On my fourth birthday I got to two new perspectives on life that will always be with me. January 18th, 2001 is the date I'm thinking about now, last night, the night before that, and every night in my future. It's always two different scenes in the same setting but with very different meanings.
The beige rooms in hospitals always remind me of orphans. They look almost like normal rooms with a tv and some comfy chairs and maybe even an abstract picture of a sailboat, but underneath you can feel that layer of pain and grief that the room as held within it's walls. That's why a room that was glowing pink stopped me in my tracks. A nurse had given me a dollar to get some food at the vending machine because the doctors needed to talk to mommy and daddy alone. But I didn't understand how because mommy and daddy had been sleeping off hours while their machines made funny beeping noises. But thoughts of my parents were swept from my mind when I saw a bit of pink glowing out of a crack in door C216. I walked towards it, mesmerized by the little bit of color when I'd been surrounded by beige and white for hours since Carol the babysitter had dropped me off because mommy and daddy needed to spend the night here. My four year old self had no idea that it could possibly be an intrusion of privacy walking into a hospital room. Especially, not when I saw the inside. Pink feathers were literally just thrown around the room, pink sheets were on the bed, a pink teddy bear sat in blue plastic sofa in the corner, a picture of dog wearing a pink tutu was hanging where a usual generic picture in neutral colors should be hanging, and the tv and metal bed structure had been outlined with pink gem stickers. I was in four year old heaven, and it took me a while to notice the frail girl with pale skin engulfed in the pink sheets. She just smiled at me when my gaze finally reached hers.
"Hi, I'm Molly, are you lost?" Even her voice sounded weak.
I was immediately shy because the girl was much older than me. Probably about twelve which meant she went to big kid school. I just shook my head no, to nervous to speak.
She smiled,"That's great I like new visitors."
Shyly I said, "You're room is pink," not realizing it was redundant to point out the obvious.
This only made her grin become wider,"Yeah this room needed some color. You can only look at beige for so long. Plus, pink is my favorite color."
I nodded my head up and down very quickly in agreement. Then I blurted out, "Where'd your hair go?"
Molly's smile never wavered,"The doctors took my hair away because they think I'm going to die."
This puzzled me, "Mommy said we should listen to our doctors so does that mean you have to die?" Daddy and Mommy's parents had all died, but I'd never met them so I didn't know what it did.
At this she started laughing,"What's your name, sweetheart?"
"Alice."
"Well, Alice, your mom is right and you should usually listen to doctors. But I know a secret."
"What?" I whispered, eager to be confided in by a big kid.
"Death is a choice. You can choose to let it take you or fight back. Eventually, death will always find you, but 'do not go gentle into that good night/rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light.'"
At that point the same nurse who had given me a dollar came bursting in the room and dragged me into the hallway, apologizing profusely to Molly.
Twenty minutes later the same nurse gave me a second revelation on life.
"Alice is it ok if I talk to you for a second?" Her tone was foreign to me and I didn't know if I had done something wrong or if she was going to send me away again. We'd been sitting outside of room D628, the nurse writing on a clipboard and me playing with a blonde haired Barbie doll. She had just come back out of the room where mommy and daddy were sleeping.
I nodded still trying to puzzle out what I'd done wrong.
"Alice your parents aren't going to be able to take care of you anymore."
"Why?" This was random. I just wanted to know when they would wake up so we could go home. Daddy had promised to read me a brand new book tonight about an elephant.
"Alice do you know what it means to die?"
I nodded my head yes, but only because I still thought she was acting very weird and wanted to get the conversation over with. I was tired and just wanted to be tucked in and missed good night.
"I'm very sorry to tell you Alice that today your parents have passed on. I just want you to know that they didn't leave you on purpose. Nobody has any choice in when they die, and it was a horrific accident that your parents passed so soon," she waited giving me a searching look, but I still didn't understand her, so instead I reached into my purple book bag and offered her my brunette Barbie doll.
Three days later I discovered the meaning to three new words. Funeral and why adults hate them, death and how it fills you with pain, and collapse and why it's so terrible when the building your parents work in does.
I was left with a photo album, a few selected possessions of mine, my father's, and my mother's, and two contradicting perspectives on life that I go in one hospital: Death is a choice that we can fight against and there is no battle between death and us. It just takes us in it's icy grip whenever it want and we can't help it.
It's funny what a four year old mind remembers. The number on a door, the conversation with a girl I haven't seen since, but not the name of the nurse who told me my parents had died.
Chapter 1
Being sixteen sucks. That's a very general statement, but one that most people will agree with until there old and forget what being sixteen is actually like and just want to be young again. However, it sucks worse when you are living with a nine year old kid who is intent on making life a living hell.
"Al-iccce!" I heard Cory scream from down the hall, stretching out my name. I grumbled and pulled the light blue comforter over my head to block out his voice. My cousin was possibly the most spoiled kid under the sun. He could rob a convenience store in broad daylight with a thousand people staring at him and my aunt would claim it wasn't him or he didn't mean to. Aunt Lorry isn't a terrible person, and she's been good to me since her brother, my father, passed away. But she feels unbelievably guilty for the fact that Cory's father ran away to Russia the moment he found out she was pregnant. My aunt feels like it was her fault Cory had a screw up for a father and therefore declares that anything Cory wants he can have.
He waltzed into my room with the most smug smile on his pale freckled face. His blond hair was defying all laws of gravity, and his super man pj's were now three inches above his ankles and showed his stomach. "We're out of your c-er-eal!" He sang.
"Go away Lorry just bought cereal yesterday."
"But I needed it and now you have no breakfast," the smile was still there.
I sat up,"What did you do you little brat?"
His smile stretched even more than should be possible. "Well... I needed some Cheerios for a school project and accidentally got some glue in the box."
I ran toward him as he dashed out of my room and slammed the door behind his scurrying feet. Great, now I would get to eat the sugary sweet cereals my aunt and cousin loved. Who wants to swallow sugar first thing in the morning?
There was a pair dark wash flare jeans on the floor that I pulled on and a dark green cami hung out of on of my dresser drawers. I completed the look with a sleeveless jean jacket. Then I pulled my dark brown hair back into a french braid down my back and applied a swoop of mascara to each eye. I then declared myself ready and stepped into a pair of blue sneakers and exited my room, headed for the downstairs kitchen.
I found my cousin sitting at the breakfast bar eating a cereal so chocolatey that even the milk had turned brown. He was now wearing a wrinkled blue t-shirt and faded old jean, but his hair continued to stick out in every which way. My aunt was behind him at the counter pouring a bowl of rainbow colored cereal. She was wearing her navy blue pant suit with a crisp white shirt. Her hair, pulled back in a bun, was the same color as her son's as we're her green eyes and pale complexion. I swept past both of them and made a face at the cupboard which contained five boxes of the sugariest cereal there were. I had nothing against sugar, but in the morning it just made me drowsy for the rest of the day. Choosing the least offending cereal, I sat down next to the Cory.
We ate in silence, knowing already that nobody in this house was a morning person. Once we finished, my aunt filled up the dishwasher while Cory prattled on about how this boy in his class thought he was actually faster than him, and I filled up my navy blue book bag and packed gym clothes into a plastic bag. My bus left a half hour before Cory's, and Aunt Lorry yelled out have a good day after me as the old screen door slammed shut.
Bus 6 pulled up at the end of the street and I ran to catch it while everyone else at my stopped piled in. I swung into the green plastic seat gasping for air after the sudden sprint had left me winded. Two stops later, Mickie, my best friend, got on. She asked me for help on the physics worksheet.
"Shoot!" I pulled out my own worksheet that was completely unmarked. Mickie spent the rest of the way making fun of me and assisting me as much as she could.
Home room was the same as always, with me ignoring all the kids I'd known all my life but managed to avoid talking to by blasting music from my ancient iPod. I made my way through trigonometry, Honors English, and Home Economics before my favorite class. Lunch. My problem with my schedule is that I have and almost photographic memory, and my friends are all smart but not in the crazy nerd classes I am. So the only time I see Mickie and our group of friends is during lunch and last period study hall. However, I was kind of out of it today and didn't do much talking. It was one of those days that I wanted to end before it even began. I barely made it through physics and American history before taking a nap in study hall.
Unfortunately, I slept a little past the bell and didn't hear my friends getting up to get on the buses. None of them tried to wake me up because if they did that then I would be unspeakably mad for days. I hate being waken up it just ticks me off, and I don't know why.
That's how I ended up walking the five miles back to my house. It wasn't like it was a dangerous walk home. We weren't out in the middle of the woods, but it wasn't exactly a city either. Plus, I could name almost every resident of almost every single house. As I was walking I noticed back ink on the inside of my left wrist. A gentle swirl had been drawn there in sharpie, and I silently cussed/smiled at the idea if my friends playing a prank while I was sleeping. We weren't wild and crazy, but my friends were most definitely the best people I knew.
As I kept walking down the road, the hem of my too long flare jeans dragging on the ground, I started to sense rather than see the presence of someone walking behind me. Partially turning my head, I caught a glimpse of a dark haired boy his head down and headphones in. What caught my attention was that he was about my age and I didn't recognize him. Oh well, stranger things have happened.
My house was only about a mile away, but my book bag was starting to put a lot of strain on my shoulders. I could see the headlines now, 'Girl Dies of Broken Back From Caring too Many Textbooks.' That would show the teachers that every single one of them shouldn't assign a crap load of homework all on the same day. I swear they sit down and say,"Let's see what we can do to make Alice's life miserable today."
All of a sudden I felt the light brush of a hand on my elbow and whipped around so fast that all I felt was a brick wall crumbling on top of me. Once, I got my bearings back I realized two things: I was lying on the sidewalk and the brick wall was really the guy walking behind me. His cheeks were scarlet red which made me immediately realize that underneath the black hair were some very blue eyes.
"Sorry," he muttered. "Didn't mean to run you over I just wanted to ask for some directions." The guy awkwardly stuck out his hand for me. I grabbed it which made me notice that he was very in shape which you could tell through the tight black t-shirt.
"It's ok," I said with my cheeks also bright red at such an awkward encounter. I'm not too good a talking to people I've never met before. Or talking in general.
"Ummmm, well I was wondering if you knew where Walnut Street is. I kind of forgot which bus I rode to school this morning, so I've been wandering around trying to find my new apartment," he still seemed really embarrassed to even have to ask for directions.
"Ohhh, umm, I actually live on Walnut. It's not far if you want to just follow me," the idea of a mile walk with a person I didn't know terrified me a little because I could barely carry on a five minute conversation with some of my best friends.
Fortunately, he didn't seem like he wanted to talk to me either, so we continued walking in silence. Eventually, we reached my street, which had exactly four apartments and twelve houses. Mine was all the way down the street in the center of a col-de-sac. I turned to the boy and said a little loudly to be heard over his headphones,"Can you find your house from here?"
He looked up, "Yeah, thanks."
I nodded and continued down the street until I suddenly realized the boy was still following me. I tried to think of an apartment I'd seen lately for sale on Walnut but came up blank. Suddenly I started walking at a brisker pace, this was starting to make me nervous. It wasn't until he turned into the driveway next to mine that I became truly mystified. "You live there?"
The suprise in my voice must have been evident because he seemed a little unsure when he turned around and nodded. "But nobody's lived there in years," I couldn't get over it. The right side of the house had been empty since my grandmother was a little girl. There were a million rumours about it, most of which were probably false, but it was still the closest thing to a haunted house we had. I'd always referred to it as lopsided because the right side had always looked dingy, overgrown, and always had few broken windows from kids on Halloween. But the right side was lived in by Mrs. Lance who was quite dedicated to her brightly colored flowers and extremely neat front porch.
"Yeah my dad thought he could maybe fix it up, he's in to stuff like that," he looked like he wanted to say something else, but instead turned around and walked into the most feared house of my childhood.
It occurred to me later on that there had never been a for sale sign in front of the apartment. Also, when I was nine and tried to google the address nothing came up except GPS locations. How had they even known about the apartment in this little middle of nowhere town?