Entry #516352, added on 06-20-07 @ 6:14 pm EDT
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| Chapter Eight | Entry #516352 |
"So, how'd it go with your mom?"
My body stiffens at the sound of Wren's voice in my ear. I know that he's waited for this moment, when Morgan in front of me in line is paying for her food, to speak to me. I turn slightly in his direction and speak low. "She's ok. She just doesn't get it, but that's a good thing."
"Does she know?" he asks, and when I follow his eyes back to Morgan, her eyes are narrowed in confusion.
"I'll get a table," she tells me loudly, as if her voice will radiate just the right tone to make it obvious to Wren that he is unwelcome.
"Ok," I squeak. I don't know why I've agreed to this arrangement where Wren and I don't associate when Morgan is around. I guess it was just easy at the time.
Morgan stomps off and I turn my whole body to Wren, ignoring the line that has formed behind him. "No," I say sternly. "She doesn't know. She can't. She'll think I'm nuts."
He meets my eyes fiercely. "Why do let her judge us that way?" he demands, though his tone is gentle. "Why do you let her judge you? Her best friend?"
"Sweetie?" The white-haired lady behind the register calls to me. "You want to hurry it up? People are waiting."
I take one last look at Wren and step up, reaching into my pocket for money.
But before I can fish out a sufficient amount, Wren is reaching past me with a five. "For both of us," he tells the woman. This is more than enough for his soda and chips and my salad.
She nods and gives him plenty of quarters worth of change.
"Thank you," I say, stepping forward far enough to let the next student in line pay for their food, but nor far enough to allow us to be spotted by Morgan.
"When do you see the doctor again?" Wren asks.
I have to crane my neck to look him in the eye. "Today, after school." I drop my gaze to eye-level, bringing it to Wren's chest. I want to laugh at his shirt, a camo tee that says 'Ha, now you can't see me!' , but my stomach is too busy tying itself in knots.
"I'm a little afraid," I say quietly.
"I'd think you were crazy if you weren't."
I look up into his blue eye and once again force myself not to uncover the other. "Thank you for lunch," I say instead and turn away and walk off.
"Ok, do you want me to pretend that didn't happen?"
I gingerly sit down across from Morgan and begin unwrapping my plastic fork. "Pretend what didn't happen?" I ask, faking oblivion.
She puts her hand on mine, crushing my hand and fork under her cluthes. "Seriously, Beth. That isn't cool."
"What isn't cool?" I demand, ripping my hand out from under hers. I'm not going to let her see what's going on because I know, deep down, she couldn't handle it, just like my mother couldn't.
She narrows her eyes, but pulls her hand away from my space. "Fine," she grunts.
I ignore her steady gaze on me as I silently dig into my salad.
I didn't get to see Dr. Holland before my orders were given to me. I'd stepped into his office and was immediately given a slip of paper by the nurse at the counter.
Mesquite Diagnostic
1786 N. Galloway
Mesquite, TX 75149
"What's this?" I'd asked.
"Dr. Holland asked me to send you there for your MRI this afternoon."
I'd shaken my head at her. "I'm not having an MRI, just some head x-rays."
"Change of plans. Your mother was called today. She came by to sign all the necissary consent forms for you."
I'd taken a few steps back and sighed, "Ok." It was her money.
That brings me to where I am now- in a tiny changing room, stripping down, and stepping into a hideous, blue polka-dotted hospital gown.
My new doctor's name- yes, I know, another doctor- is Dr. Landree. He seemed safe enough, but, like Dr. Holland, he gave me the creeps. He had gray eyes and high cheek bones.
I tie the gown as tight as I can in the back and walk into the room that I was directed to upon first meeting Dr. Landree.
"You ready?" he asks from the middle of the room, next to, what looks to me to be a huge metal tube.
"Sure," I squeak. I had been nervous enough coming in, seeing how empty the place was, compared to Dr. Holland's office. I had seen surprised with this, and I hated surprises. They made my palms sweat. And turst me, nerves were bad. I get butterflies in my stomach and suddenly Texas is prone to earthquakes.
And this, this giant machine, does not do well for my nerves.
This will tell us if the damage to your brain has effected anything else, Dr. Landree had told me.
At the moment, here in this room, with this stranger, I'm not sure if I'm scared or nervous. I'm sure the citizens outside could tell me.
I take one look at the machine in the center of the room and decide that, although I've never been claustriphobic in the past, I will be after today.
"I'm going to need you to lie here." Dr. Landree's voice jolts meout of my trance and I step forward.
I climb up onto the table but don't move from a sitting position.
Dr. Landree looks at me in anticipation, his eyebrows to the ceiling.
"Oh!" I exclaim and hesitantly lay back.
"I'm just going to give you some medication to help you relax."
My pulse jumps when he says this. "I don't need any medication. I can stay still," I tell him, all arterial evidence to the contrary.
"Dr. Holland said you were a little jumpy."
"I'm not jumpy!" I say, more offended than anything.
He nods, obviously not taking my words to heart. "It's just a little valium," he says gently. "It'll just numb you a little so that you don't freak out."
I speculate for a minute then agree.
He reaches to a tray near me for the seringe and a cotton swab. Clean and inject, and as Dr. Landree walks out of the room, I can already feel it beginning to wear on my nerves. His face reappears in the dark behind the glass in front of me.
I'd had a valium shot before in the hospital. I know it doesn't happen this fast. Within seconds my whole body is tingling.
I'm starting to get really nervous now. And I start to get that feeling, as anyone would when they are half-naked, drugged, and about to be stuffed in a tube, that something is wrong. I can feel it in my blood that something bad is about to happen.
And before the thought has even finished passing through my brain, I hear Dr. Holland's voice. The table I'm on has just begun to slide into the machine when he says it.
"You should have listened to them," he tells me through the intercom.
I know in a second who he's talking about. Dr. Reynolds. Dr. Gray. The men who knocked on my door. I try to squirm, try to move, try to scream, anything, but nothing happens. My arms and legs sit there while I will them to move.
"You know," Dr. Holland is saying. "They probably won't kill you at first. They need your brain alive and active for the first series of tests."
The lights around me come on and I can't close my eyes against them. My eyes burn and I feel a tear slide out of the corner of my eye. I know it is a reaction to the light, but I also know it's from pure fear.
I'm going to die. This is it. This is the end.
"They'd keep you in a tube for a few months, keeping your body alive. You won't feel anything. You'll be numb."
Why is he doing this? Who would do this to a person?
I feel a joint in my arm move with my struggles and shed a tear of relief.
I'll be out soon, I know it. I won't die here.
"Yes, you'll be pretty much braindead when you get out, but that's not so bad, Bethany. It's better than this."
The lights go off and blink on one at a time, from left to right.
What are they waiting for? Why don't they kill me?
I sense my hands move. They're reaching toward the lights. I can't feel them, but I can see them, in slow motion, moving up, centimeter at a time.
"This for you, Bethany. Just give up and let us-"
Dr. Holland's voice cuts off and my hand drop to my sides. I can see the light at my feet, but from here it seems miles away.
"Beth."
I want to burst into tears when I hear the voice on the other end.
"Wren!" I want to scream out. "Save me!" But I know he already has.
The table begins to move and my feet soon stick out the bottom of the machine.
But when my head emerges, it's not Wren who is looking over me. A man with skin the color of coffee looks down at me. His pupils are the first thinf I notice. They are so dark, while the white surrounding is so bright.
I try to scream. It's the first thing I think to do, but it's just a loud humming coming from the bottom of my throat.
The man's hands go under me and he lifts me from the table. My head is falling back and I watch lights pass my vision as I feel us move through hallways and rooms.
I try to move my body. I can slowly swing my legs. I can lift my head so that it's parallel with the rest of my stiff body. But before I can experiment further, I'm being placed on something soft in a dark, cold room. I think I must have hallucinated Wren's voice. This is obviously the next step in their plan. Now they're going to turn me into a vegetable.
But then Wren's face is hovering over mine and I can feel the smile in my face, but I know the muscles aren't moving.
"Hey," he whispers. "Are you ok?"
I try to nod. I can feel the effort all the was to my toes, but it won't happen.
"Can you talk? Can you move?"
No.
But as I think it, I can see my hand moving up tpward his face.
He doesn't take his eyes- or eye- from mine as my hand touches his face. And this, this softness and warmth, is the first thing I can feel from my fingertips to my spinal chord. He nods, taking the gesture as the thank you it is, and lifts me up in his arms.
We're barely out of the room before my eyelids becoms to heavy for my face, now that I'm safe.
My eyes open slowly and my mind doesn't process the sight before me, which is mothing more than a patch of navy blue wall. I turn over under the blanket that covers me and I can feel that I'm still in the polka-dotted hospital gown. My mind rushes back to the last thing I remember- being numb in a cold, dark room. But then I remember Wren's face.
And then I see it, sitting a few feet away in his computer chair, staring at the TV that I can hear in the back of my mind.
"Hey," I say horasley, my vocal chords still adjusting.
He turns his face towards mine and he doesn't seem to comprehend anything either. But then the side of his mouth quirks up and he says, "Welcome back."
I bite my lip and listen closer to the TV.
"The weather went haywire this afternoon in Mesquite. We had a massive thunderstorm and even a 2 on the richter scale today. Many Mesquite residents ran for shelter, having never encountered anything of the sort in the Dallas area."
When Wren hears the rain against the window, he shuts off the TV and back turns to me.
"I'm so sorry," I sob.
Wren moves over to sit next to me on the bed. "It's not your fault. You were scared."
"I could've killed someone," I choke. I bury my hands so I won't have to face what I've done.
"But you didn't," he says flatly. "Please don't do this to yourself. I thought you were dead."
I look up and see that his eyes are sad. "Did you know I was in trouble because of the weather?"
He nods.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see a dark ifgure walk into the room. I glance over and recognize the man who took me from the MRI.
Wren looks, too. "That's Sebastian," he tells me. "He's an old friend from my last town."
"Hi," I say halfheartedly.
"I called him to help me," Wren says when Sebastian doesn't answer me. "He was there when my mother died. He knows everything."
I nod and analyze Sebastian once again, this time more than his face. He's twice Wren's size and has the build of a body-builder. He looks older than us, but his face is so perfect and flawless that it's hard for me to tell. He just watches me and Wren on the bed.
"Your clothes are on the nightstand," Wren tells me. "I didn't think you'd want either of us changing your clothes for you."
I nod, then glance around for a clock. "What time is it?"
"Late," Wren answers shortly. "Your mom is gonna be furious."
I nod again.
Wren waits for me to change then escorts me out the door.
"We should call the police," I say to Wren once we are en route to my house.
"They won't listen," he answers. "We've tried."
"What did you do to them?" I ask, slightly afraid, given his past solutions to such problems.
"We just knocked them out." He touches my arm to stop me and I look up at him. "They'll come back, Bethany." He drops his gaze and shakes his head. "I wish this weren't happening to you."
I bend down and get in his line of vision. "It's going to be ok," I say.
He shakes his head, but I put out my hand. "Just listen. Let's use this for us. If I'm ever in trouble, you'll know. You'll see it. Just keep a weary on the sky. Yeah, today was pretty bad," I state. "But this can't go on forever. One of us has to give up. And I only have a year."
"You don't know that," Wren interupts.
"It doesn't matter. If they come after me, we run. But it has to end one way or another." I turn and walk away, leaving him to catch up.
"Ok," he says. "But you have to believe that I'm not just going to let this happen to you. I'm trying. We both are."
"I know," I chirp, not glancing at him. "And I appreciate that."
When my mother opens the door, seething once again, I push by her without a second glance and race up to my room to watch Wren walk home. |
© Copyright 2007 GryffindorGurl (UN: magicfreak11 at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
GryffindorGurl has granted Writing.Com, its affiliates and its syndicates non-exclusive rights to display this work.
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