Being sick is lonely. The whole world continues on outside as I lie here in this bed. People go to work, kids go to school, stock boys stack apples and oranges into pyramids in the grocery store, truck drivers hauls their goods. All this happens as I lie here.
I remember last year when the Pope died. I felt so sorry for him. I knew what he was feeling. After so many years of being among throngs of adoring people he was sequestered away in a bare hospital room. He must have lay in bed listening to the whispers of his cardinals as they talked around him. No laughter, no joy, no life. Just a hushed contraction of time while they waited for him to die.
I am not going to die like the Pope, but I am so sick that I can’t go to school. At 8:15 each morning I can hear the middle schoolers gathering for the bus and then it drops them off everyday at 3:30. I used to wish my window would overlook the street so I could see them too. But wishing is useless.
On one side of the room I turn my head to see a blue chest of drawers with silver pulls. It is there everyday. A constant. I get bored of looking at it; I have looked at it so much. To the left is my window, which overlooks the side yard. So instead of watching kids get on the bus, or old people walking their dogs, I look out to see what is happening in the yard. An awful lot happens there. Birds and squirrels wander through, the leaves grow and change and drop of course. I don’t need to tell you. I notice everything though. Every shade of green grass—from its emerald lushness in the early spring to its weak, limey green at the end of the summer. I notice the weeds as they sprout up and the way the laurel hedges grow at least two feet each year.
I have a tutor that comes once a week now on Saturdays. He’s a timid man who looks nervously around the room at the pill bottles and syringes and the IV drip that stands at attention in the corner just in case. He must worry that he’s going to get what I have, though you can’t catch it. He sits across the room perched on the folding chair mom puts there for him and he talks loudly at me, as if it were my ears that are failing, not my lungs.
At first he tried to do all sorts of work with me—math and science. But now we just read books and when he comes he talks about them. He yells his thoughts across the room for about an hour and then he gives me a new book for my assignment. He scurries out the door to where mom is waiting and I hear her say each week, “How’d it go?” while she writes him a check. I always wait to hear the sound of her ripping it from her checkbook—the perforations tearing with a satisfying zzzzip.
I feel bad for my mom. She feels bad about leaving me everyday but she has to go to work. She gets up before its light out to give me a bath and make me breakfast, give me my pills. She leaves a few hours later with nothing but a Ziploc bag full of Cheerios in her purse for her own breakfast. She leaves me propped up on pillows with the remote control in easy reach and kisses me on the cheek.
My favorite day of the week is when she reads me bits from the town Bee. She reads the articles about people we know or important things like that time when Wal-Mart wanted to open a store near the post office but everyone fought it. It comes every Thursday and she reads it out loud to me.
She gets especially into the articles about the mayor or the school board. Once, there was a proposal to build a skate ramp in the park and she was really upset about that. Half the town was for it, and the other half against. Some said at least it would get those boys out of the bank parking lots and movie theater steps where they were destroying property and scaring off senior citizens. The others said that skateboarding should just be banned altogether. Those kids were just waiting to crack their heads open and the town shouldn’t given them a legal place to go and do it.
I didn’t really care too much, because I was waiting for her to get to the school lunch schedule, which is my favorite part. Sometimes it’s grilled cheese on Monday, spaghetti on Tuesday and all the standard stuff. Sometimes the menu is out of the ordinary like the February when its African American history month they serve things like red beans and rice and okra. I’ve never had those but they sound good.
I wonder what it would be like to go to school. I would have a locker and eat in the cafeteria. I’d see the lunch lady every day in her hair net. She would ask me if I wanted peas of French fires and I would answer, “Fries, please.”
I’ve been at home so long that most of my friends have grown a whole foot or more by now. When I was first out of the hospital they would sometimes visit me, bringing flowers and had to be removed from the room right away, or candy that I couldn’t even open my mouth to eat. I remember my best friend, Michelle, with her long, brown hair and brown skin. Mom called her a “tomboy.” She came only once. She sat nest to my bed and didn’t say anything. Her mom and my mom were outside in the hall talking and she just sat there and stared at the floor. I couldn’t say anything either—I wanted to. I wanted to just say hi and ask her about Valentines Day and stuff. But finally her mom came and got her and she never came back.
I wonder if my friends ever think of me anymore or maybe they just pretend I moved away. I still remember how they looked. Timmy always had a runny nose, and Scott had the nicest freckles. I hated Amy and her bouncy, blonde curls. Cindy was tiny and had a funny laugh that always made me laugh too.
Mostly I think of Nathan. We always sat at the back of the bus together, even though boys and girls didn’t usually sit together. He had sandy brown hair and a scar on his chin from when he fell down the stairs as a little kid. He never did come to visit me, but he sent me a card with a big elephant on it that said, “Get Well Soon!”
I think of him everyday, especially when the Price is Right is over and the soap operas are on. They are never fun to watch. I think of the time he chased me during color tag in gym class. He didn’t chase any other girls except for me.
My friends probably do things like play sports after school and go to dances. If I were in school, I’d try out for the soccer team. That’s what Michelle plays. I know because sometimes the Bee has articles about how the team is doing so good. She is the star forward. I would be on the team too, and we would both be out there on the field and maybe it would be muddy that day so we’d come home from the game covered in mud. But it would be really fun and we would run hard anyway and be exact with our passes and outmaneuver the other team. We’d win, and then come in to the locker room cheering and excited. And on the way I’d see Nathan watching me from the crowd. And maybe he would have his driver’s license and wait for me so he could dive me home from the game.
Last year, mom read me a story about the homecoming floats. Each class would make a float on a theme, and the theme that time was fairy tales. One class made a Little Red Riding Hood float with a giant wolf’s head in a pink bonnet, and another class did Hansel and Gretel with a real gingerbread house and they threw candy to the crowd. I’d want to be one of the people throwing candy and watch the kids rush forward to pick up the peppermints and lollipops that fell to the ground.
There was a picture of Timmy in the paper too. He was homecoming king and there was a photo of him and his queen. They were wearing goofy tinfoil crowns. But I hardly recognized him. His note was bigger and it was like the whole shape of his head had changed. As if someone had pushed his jaw in and made his forehead stick out more. Maybe it was all the football he played. His neck was thick and he had hulking shoulders too. I wondered if he remembers coming to my birthday party once. He was the only boy I invited, and mom didn’t want him to come. But I invited him anyway.
Last night, I felt my lip split open. I sneezed and it tore open. There was nothing I could do until morning when mom checked in on me. By then, the blood was dried and my lip swollen twice its size. Sometimes it happens. It always hurts, but now I’m more used to living with it. I know that in the morning, mom will wipe it clean and apply Vaseline. She always makes me feel better.
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