Floating On Air

X. Stories

X. Stories

 

“You are the most troublesome person I’ve ever met, you know that? No, don’t tilt your head up. Lean down.”

He took my chin in between his thumb and index finger, and forced my head down. “My mum always said to tilt my head up!” I protested, though it probably sounded more like an old lady’s garbled response.

Austin rolled his eyes. “No, you’ll swallow blood that way, though it wouldn’t really make a difference since you’re bleeding inside your mouth too, apparently.”

Desperately attempting to tilt my head back once more, I replied, “No, you’re wrong.” I dug through the tissue box, reaching for nothing but air and oxygen, and groaned. “More tissues, please.” The tissue I currently clutched to my nose was absolutely drenched with blood.

“Crap,” he swore. “Don’t have anymore. Do you get nosebleeds often?”

“Yeah.”

“You can walk, right?”

“I’m not a cripple.”

“Well, you sure look like one,” he grumbled as he attempted to drag me down to my dorm room. It was a pretty stupid action, since he, himself, could barely apply pressure onto his left leg without hurting. Just as I leaned against my door, it opened, and I found myself crashing down onto the floor for what seemed like the twentieth time tonight.

“Oh my god!” Allison squeaked. “What happened to you?”

Our room was littered with tubes of paint, used aprons and cloths, unfinished canvasses of work and just paint. She held thick paintbrush in her hand, which was covered in all sorts of different colours. Our dorm had been an artist’s den for the past two weeks, as Allison struggled to come up with the perfect idea for her major body of work for the HSC.

Unfortunately, none of these artworks really painted a vivid image for me. They looked like meaningless blobs of nothing, but I knew that art was a long and tedious process – one that I would never be able understand very well.

Allison wasted no time to scramble across my bed, leaving imprinted stains of red and blue paint onto my bed sheets, and into the living room, to grab two icepacks, a first aid kit and a box of tissues.

“Get her to the bathroom,” Austin ordered.

She glanced down at her hands, which were wet from paint. “Uh… why can’t you do that?”

He sighed, impatiently, and seemed to effortlessly lift me up and bring me to sit down on the bathroom stool. Just when I thought the flow of blood had stopped, I sneezed. And it wasn’t one of those cute, quiet sneezes that most girls seemed to have. Instead, it was one of those ear-shattering sneezes. Not only this, I couldn't seem to manage to bring my hands up to cover my mouth and nose fast enough.

“Ugh, gross,” Austin said, wiping the blood off his face. “Cover your mouth.”

Allison removed the tissues from my grip, discarding them into the trashcan with a grimace. “How much blood do you have?”

“Not much left, I can tell you that.”

Gingerly, Austin placed an icepack on the bridge of my nose, where I could feel the bruise starting to form. “Hold onto this.”

Allison’s mother was a nurse, so I wasn't all that surprised that she knew what to do in situations like these. Austin, however, I had no clue, but he seemed to know a lot, too. After she’d washed her hands for a good few minutes, Allison returned with an antiseptic cream. I slapped her face away as she leaned forward to apply it to my busted lip. “Don’t touch my mouth,” I said.