E. R.
“That’s not my pink underwear…” I tried to convince the giant cow that was slowly fading away as I awoke. “Caroline…?” I asked. For once, my mind was completely blank. Well, there was nothing to think about, except “What the heck am I doing here?” when you were in a room with metallic walls covered in cables and terrifying looking utensils and, somehow, you felt you were moving. I remember coming here after my bike accident, when I was 7. I didn’t feel as delicate as I looked or had to be to have to be placed here, though I was coated in scrapes the way fried dough was coated in powdered sugar. An ambulance. I remembered Ms. Mackadem calling an ambulance on her cell phone and yelling directions to them quickly. “Hurry,” She had almost screamed as I felt liquid warmth slowly covering my body like bath-water, soaking through my clothes right onto my skin. “She has a gash on her head that’s flooding out with more blood than the Atlantic has water!” She’s surely exaggerating, I thought as another covering of the comforting warmth washed over me again.
I closed my eyes, only to have them fly open again in surprise. The siren had stopped and my cot dropped to the ground, wheeled by two serious looking doctors who started rolling my cot towards the hospital. We flashed past the waiting room that smelled strongly of hand sanitizer and rubber gloves. I almost gagged at the revolting smell inside of the emergency room. What I had described before, plus throw-up, plus blood.
I ended up getting stitches and casts on the whole left side of my body by the two doctors that had brought me in and as soon as they were done operating they left the room to treat other patients. I figured out that the liquid warmth had been blood and it was no exaggeration when Ms. Mackadem had said it was gushing.
Thoughts finally made their way into my head and unexpectedly flowed out of my mouth as smoothly as a memorized speech. “ It smells like crap in here, you’ve got to get some honey-almond scented air freshener in here or some thing!” I directed my questions and accusations toward a doctor hadn’t seen before, that was sitting in a shady corner, I couldn’t see even the outline of his figure. I saw the flicker of a pale chin jut up into the light, then back down into the dark repeatedly. He was nodding in agreement, a kind of nod that went with a hard, expressionless face, which I had no doubt he was wearing, even though I couldn’t see his features at all, in that dark shady corner. “You don’t want the patients to die puking their guts out, because you people don’t have a sense of smell, do you?” I paused, waiting for a reply, and when I didn’t get one I asked, hesitantly “Would you… step into the light?”
I saw pink lips shape themselves into a smile at my question as he revealed all 5 foot 6 himself, making me stare in shock as he gave me another, flawless, breathtaking smile. He was, no doubt, laughing internally at my flabbergasted expression as I looked over his well-muscled body. Looking at his face with just a slight trace of baby fat in it, realizing he just couldn’t be older than 12, for the sake of my sanity, I mean, I’m talking about a drool-worthy guy, here. If he was older than 12, then he’d definitely be out of my league, then, I had an epiphany gawking at his muscular figure again, realizing he was already out of my league with the body of an Olympic athlete.
What was a boy of his age doing in this busy hospital replacing my empty water bottle with a new, full, one and placing a dozen “Get Well Soon!” balloons on the cart beside my cot? I was intelligent enough to know that you couldn’t get a job until your 16, at least, in the U. S. A. legally. This boy, though having left childhood behind, was definitely not of age.
He was stupendously handsome, but far from a Twilight character. He playfully flipped his chin-length dark brown hair as his cherry-blossom colored lips curved up in a corner, forming a lopsided grin, he was smiling with both his eyes and his lips. Oh, his eyes. They were a dashing shade of green that looked like the color of the leaves on an oak tree, when the sun rose and tinted them with yellow.
I looked surprisingly morbid, compared to him. My T-shirt was the color of a starless night, I wore midnight-black jeans, then there was my pale skin, and my dull blue eyes that used to look bluer than the sky itself, now, were the color of a light-gray storm cloud. He, on the other hand, was wearing a gray YMCA summer camp shirt and khaki shorts. He had a white doctor’s coat draped over his shoulder. I felt terribly Goth, even sitting 6 feet away from him, as I blew a lock of hair so dark brown it looked black out of my eyes. His cheerful mood and outfit didn’t rub off on me, I was still in shock, and he could probably see that by my dropped jaw.
I quickly fixed my posture, straitening my back and closing my jaw completely shut, so that not even a whispers-worth of air entered or escaped my clasped lips. I made my eyes go blank of any expression, tying to put on a poker face. What guy would like a girl who stares at him all day? This is how it would be, you’re a girl on a diet that can’t resist cheating on it and he is a huge hunk of 7-layer chocolate cake with coconut frosting. Yeah, that yummy.