Rumors

Chapter Two

I sat quietly in my hospital bed, staring at the ceiling. It was hushed in the hospital, contrary to what one would expect. There were no long, droning beeps of flatlines or doctors scrambling to rehabilitate coding patients. Mostly just deep coughs and grunts. And that damn tapping. Someone had been tapping their foot on the blue and white checkered floor for the past ten minutes. We were all nervous waiting for the results.

"Would you knock it off?" I grumbled, my voice barely above a whisper. My throat was raw and my vision was slightly blurry because of all the pain meds they had me jacked on.

"Well, I think I deserve a little more respect having just saved your life." A familiar voice announced as the tapping stopped. Turning my head, I saw the blond sitting in a small green chair in the corner of the room, looking at me smirking. Next to him, my mother and little sister sat quietly on an old couch.

"That was two days ago, Patrick." I reminded him. Two days ago I'd been hit by a car. Patrick and Rob had watched the whole thing from inside the Quik Shoppe, and, according to Patrick, he'd run outside and called 9-1-1 while Rob stayed inside ("Because he's just that much of a dick"). A day after that, I went into surgery because I had a broken arm, collarbone and a collapsed lung among other injuries. In the surgery, they found that there was something wrong with my spine, something I couldn't quite remember, or didn't quite want to remember, then determining that I was paralyzed. Right now they are running tests to figure out if its temporary, fixable or permanent. 'Permanent' was the big scary word of the day.

My mother smiled at his comment and reached forward to grab my hand.

"Are you feeling okay, sweetie?" She asked softly, and I nodded.

"As okay as you can feel while you are waiting to hear whether you are paralyzed or not." I told her, and she frowned disapprovingly. I gave her a lopsided sympathetic smile.

"Sorry." I apologized, and she rolled her eyes. There was a meek knock on the door, and we all looked up to see a man with dark hair and a long, white coat over the ugliest muted yellow scrubs you'd ever see standing in the doorway. In his hand, he held a clipboard. A clipboard that would change my life forever, a clipboard that had the power to make or break my life.

The doctor pressed his thin lips together and glanced down at the clipboard.

"Mr. Oliver, I'm so sorry." He sympathized. "You scans show that you are paralyzed from the waist down. We can put you through physical therapy, but there is little hope of you gaining any movement."

My mother sucked in a breath and squeezed my hand tighter, so much so that it hurt but I didn't care. I hardly even noticed it. My vision was going blurry, a collage of worries and anxieties forming in my head. I struggled to contain it, but tears began slipping from my eyes. Embarrassed, I wiped them away quickly.

"I'm sorry." My mother said, rushing out of the room. She didn't want me to see her cry. She was supposed to be strong, to be brave. She couldn't show any signs of her weakness.

Patrick approached my bed and looked down at me.

"It's okay to cry," He told me. "You don't have to hide your emotions because you're supposed to be a man."

"That's not why I'm trying to hide my emotions." I whispered, looking out the doorway where I could hear my mother's faint sobs. Patrick glanced out the doorway too, and then looked back at me.

"You don't have to be strong right now. Your mother doesn't need you to be strong right now. You're not supposed to be strong right now." Patrick told me. "I understand that you feel like if you don't hold your family together they may fall apart, but trust me they won't. This won't break them." And just like that, he left.

I figured that would be the last I would see of him, he stuck around for the results and then would soon remember less and less about me until I was void of his mind completely. But to my surprise, he was back the next day.