Sleeping Beauty

Chapter 2

Shawn

The hospital was pretty depressing. There was no music, color, or fun. Just conversation and the smell of coffee and peroxide. When I had volunteered this was not what I was expecting. I walked down the hallway with my guitar hanging on my back. I can not find room 526. I've gone up and down this hall at least five times. A man rushes towards me. "Excuse me-"

He rams into my shoulder and pushes past me.

I walk up to a nurse who has stopped in the middle of the hallway to mark something off of a paper. "Do you happen to know where room 526 is?"

She nods her head, but doesn't take her eyes off of the paper. "Start by getting on the right floor."

I feel my cheeks get hot as I realize what an idiot I must look like to her. I mumble a quick thanks before I rush down the hallway to the elevator. I press the number five and silently wait for the elevator to ding and the doors to open.

I pray that I chose the right direction when I turn right down the hallway and my prayers are answered when I see the number 526 in bold on a plaque next to a door. I quietly push the door open and remember what the nurse told me downstairs.

"Now, this patient is extra special. Only seventeen years old."

That's only a year older than me, I thought.

"She's actually a coma patient."

I remember taking a step back from her at the word coma. That's not exactly what I had been expecting. I had been expecting some old person or someone with cancer. Playing for someone who was unconscious and could probably not even hear me was not what I had in mind.

She continued. "The reason I'm assigning you to this patient is because studies have shown that coma patients can still hear in their traumatic state and that listening to music improves their spirits and physically helps them get better."

"Oh," I sighed.

Then she gave me the pass that said I was a volunteer and proved I was allowed in the hospital and told me to go to room 526.

When I opened the door all the way, the room was dark. The lights were dim and the windows were shut and covered by curtains. I laughed to myself. And I thought this hospital couldn't get more depressing.

Then I realized it doesn't even matter what this place looks like. She can't see it.

My eyes shifted over to the bed that almost blended into the room. There were white paper sheets on it and tubes and wires that ran from machines, and under all of that, was a girl.

She had long brown hair and this perfect face that I couldn't even imagine being real. Her eyes were closed and I was dying to know what color they were and for a second, I forgot she was even in a coma. I pictured me asking her out on a date and us having tons of fun and just being together because her lying there really just looked like she was asleep, but then I remembered where I was. I was in a hospital and she was in a coma that she might possibly never wake up from.

So I pulled up a chair from the opposite side of the room, and as ridiculous as it might seem, I started talking to her. "Hey." I paused for a second, almost expecting her to reply back, but of course she didn't, so I kept talking. "I'm Shawn." I paused again, giving her a chance to reply mentally, if she could seriously hear me. "And your name is..." I glanced around the room, trying to find her name somewhere. There was a notebook on the table next to her sitting next to the lit lamp. I picked it up and opened it to the front cover.

Property of: America Camer

Her name was so different. I had never heard of it before.It made me all the more interested in her. I gently set the notebook back where it was and set the guitar on my knee and wrapped my hands around the neck of it. Then I started strumming and it eventually evolved into one of the songs I had written. Of course, she sat there, emotionless for the whole thing, which was kind of a bummer. I sang her all my other songs and then started to tell her about the weather, which was kind of lame, not that I look back on it. "It's pretty sunny outside today. It's, like 70 degrees outside which is pretty cool, I guess." I scratch the back of my head. Then I stand up. "Well, I'm gonna go now." I turn to leave, but my foot wraps around the leg of the chair and I fall. Good thing she didn't see that. Then I walk out of the coma girl's room.