Look Closer

And Even More Maze

The first thing that I noticed when I looked behind me to see where the maze had turned from dark gray to green was the trail of red where my palm had been dragging against the leaves. I yelped and jumped away from the leaves, afraid to look at my palm, but I had to. My palm had four huge thorns buried in it, and I saw red blood gushing from each of the points where I had been impaled by the thorns. I put one of my fingers from my left hand onto one of the thorns and pulled, wincing as I yanked out the thorn.

It's just like taking off a Band-Aid; it works better if you do it all at once instead of just slowly pulling it off. I took a deep breath and proceeded to take out all three of the other thorns that were invading my palm. The blood kept coming out of my palm, making me slightly dizzy from losing so much of it. I wish I wore two undershirts today.

I took off my undershirt and had to use that to wrap my palm up so that I could try to stop the bleeding. I bent down and winced, my legs screaming from the effort and re-tied the shirt that was around my ankle, as it had started to drag on the floor. The floor, to my disdain, had stayed the same color gray as the walls from the previous part of the maze. I was standing in the middle of this part of the maze, wearing nothing put a grey bra and some grey pants that I found in my room.

The static came back and I furrowed my brow, ready to yell at Julie for not telling me that there were thorns in the leaves. "Sorry about that Gabrielle," Micah's voice echoed through the speakers and I felt my whole face turn red and I tried to cover myself up a bit more, remembering the cameras everywhere. "I didn't know that there would be thorns in the bushes." His voice was warm and soothing, but there was a hint of worry in his voice as well, something that I had never heard there before.

"Uh, it's okay. My hand will heal. I'm just going to keep walking now." I could feel the heat flush throughout my cheeks as I kept moving forward, my arms uselessly hanging at my sides as I dragged my left foot through the maze. I kept moving straight and eventually hit a dead end.

I backtracked and saw a left turn that I had missed in my embarrassment and walked through there, crossing my arms over my chest to try and cover myself up again. I couldn't seem to calm myself down, and my cheeks were still warm and filled with pink. Some of the pink spilled over and creeped up my ears and down my neck, something that had never happened before, not even when I fell over and brought Alex and I toppling down to the ground.

Alex. Just thinking his name hurt, because I had realized that I totally forgot about him and hadn't thought of him since the time when Micah slept in my bed. I remembered all of the good times that I had spent with him and a hot, salty tear rolled down my cheek, landing on my left foot.

I remembered back to when we would pass notes back and forth in class until our science teacher caught us and read the notes of us professing our love for each other multiple times in front of the whole class. I remembered walking to the ice cream shop next to our school hand in hand and ordering a cone to share. I remembered kissing him in the rain until I was so cold that I had to get my mom to warm me up by placing her hands on me for five whole minutes before I would stop shivering.

My foot starting dragging even more as the guilt of the situation sunk in and I didn't even feel happy when I made it out of the maze and Micah gathered me in his arms, letting me cry on his shirt until I ran out of tears.

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I woke up in a white room, lying in a white bed that had the same texture of the hospital bed that I had to sleep in when I broke my arm and knew exactly what I was doing in a room like that. I looked down at my palm and saw a white bandage wrapped around it and my ankle had some kind of cast around it. There was a hover chair next the bed, the kind that people have to sit in if they break something.