24 Hours

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

                The impact left me in a daze. As I stood up, my feet wobbled and shook with a mighty force. I felt my knees begin to buckle as my shins could not support the weight of the rest of my leg for just that brief set of moments.

                There were voices. They were muffled, but they we voices. I could infer that my eyes were closed from the way the voices spoke, and their careless words that seemed only to confuse me slipped out of their mouths and into my ears.

                “Who is it?” I heard someone say. Their voice was quiet, and the responses they got came almost at once:

                “Well, that one girl looks a lot like Tiffany Petals.”

                “And the other one?”

                “I think it’s Margie.”

                “No, no, it’s Juniper. The psychotic chick from seventh grade.”

                I heard a bunch of blurred giggles, many of which emitted a feminine tone, despite the definite presence of several boys. Their conversations continued to move onward, and their words were that of which I could not process due to my sudden plummet into a state of limbo.

                I tried to sit up, but the effort was too much for my aching spine. All I could manage to do was let out a pained groan, then stumbled over onto my side with a lack of mind for the condition of my ribcage, which I figured – with no doubt – was going to bruise up in only an hour or so.

                There were several surprised gasps and over exaggerated inhales from the growing crowd swarmed around me and - what was her name – Tiffany. And Tiffany.

                I heard a louder moan come from beside me. It must have been Tiffany waking up, and I almost certain to the core that she did so with a great amount of effort. I imagined her attempting to sit up, much like myself, but unable to gather the strength to complete the laborious movement.

                I pictured this Tiffany to feel a throbbing pain – as I did – in the side of shaken head. It was easy to imagine her looking at her fingers with and trying to wobble them around. Once she’d made sure they were unbroken (or severely damaged, I supposed), she would lift the hand with caution to her head, displaying her ache to the viewers whom were gathered in a tight, crowded circle around us.

                But as far as I could tell, Tiffany did none of the sort. I heard nothing but a weak, discouraging thump that I assumed was the sound of her head falling back onto the floor, retreating from its efforts to lift itself up. The girl let out a second desperate moan, which I understood as plea for both assistance and pity from the audience. The kids around us did not respond; they simply gazed at us as if we were two hospital patients who had – out of nowhere – slipped into a devastating coma and were not likely to ever wake up.

                “Is she awake? Juniper?” A boy inquired. Out of the whispers that followed, my delicate, ringing ears managed only to send a select number of the messages it had picked up to the brain, where they were received through the ordinary, standard body procedures. Unfortunately, it was up to my scattered, rattled thoughts to interpret the words’ meaning(s).

                “Not sure,” my brain desperately tried to grasp, “I thought I heard her moan.”

                A girl with a low voice responded, “Yes, yes. Juniper’s definitely conscious; she’s flipped over on her side, see? In fact, I don’t think she was ever passed out in the first place.”