by Alice Bello
~*~
Lucy clawed and screamed her way out of the dream, her eyes opened wide and her head scalded with pain. She reached up to hold her head, but then her arm joined in on the pain-a-palooza. She was pressed up against the stained stucco wall, the greasy tiles cold and hard against her body.
At first everything else was a blur. Odd shapes hovered around her, and she heard voices. They were all talking about her. The only thing that was clear was a blackness that snaked around the periphery of her blurred vision. It faded into the din as she heard someone say, “I saw her come barreling out of the cooler.”
“Yeah, well, I think she was stuck in there,” said someone else. “I’ve had that happen before.”
“And don’t forget Brad and his pickle mishap. That shit was all over the floor.”
Gradually everything came into focus, and she felt cold and sticky, on top of the pain in her head, shoulder, and arm. There was a tangy, sweet, totally nauseating smell. She looked down at herself and saw she was covered in special sauce. It dripped from her hands, was splattered over the black slacks she’d bought on sale at Wal-Mart, and had plastered her McDonald’s polo shirt to her chest. She knew without looking that it was dripping from her chin, and a glob ran cold and wet down the lobe of her right ear.
“Shit Lucy!” Greg stood over her, eyes wide and his hands on his hips. He looked pissed. “Look at the mess you made.”
The pain in her head turned to a hot annoyance as she looked up slowly into Greg’s eyes. “Mess I made?” Her voice was low and strangely even sounding. “You sent me after too many things at once—”
“You should’ve made two—”
“I got stuck in there because you never had the latch on the door fixed, and I slipped because there was—” She looked over to the floor in front of the walk-in cooler. There were even some pickle slices shining green against the sandstone red tile. “Pickle juice on the floor!”
When she looked back up at Greg she saw him gulp.
She was about to point her finger at him and tell him her father’s lawyers were going to sue the shit out of him, and McDonald’s, and the company that designed such a faulty latch, when the pain in her arm suddenly sparked to life again and raged like a bonfire. It sapped her words out of her head and replaced them with raw pain.
There was a long, cold silence, and then Greg said, “We’ll call an ambulance to take you to County.” His voice was thin and very polite.
A hospital! And doctors and tests and needles and...
“I’m fine!” she snapped, and Greg’s head jerked back at the force of her words. Seeing the sudden effect of her voice, she forced a fake smile on her face and pulled herself—though cringing at the nagging pain—up off the tile floor.
“I’m fine,” she said again, this time with smooth sweetness. All she wanted was to get the hell out of there, and go home. Her birthday had already been heinous enough; she’d rather not tempt fate anymore. And she wasn’t about to spend the night in the emergency room.
“I don’t know.” Greg was returning to form. And once Greg got it into his head about something, he always forced the issue. His beady eyes squinted down at her. “I think you should go to the hospital and get checked out.”
“I... am... fine!” That annoyed heat was back in her voice as she rounded on Greg, and practically spit each word at him. “I didn’t black out,”—which was a lie—“so I don’t need to go to a hospital!”
Her voice ricocheted off the walls like a shotgun blast. Greg’s eyes bugged out and then he cleared his throat. “You’ll have to sign a waiver,” he croaked.
“Fine... whatever.” She shifted her weight and almost fell back into the wall. She was dizzy, yet still on her feet... with the help of her hand gripping the wall. “Can you call my Gram to come drive me home?”
No way was she making it to the bus stop, not to mention all the way home, like this.