Barking Up the Wrong Lead - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten

I woke up.  That seemed to be happening a lot more now—waking up, I mean.  But no matter how much sleep I got, I was somehow always tired.  Always.

Except this time it was different, mostly because I had no idea where I was.  I wasn’t in my bed or in the window next to my mother’s picture.  I wasn’t even in the training room, which was the last place I could remember being.  Instead, I was in a room I’d never seen before and in a bed with sheets that felt more like plastic than like blankets.

A small woman with big brown curls slipped in through the turquoise curtain that seperated me from whatever was on the other side.  “Oh good,” she whispered.  “You’re up.”

I couldn’t see her face in the dark, but I was a hundred percent sure that I didn’t know her.  I started to sit up, wanting to run, wondering what time it was.  Why didn’t I know what time it was?

The woman stopped me, pulling the blanket back up over my waist.  “I’m Doctor Alexandria Hughes.  You’re in the infirmary wing,” she said and immediately I started panicking, going through a mental checklist of which body parts hurt and which didn’t.  Oh god, was I dying?  “But don’t worry,” she continued quickly.  “You’ve experienced a mild head injury—nothing too traumatic, but you were out for a few hours.  We really like to monitor sleeping in that sort of situation.”

Sleeping.  Yeah, sleeping sounded like a good idea.  “Can I go back to bed?” I mumbled, too tired to form a sentence any more impressive than that.

Doctor Hughes smiled.  “Of course,” she said, combing through something on her clipboard.

And I was going to.  Really I was.  When I’m underneath a warm blanket, I can be out in five seconds flat.  But when I put my head back against my pillow and made myself comfortable (or, I mean, as comfortable as a girl can get in the infirmary wing), I saw that Doctor Hughes and I weren’t alone in that little room.

Three chairs.  Four people.  All right there in that room next to us.

I saw Matt first.  He was tucked up in the corner between the radiator and the wall.  He had a wrap around his ankle and I spotted a bag that had probably once been filled with ice, dripping onto the tile beside him.  Someone had thrown a scratchy blanket over his shoulders. 

It had probably been Grandpa Joe, I decided, since he had another one of those blankets covering his own legs, too.  It didn’t look like he could’ve been very comfortable, sitting slouched in that hard plastic chair like that, but he was sound asleep.  Hands in his pockets, legs outstretched and crossed.  Joe Solomon even looked cool when he slept, I thought.

Then again, anybody would look cool in comparison to Alice, whose messy lifestyle bled into the way she slept.  One of her arms was bent behind the back of her chair while the other hung out in the front.  Both of her legs were slung across Grandpa Joe’s lap as she snored, dribbles of drool alternating between landing on the chair and landing on the floor below.

“What’s the matter, Maggie?” Doctor Hughes asked.  “Headache?”

It took me a moment to answer.  I was speechless, but for all the right reasons.  “No,” I said.  “I just didn’t think there’d be so many people, is all.”

“You had more than that,” my doctor informed me.  “We had to limit it to family-only.”

 My eyes stayed fixed on Alice.  “Oh, she’s not…” I started to say, but then I didn’t dare finish, figuring that if I did, Alice would wake up right then and a headache would soon become my least impressive injury.