(Book 1)I Have Chemistry With My Tutor

Chapter 15 - Lift Me Up, Throw Me Down

                        Chapter 15 - Lift Me Up, Throw Me Down

        I inhaled sharply as pain and pressure gorged my throat.  A pounding, steady pressure was applied to my chest and I wheezed out salty, bitter liquid from my stomach, vomiting the contents to my side as a splitting headache tore me apart.  I panted painful breaths before the exhaustion and pain wore me out.  Everywhere it was bright, like I was in the middle of the sun. And it hurt.  My eyes hurt.  I closed them and succumbed to the soothing darkness.

        ~Two Days Later~

        Did I dream?  Did I dream on this last day, the last day I saw his face?  Did I lose all my grief for a fallen friend, ex-boyfriend?  Did I hide that grief away to strengthen another side of me?  Was I ever aware that one moment truly could change my life forever?  One moment repeated forever in time.

        His ghost stopping Hanako's car.

        His ghost passing through me on the way home, in a car.

        I sit in a car, traveling forever and going nowhere.  My ghost... had no car.  He traveled nowhere and appeared everywhere I was.

        He appeared to no other.  He plunged himself into my world, firmly believing I am his Sarai.  He slid onto the couch of Seamus' mind, and pushed Seamus off the couch, shrinking the couch to the size of a small chair so both of them could not fit.  And I... so enraptured in the ghost, Asmodeus, in those black eyes that brought me not fear, but curiosity...  I brought suffering to Seamus.  If I had never met Seamus, this ghost would have never...

Never burned Seamus' house down...

        I stared at Seamus' still body in the hospital, merely a room down from mine.  I was fine... I had slept for nearly two days and woke up to intense pain and the hard slam on the table of reality.  I was only recovering from nausea and a sore throat, and occasional throbbing headaches.  I was recovering from the bit of grief that didn't want to linger.  The grief for Richard...

        And yet that grief was stone dead.  It belonged to Lacey now, as if I'd passed over the gauntlet.  A cold, heartless thing to say, I would have told myself merely a week ago.  But a week changes a lot... Two weeks changed my entire world.

Now another four weeks would change my even more.

~Four Weeks Later~

        Here I am. Staring at Seamus' bandaged body.  His arms, face, and even legs are wrapped up.  The doctor, his private doctor, Ms. Mikavich had told me he had three broken bones, seven small shattered bones, and a torn ligament, added to the fact he almost drowned.  He had an emergency surgery while I had been asleep.  I awoke to him being in a coma...

And it was all my fault.

        The doctors weren't sure if he'd ever awake.  They said give him time to recover.  It might be any minute he'll wake.  Or it might be never.

        As for Lacey, she got out with barely a scratch and a bruise on her lip.  And a broken heart...

        As for me, I...

        I'm not sure if my heart is broken or if I really had drowned in that river. Every day that passed, I grew further away from who I was before the accident. Every day, I held Seamus' hand and kissed his knuckles, my lips brushing gently against the calloused, bandaged skin.

"Do you feel that, Seamus?" I whispered.

Breathing softly onto his knuckles I raised my head to look at him. He seemed to breathe much slower and steady in that hospital bed. For fourteen days, every day I wished for his palm to move against mine, to squeeze back even just a little bit. When he didn't, a death grip around my heart would tighten.

"Dr. Mikavich says maybe you can hear me while I talk..." I started my daily routine of telling him about my day. "I walked by the cemetery today. There were a lot of peonies and geraniums. A hummingbird stopped at a little red flower. I just watched... Yeah yeah, you'd scold me for skipping school to walk in a cemetery, but I just haven't felt like going to school lately... I try... I got a C+ in Chemistry," I laughed softly. "For that you'd be proud, huh? Ugh, it's awful. Ruining my perfect score... but I don't care. I just want you back here... so we can take a boring, dreadful walk in a stupid cemetery..."

...

After an hour or so, Dr. Mikavich walked in with her report sheet.

"Any progress today?" She asked.

I shook my head with a shaky exhale, wiping away the small tears at the corner of my eyes. "No. None. I'm gonna get some coffee. Want some?"

Dr. Mikavich sighed and scribbled a few notes down, checked off some things on a list before replying. "Yeah, mild roast, two creams and-"

"And three sugars. Got it." I stood up.

She looked at me with a curious smile. "I guess we've gotten well acquainted, Andrea."

I nodded. "Why wouldn't we? I practically live here now."

She nodded. "Yeah, you're right."

I went to fetch the coffee, my feet dragging sluggish across the smooth shiny floor.  The sound of the last drip of coffee plopping into the cup drew me back to the memory of rain...  The rainy day with Seamus and I drenched... where Ash tried to take over his body and harmed me in doing so.  But most of all I let myself be swept up in the memories of our intimate embrace.

It wasn't five minutes later I returned to the room and entered.  I stopped in my footsteps and stared into empty cerulean eyes.  Eyes that darted their gaze directly to me, as if having heard the door open and were curious.  I smiled widely, tears blurring my vision and so I blinked them away.  It took all my energy to not shoot off like a rocket in excitement.  All the sorrow building up the past month suddenly dripped... melted away... as a tide of relief washed over me.

The coffee vanished from my hands, probably blindly handed to the doctor as I knelt to the bedside.

"Seamus..." I barely stopped myself from shouting, all my emotion pouring out in that one word.

He didn't say a word back to me.  His eyes blankly stared back at me, as if he did not recognize me.  Suddenly I frowned, a terrible gut-wrenching thought surfaced.  This is not Seamus...?  Asmodeus?!  No...

"Andrea," I almost jumped at Dr. Mikavich's fingers on my shoulder, tender but firm.  I looked up at her.  "He cannot speak quite yet, but..." She handed me a note pad.  A few lead scribbles were on it.  For one, a huge fat letter 'A', and...

The three words that I never imagined I would hear, let alone see written on a piece of paper in 4-year-old scribble scrap.  It sent a spiritual brick spiraling inside of me til it slammed into my heart, stealing my breath away. 

"Who Am I?"

My hopes were crushed under the weight of myself.