Chapter 9
"Lisa, vampires are make-believe, like elves, gremlins, and Eskimos.”—Dan Castellaneta as Homer Simpson, The SImpsons
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I hated hearing those eleven dreaded words: "Who wants to drop this off at the nurse for me?" At the moment, my English teacher, Mrs. Hornsby, was saying them, drawing them out like they were Manna from Heaven. She held up a yellow sheet of paper, her elegant scrawl written all over it in dark ink. When all the hands stayed down, she scowled, running an olive-toned hand through her dark hair. "Come on now. Let's not all raise our hands at once."
She glanced to the left. All the hands remained down.
She glanced to the right. A few of my fellow classmates studied their nails. Most refused to meet her gaze, instead opting to stare at their brand-name shoes. One was even sprawled out across his desk, his eyes closed and his mouth wide open, drowning in a puddle of his own saliva.
Me? I just sunk lower in my seat, mentally chanting, Please don't pick me!
Her head turned to the center and her eyes passed over all of us. By that point, I was so low in my seat that I was practically under the desk, the noise of my inner voice grower louder and more frantic: Please please please don't pick me!
"Amy Green, how about you take this note to the nurse's office for me."
"Yes ma'am," I murmured. Shoot me now.
"When you get there, give this to the nurse and tell her to reply to me ASAP. I trust that you won't read the note on your walk over there."
"Yes ma'am."
I grabbed the note from her hands and exited the classroom.
When I was younger, people would often wonder why I got so upset about these sorts of things, and my response usually came out as an incoherent jumble of words. But honestly, they just brought back awful memories. Hospitals are filled with as many bad memories as they are filled with good ones. For every baby born, fourteen people die.
Like my dad.
He died in the ER while across the building a woman was giving birth to a healthy baby girl.
I didn't like hospitals. Or anything associated with them.
The nurse's office was situated by the front office down a long hall decorated with pictures of the staff and various awards, and I steeled myself to approach it. The door to her office was slightly ajar, but there was a poster on it that read "STOP!" and a Post-It note with the words "Knock before you enter" taped below it. I knocked lightly; no answer. Suddenly I was faced with quite a conundrum: I could a) turn back, b) hand the note to one of the secretaries, or c) man up and walk in. Deep down, I knew the first two weren’t real options to begin with. With a quick intake of breath, I slowly pushed the door open.
Voices, snappish and sharp, drifted back from the room, freezing me to my place like a naughty child with her hand caught in the cookie jar. The tarnished brass handle burned under my hand as my heart pound in my chest. I should have run when I had the chance. But upon closer inspection, I discovered that the voices weren’t aimed at me at all. I strained my ears, finally making out the faint intonations on the other side of the door. One was high pitched, as sweet as honey, with a thick Southern drawl. The other voice, obviously male, was as smooth and rich as melted chocolate but noticeably vexed. For a second I wondered whether I should give them their space before I came to a conclusion: nah.
I peered around the door into the room, gripping the paper in my suddenly sweaty hands.
My heart did a back-flip as I took in the scene spread out before me. Steffan Lyon was on the bed, holding an asthma inhaler to his lips as the nurse scribbled something on a sheet of paper.
YOU ARE READING
River of Dreams
Teen Fiction"Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange." Amy Green is a small town girl, starting her freshman year all alone in a big prestigious high school. Then suddenly, when the humble...
