Trapped in Forever

68 ~ Deformed Baby Birds

The doctor at the ER with strands of dirty blond hair that reached his shoulders that were clad in pale blue scrubs that smelled of laundry detergent and a bit like metal, somehow, and a pair of glasses that were speckled with dandruff diagnosed me with malnutrition after a few hours of waiting on one of the uncomfortable cots with thick sheets encasing the mattress in the emergency room and a brief examination. He told me that I just passed out because I was exhausted, probably hot, and the fight triggered the “spell”, as he put it, and then he said that he wanted to keep me overnight anyway and give me a new dieting plan in the morning. I just nodded as he spoke, catching only a few words as he spoke and turning my gaze away from him and focusing on his stethoscope that was wrapped around the back of his shoulders like a towel. He had remarked during the examination, when he had me take off Orion’s hoodie and place it into a plastic bag and saw my waistline peeking through the gap between the hem of my shirt and my jeans that I was “pretty thin” and asked me if I was eating three meals a day, and I told that I was. It wasn’t a total lie. Sometimes, I did. It was just digesting those three meals that I didn’t always do.

Veronica had ridden in the ambulance with me, her manicured fingers grasping onto the ball of my shoulder as we rode, her nails occasionally digging faintly into my skin through the layers of fabric I was wearing whenever we hit a bump or made a sharp turn, and I heard her sporadically telling me that it was going to be okay, that I was going to be okay, and I just nodded once to let her know that I was listening, or that I wasn’t dead, but I kept thinking about how the sirens were silent, only the whirring of the air passing the bulky ambulance, various car horns in the background, and the tires crunching on the pavement were ringing in my ears. I thought of Orion as one of the paramedics took my pulse again, his eyes trained on the face of his watch as he counted the beats, and I remembered that he was standing outside of the ambulance when they slammed the doors. His face was somewhat distorted in my eyes as I blinked, taking a few moments to realize that the parted lips and tousled blond hair and CLAWS T-shirt belonged to him, but as I squinted, lifting my head from the surface of the gurney, I could see that his eyes were wide, hazel pooling into the whites of his eyes, and his chest was heaving with heavy breaths, as if he was now the one who couldn’t breathe, and then they slammed the ambulance doors and all I could see through the windows was random members of the crowd who squinted at the flashing lights of the ambulance and a police officer, who was there to interview Evan Dillinger about the attack.

Me, attacking him. Not him, attacking them.

A few hours after they had admitted me into a joint hospital room with greenish brown walls and two large beds with remotes laid over the edges of the neatly made beds, the mattress bent and the top half was pressed against the wall, and a window on the left side of the room with blinds composed of what felt like plastic rectangles that shielded me from the depressing view of the handicapped section of the hospital parking lot, and after I convinced Veronica to go home, I persuaded the nurse to let me change out the paper-like gown that the hospital had given me and back into my old clothes. I had shed the gown from my shoulder and dropped it to the ground, the fabric bunching and grazing against my ankles, and I had opened the plastic bed that I had placed on the foot of my bed, reaching for Orion’s hoodie, the scent of icing sugar calming and exciting me at the same time when the door opened behind me, and I heard my name, muffled by the hiss of a gasp.

I held the hoodie to my bare chest, using it to conceal my breasts as I turned around in direction of the doorway where my mother stood with my father behind her, and I could see Mikayla’s shoulder beside him as well, the rest of her body shielded by the wall, but my eyes soon fell back to my mother after a moment of taking in my father’s slackened expression, his mouth ajar and his eyes blinking, as if he couldn’t process what he had seen, and Mikayla trying to lean over him to see what was the cause of his stunned features, and I saw that my mother had a hand pressed to her lips, her eyes wide and her pupils large, swallowing her brown irises in a circular pit of darkness, and as I stared at her eyes, I noticed that they were beginning to brim with tears. “Amanda,” she murmured around her fingers, her blood red manicure gleaming underneath the flickering of the fluorescent lighting that made the greenish brown walls even more sickly, and a tear slid from her eye, rolling over her lower lashes and down her cheek, and it reminded me of Debbie Beatle, standing in that bathroom, telling me it was her fault. “You’re so . . . you’re—” she stopped, her voice choked and thin, crackling as she spoke to me, and I looked away from her, grasped the hoodie tighter to my chest. I wished them away. I wished their stunned gazes and shedding tears away. I could feel their eyes analyzing my body, lingering over my collarbones and my shoulders, my breastbone, my wrists, the exposed skin of my stomach that the hoodie didn’t conceal, and I wanted to run into the bathroom and lock the door, allowing it to separate us.