Heal Me

Chapter Sixteen

My monitor stared back at me, basically asking how dimwitted I was to be so undecided. It wanted to know how long it would have to wait. Account name, it asked of me. Password? Are you entering the world or not?

Not.

At least, not right now. If I was going to recant my earlier words to Smith about how we couldn't be friends, it would be when I was sober and less willing to spill my entire life. I decided to leave my monitor on as a night light and went to brush the taste of sugared-rum from my mouth. I found a set of silk pajamas to remind me of my pedigree and slipped between a set of two thousand thread count sheets. Pure bliss. And I might as well enjoy it, was my final thought of the evening.

At three o'clock, I heard the front door open. Hyper-awareness must have been to blame, because I normally sleep right through Sarah returning home. With my eyelids scraping over swollen capillaries and my head feeling dull and foggy, I trudged to the kitchen where she was pouring milk into a coffee cup and setting it inside the microwave.

"Do you think you could be just a little louder?" I asked on a note of irritation, because despite having had three entire hours of sleep, I still felt the effects of my earlier buzz. Warm, itchy, irritable... Though that last was probably more of a personality defect, therefore permanent. I reached into a poorly stocked refrigerator and procured a bottle of Gatorade.

It's a little known fact that electrolytes and vitamin C can stave off a hangover.

"Oh, sorry," she grumbled, reaching for a bottle of honey that Cat had so nicely left upside down. She uncapped it and held it sideways, waiting for her milk to warm up in what Cat calls our 'Cancer Conductor'.

I noticed little floaters in the milk and weighed the damages of informing her. By doing so, Sarah would be spared a few hours in the bathroom which might be construed as niceness on my part. Then again, telling her would mean getting to ruin the rest of her morning, and let's face it. Sarah had kismet against her in a bad way.

"You know the milk's gone sour, right?" I asked, taking a pull from my own unspoiled drink.

"How could it be sour already?" She checked the label and frowned. "It's only a day passed the expiration."

"And that date is just a suggestion?"

"It's supposed to give you a little leeway."

"It's chunky."

She sighed. The microwave beeped.

"Try the almond stuff – Cat swears it's awesome," I told her after taking a seat at the little lonely table nobody ever occupies. I can't even remember why I furnished this place when all we use is the couch and the TV. Even hobos have that much. "It's full of protein or amino acids."

Or rainbow extract or magical leprechaun piss. Who knows.

Sarah went through the motions of dumping her old milk and refilling the mug with something less lumpy. She added honey and put it in the microwave. Then she rattled on and on about how work was busier than usual, how she made such and such for tips, and how Pearl finally got pregnant again, so she won't have to strip when the welfare kicks back in.

"Do I even know Pearl?" I asked. Translation: Why are you telling me this shit?

Apparently, answering my question didn't top her list of priorities which at the moment were stirring her milk with a fork and recounting seven other non-issues at her job. The conversation only got weirder until the moment Sarah, standing directly over her milk, suddenly stopped talking mid sentence. At first I thought maybe she'd had a seizure, but then I saw bright red staining the surface of her milk. A crimson dot mingling with the creamy froth, like food coloring added to the petal of a white rose.