn’t understood why her or my father weren’t jumping for joy like I was at that moment. “It’s just a misspelling.”

“But it’s not just a misspelling! It means that they thought I was some other girl, some other girl with a last name spelled B-L-U-E! That means that I don’t really have sickle cell anemia; I’m okay! I’m…” As my mother’s face crumpled and tears started in her eyes, I trailed off and turned to my father. “Daddy, you think so, don’t you?” He turned his face away from me.

“Sweetie, go to bed. We’ll talk about this in the morning.” Mom whispered, but I was resilient and wasn’t giving up on my theory.

“But! But! You—This is—“ I hadn’t been able to get any words out, because that was when I had realized: it was only a misspelling. 

~~

The day after the disastrous date, Friday, I sat on my porch at 7:25 and waited for Tom, as I would for Rut. As I sat there, shivering my ass off, I thought about the day before, and everything that went down. It was kind of depressing, in a way, but at the same time, it wasn’t. I mean, in a way, I made progress with Tom. But, I also could have totally made myself look like an even bigger freak than I already had by the meltdown at the lake. I couldn’t help it, though. It really messed me up, I guess, when I almost drowned.