Viaje

6. The hospital room

We stayed with him obviously. Our trip could wait, we'd just have to re-book the hotel for different nights. We went to see him everyday and everybody took turns. When the twins' sister arrived she was extremely tired and miserable. She went to Melbourne University so she got there quicker than their parents. I missed Tom like hell. We all did. Harriet and I called Jenny to tell her what had happened and she sounded so broken over the phone.
"Tell me you're joking", she said, sobbing.
"We're so sorry Jenny, we aren't sure how long he's going to be in here so if you're able to we would all love for you to come and stay with us" Hari said and she started crying even harder. Jenny was so precious and pure, I wished I could just give her a big hug.
Oscar and El went out with Jude and Noah to stock up on food at the shops down the road, I think there was a Coles which was super handy. When they got back Jude and Noah looked extremely pissed. "What's up your ass?" I asked Jude and he pulled me aside from the others. "Noah is cheating on Ella", he whispered with rage in his voice. "Haha very funny" I exclaimed. Noah loved Ella to bits, there's no way he'd every cheat on her. That would be ridiculous. "I saw it on his phone and then I took it from him and had a look, it's with that chick from school. Y'know? The one with the tanned skin and long dark hair? Quite Asian looking?"
Shit.
He was talking about Prair.

Jude and I took it upon ourselves to inform Harriet about Noah's asshole-ness and we told Ella. She was fucking pissed. She yelled at him in paragraphs at a time and the expression on his face was priceless. "I can't believe I trusted you and let you in. You acted so kind and pure like you had good intentions! I saw a fucking future with you, I was going to move to Sydney for you!!" And that's only some of what she said. The rest, I'll leave for now. After that Noah packed up his things and left. He literally just left and everyone was happy about it. Ella was miserable for days and those days turned into weeks quite quickly. At that point it had been 2 weeks since Tom was put in a coma and 1 week and 6 days since Noah left. We all tried to cheer Ella up in different ways. Cade offered her coffee every 5 minutes and eventually she slapped him and he stopped. Jude was just constantly hugging her which was a new thing for him as he usually would only hug someone if they made him. Harriet, Frankie, Ana and I gave her multiple motivational speeches about life and how she didn't need a guy, let alone Noah, for her to succeed and do what she wanted to do. Oscar was really good at distracting her and talking about hot guys on Instagram which worked quite well. El put on some K-Pop and Ella seemed to actually like it. James was mostly busy with Tom but when he heard what had happened he came out and sat with her. He let her fall asleep on his lap and when she woke up she curled up next to him and cried for a bit. He was a really good guy and cared about all of us so much. I hated that he had to go through this with his brother.

Ana and Cade went back to Coles to get some things that the others had forgotten while they were there. It didn't take them very long and while they were gone I overheard Harriet on the phone with someone. I couldn't help but listen in.
"... love to have you Ms Cain. We adore your work and would be honoured to have you represent us here in New York. It's far away but if..." The woman's voice slowly faded out as I began thinking. Harriet was moving to New York? She hadn't even talked to me about this. Harriet had been my best friend since year 7. Since we were 12 years old! Five years of my life I'd been inseparable from her and she was about to move all the way across the world. Ella came out and called me in to see Tom. The doctor gave us fantastic news, he said that we could be expecting Tom out of the coma very soon. We were ecstatic. James was practically bouncing off walls.

After a month and 4 days of being in a coma, Tom finally woke up.
James came running out into the waiting room at 2:46am to wake everyone up. Not long before that I'd kicked Jude in the stomach for snoring so loud, so he was already awake. We all got up and rushed to room 37 on the second floor. We ran up the stairs as the elevator was occupied. Of course we had to be quiet as well, we were in a hospital after all. When we got to the room Tom's eyes were barely open but the smile on his face grew larger and larger as we all piled out into the small hospital room. The whole room smelt like him. He had a particular smell and he'd been in that room so long that it'd absorbed it. It was calming, every time I walked in there it smelt like home. We all loved Tom so much as he'd been a part of our lives for so long.
I managed to give Tom a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek before I had to leave the room and answer a call. It was from Jenny, she was waiting outside the hospital and I couldn't wait for him to see his girlfriend who had driven all the way from Perth to come and see him. The look on his face was priceless.
She came in and cried as soon as she saw him, they kissed and she laid with him for a while. We decided to take her along with us when Tom was well enough to continue our trip to Melbourne.