The damn lady on the phone wouldn't tell me a thing. She just kept saying, "We can't disclose personal information over the phone. You really shouldn't be talking while driving", until I hung up. I tried Will's cell about ten times on the way to the hospital and he never answered. I was hoping that his parents or a friend would pick up so I could hear some actual information, but there was nothing.
He must have gotten in an accident either on the way to or from the bus stop or on the way to my dorm room. I'm going to hate myself if it was on the way to see me. I should have just gone to him. I should have insisted that I go and talk to him because he's not allowed in the dorms anyway. I shouldn't have been so damn sensitive. Why couldn't I have brushed off what he said? She's just wrapped around my finger. I still can't, but I'm more concerned with Will's condition for the time being.
I pull up to the hospital, park, and run inside the lobby. It's quiet. A gross kind of quiet. The only person in the room is sitting behind the desk and looks like she wants to be anywhere but here.
"Excuse me. Can you tell me where Will Hastings is?" I ask her as sweetly as possible. She must be the jerk that was on the phone with me.
"Right this way." She looks annoyed that she has to stand up. I see the game Solitaire on her computer screen and I feel no sympathy for her having to walk ten feet. She points down the hall at a door that says 'Waiting Room' and quickly walks back to her computer before I can even thank her. Not that I was going to.
I walk into another room that looks similar to the last, only a little bigger and people sitting in a few of the chairs. I approach the desk and the much nicer man tells me to have a seat and a nurse will come to talk to me soon.
I can't stop fidgeting and letting my thoughts run wild. What if he's paralyzed? What if he dies? What if he's really mad at me and blames me for getting in the crash? What if it was my fault that he was in a crash? Where is Leah? Why was I called and I don't recognize anyone else in the room? I look around to try and distract myself.
There's a little boy with his hand wrapped in a towel and his mom is trying to comfort him. There's a young man who looks really nervous. I bet his wife is having their first child. There's another older man sleeping in the corner. There's an old lady reading a magazine. Who knows why she's here. And there's a teenage girl holding a bag of ice to the top of her head. It's silent besides the sound of typing and the mom's soft whispers. The little boy gets called into another room and then a woman in scrubs come through the door and calls my name. I immediately get up and follow her out of the waiting room.
"Hi. How are you?" she asks calmly.
"Do you know what happened? Is he okay?" She's walking way too slow for my liking.
"For his cousin, you sure do care about him. That's nice to see. You're more frantic than most parents." Cousin? I'm not Will's cousin. But right now I'm more concerned with if he is alive.
"Can you answer my question?" I ask as we stop in front of another door. She writes something down and then keeps walking.
"He'll be fine, I think." That is probably the least reassuring thing you can tell someone at a hospital.
"What the hell does that mean?" Now she's just making me angry. We get to another desk and she starts talking to another woman in the same outfit.
"This is Jessica, William Hastings cousin," she says in almost a whisper like she's saying some big secret.
"Can you please tell me what's going on?" I ask the other women. She sighs and then gives in.
"We think it was an attempt at suicide," she says and I about pass out.
"Suicide?! What the fuck is wrong with you people? What happened?" There is no way Will was trying to kill himself. I've known Will for almost three months, and I may not know a lot about his past life or his family, but I know Will. And the thought of suicide is pretty much impossible.
"He was hit by a bus." My new names for them are Crazy Lady One and Crazy Lady Two because I don't want to take the time to learn their real names. Plus they don't deserve it.
"His car was hit by a bus?" It's like their goal is to be as vague as possible.
"No, he wasn't in a car. He was just hit by the bus. We have no witnesses and the bus driver says he came out of nowhere," Crazy Lady Two says.
"No one else was at the bus stop?" I ask skeptically.
"There were a few others, but no one saw it happen." I want to slap the clipboards out of their hands. They're probably not even writing anything important, just avoiding eye contact.
"Here's a genius idea," I say. "Why don't we just ask him? Where is he?" I'm about to barge into every room in this building if they don't give me an answer.
"He's unconscious and in emergency care." My heart stops. This is worse than I thought.
"Take me to him anyway." I need to see him, even if I can't talk to him.
"No one but immediate family."
Is she chewing gun in a hospital? I swear to God...
"I'm the only one here! Take me to his room, damn it!" Both of them look up at me and then look at each other a little scared. Good. They should be.
"It's locked, but you can sit in the chair outside of it if you want. You can talk to a doctor if one walks by," Crazy Lady Two finally says. And that's exactly what I do. There is one chair outside of the emergency care unit and that's where I sit for hours. I think it was hours, but it felt like days. I gave up on asking everybody who walked by if they had a key because none of the nurses have any real authority in this place, even though they think they do. I have yet to see a doctor walk by and I wonder where you could possibly hide all of the doctors in a hospital. Crazy Lady One and Two must have sat me by the back entrance because emergency care sure is lacking emergency care. It's driving me insane.
I drift off to sleep every once and a while and I never know for how long. It's probably already Friday, but there's no windows for me to check. My phone died a while ago and I'm too exhausted to go look for a clock.
One of the times I wake up, a doctor is coming out of the door in front of me.
"Hey! Is Will Hastings in there?" I ask just as he's about to walk away.
"Yeah, are you his cousin?" I don't like lying, but everyone already thinks I'm her.
"Yes. Is he okay?" I ask hesitantly.
"He'll be okay. We're just having a little trouble waking him up. As soon as he does though, he'll recover in no time. Quite a few things bruised, but hardly anything broken. He's very lucky." Relief spreads through me. He's not going to die.
"Do you know what happened?" He tries to pretend he didn't hear me, but I follow him down the hall. I know he probably has a lot of life and death situations to get to, because he seems to be the only one that knows anything around here, but I need to know about Will.
"Got hit by a bus I heard. Suicide possibly," he says flipping through his papers in his hand. There it is again. Suicide. It couldn't have been. I refuse to believe it, but I decide it's probably best not to verbally attack him like I did the nurses.
The paper on top of his pile is titled 'William Hastings' and I try my best to read as much of it as I can before he notices. Age, weight, height, blood pressure, a few other things I don't know. The only thing that catches my attention is his emergency contact information. My name and phone number are the only things listed under the relationship cousin. Neither of his parents are written. He sees me trying to read further down the paper and quickly closes the file.
"Can I see him?" I ask before he can yell at me. Please. Please. Please.
"Not right now. I'll have someone contact you when he's awake. You should go home and get some sleep," and with that, he's gone. Even if I did go home, there is no way I'm sleeping. Might as well stay here.
I walk back to my chair and slump down thinking of all the ways I can break into the room. They couldn't have put one window in? I look closer at the door to see if there is a way to pick the lock, when I notice something.
It's cracked! The doctor never closed it all the way when he left. I look back and forth in the hall and no one is in sight. I push the door open a little more so I can see inside. There's a bed, a table, a chair, and a bunch of medical equipment with an unknown purpose to me. It's a massive room that is divided by half walls. It reminds me of office cubicles, only bigger.
I creep into the room when I notice that no one is around and walk quietly up to the bed. It's Will all right, but it's hit-by-a-bus Will. Half of his face is covered in little cuts and it makes me wince just looking at it. There's a big stitch across his forehead and a bruise the size of a golf ball on his opposite cheek. His one arm rests in a sling and the other by his side with two different IVs sticking out of it. His face looks so solemn, so sad. I run my fingers over the top of his hair because I'm afraid of setting off some alarm if I actually touch him.
"Hey Will," I whisper mainly to myself. I know he can't hear me. If the doctors can't get him to respond, then there's no way I can. "They're making some crazy accusations about you out there that you really need to clear up." I very tentatively touch his face. No alarms are sounding. That's the first thing that has gone in my favor all day. "It would be great if you could wake up and talk to me. I'll even let you call me Rosie if it makes you happy." I smile a little at the thought of his voice. "I know you probably hurt right now and I wish there was something I could do to help. I've been here with you the whole time." I hear footsteps in the next room over, which are surly on their way over here. "I have to go, but I'll be right outside the door. I'm already breaking the rules by being in here." I lean down and place a kiss on the top of his nose and whisper in the quietest voice possible, "You'd be proud of me."
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Knock Knock.
Who's There?
Daisy.
Daisy Who?
Dasiy me rollin, they hatin.
HAhHAHAHAahahhahAhAHhahah
I feel like my chapters end really serious so I wanted to tell you a joke:)
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