Finishing Crazy

Finishing Crazy (21)

The sterile white butcher paper underneath me makes loud crinkling noises as I sit on top of the uncomfortable hospital bed, shifting from side to side.

“Knock it off.” My mother tells me, frowning.

I stick my tounge out at her, just to lighten the mood.

The air hangs thick and heavy around us as we wait for the doctor to come back with good or bad news. We don’t know which one it is yet.

Well, not technically. But I’ve got a pretty good guess in mind.

Last night, my mother called the doctor for the umpteenth time, telling him that my side still aches, even with the stacks of pills I swallow every morning. He told her not to worry about it, but to take me down to his office so that he could examine the problem more closely. He also said that I should stop taking the medication.

My mother fidgets with a health magazine in the corner, pretending to be reading an article on diabetes. But I can tell she’s just faking it to make me calmer.

I go over to the jar of lollipops and let out a contended sigh when I see they have the caramel apple kind. Those are my favorite.

I pluck it out of the jar and stick it in my mouth, walking over to the other side of the room and opening up the drawer that is labeled ‘stickers’. It’s full of empty syringes and vials of clear serum. Shouldn’t that kind of stuff be locked? That stuff can be dangerous, can’t it?

I decide to try the next drawer over. The stickers are probably in there.

“Kyra!” My mother scolds, looking up from the magazine nervously. “What are you doing?”

“Eating a lollipop- they had my favorite kind.” I defend.

She shakes her head and points up to the pathetic excuse for a bed.

“Sit.” She tells me.

I do eventually obey, but only after I’ve snagged a box of crayons from the second drawer I opened. Opening the box and sitting down, I begin to draw a butterfly on the noisy butcher paper.

Just as I do, the door clicks open and Dr. Strider walks in.

“Kyra, I have some bad news.” He says, walking over to the corner and sitting on a very old-looking swivel chair. It lets out a small crack under the pressure.

I feel very much like the chair at this moment.

Cracking.

The silence after his remark extends into what feels like a thousand years. The air seems to grow even denser, and Dr. Strider looks between my mother and me cautiously, as if he is afraid of what we’ll do if he goes on.

“Do we really want to know?” My mother asks, sighing exasperatedly, “Because I don’t ever seem to like any of the words coming out of your mouth.”

I’m appalled at my mother’s boldness. She’s never acted like this before- or at least, not in a while.

Not since my dad died.

It was a rainy Saturday afternoon when we got the call. Nature almost seemed sympathetic to us, as it wept its own tears on the Earth, mingling with our own. Lola thought it was a joke at first. She kept on telling us that dad would walk through the door and yell “Gotcha!” any second. Karrie and I tried to tell her that we weren’t kidding, but it was hard for us to accept the fact too.

It was all so surreal, so unexpected that I just sat in my bedroom for hours, watching the ceiling fan above me spin around and around and around again, clutching the teddy bear my dad gave me when I was five. The truth didn’t sink in for quite a while, not until a week later.