Sleeping Beauty

Chapter 1

America

I'm dead, but not the kind of dead you would think. I'm not six feet in the ground. No, no, no. The smell of dirt disgusts me. I am actually in a hospital room with stale paper sheets pulled up to the bottom of my chest and wires going into my arms. Most people would classify me as quite the depressing character. My brown hair wraps around my head like a halo and my closed eye lids hide the blue color that sits under them.

So yes, I am dead, but not technically. I am currently in what some refer to as a coma. It's not really being dead, it's just as close as you can get. I've been asleep for about four weeks now. Almost all of my cuts have healed and all of the bruises are gone. Not the mental ones of course.

Now, as you can guess, four weeks is a long time. I haven't moved for 28 days. My eyes haven't blinked, my mouth hasn't opened, and my legs haven't moved. 672 hours of doctors running tests and physical therapy which, as you can guess, is no fun.

Before all of this, I liked to live life on the edge, I guess. In my seventeen years of living, I've sky dived twice, jumped off four different cliffs into lakes and rivers multiple times, driven up to 98 m/h without being caught, and bungee jumped off a bridge in Europe. Surprisingly, that's not how I got here.

The only thing I remember is sitting in a car with Leah, Ryan, and Peter. We were just coming back from a party, maybe. Peter was driving. I was in the front and Leah and Ryan were snuggling in the back, asleep I think. Peter and I were talking about the history project that was due next week. The road we were driving on was thin and curvy. The house all of us had been at was kind of in the middle of nowhere. There were guardrails up in some places, but not everywhere. I remember specifically telling him to slow down, but he was worried about his parents wanting him to be home by 12 and it was 1:30. We started arguing. Then the car flew off the road and we were in free fall. It was probably only about 5 seconds, but it felt like forever. We were both looking at each other and I think I screamed, but then we hit the ground and I flew out of the car because I didn't have my seat belt on and I was covered in water for some reason.

Then I woke up here, at Springfield hospital. Well, I didn't really wake up. When I became conscious again, I was in this huge black room that had no walls and no doors and no way out. I screamed for I don't know how long, trying to get someone to hear me, but no one came. Eventually, I caught on. The doctors came and talked to each other like I wasn't even there and the nurses silently spoke to me, which was nice sometimes. It just got lonely, to the point where it was painful. My mom and dad used to come talk to me. I would feel the bed shift underneath me like one of them sat on the corner of it and then they would just tell me everything that was going on. How my soccer team was doing, how Easter went, they sang for me on my birthday. Then they just stopped coming. First my mom disappeared. My dad explained to me how it was just getting to hard for her. Then after a week, he disappeared, too. It's been two weeks and three days since they've been here.

Yesterday, a boy came and sang to me. He played guitar and had this amazing voice. I had a hard time picturing his face, but it was kind of sweet the way he sang to me. It cheered me up a bit. They were songs I had never heard  of, too. I wondered if he had written them or if I had just been asleep that long.

He told me his name was Shawn. I thought that was an old person name considering he sounded like a teenager, but I went with it.