My Stupid Girl

by Smith, Aurora

  The EMTs and firemen were trying to calm her down with force but she kept flailing her arms like she was trying to get closer to Isaiah. Lucy gasped and grabbed onto my leg. That hurt, but I didn’t acknowledge it. The group passed us at top speed, running to an ambulance. They had been putting as many people as possible in the backs of ambulances, then driving the worst off to hospitals. They didn’t bother to fill Isaiah’s ambulance, but gently laid he and Evelyn in separate rolling cots.

  Sirens blared and the light of the dying fire illuminated the back of the ambulance as it carried my friend away.

  19. CRASHING DOWN

  Beep. Beep. Beep.

  This was all I could hear, sitting in a hospital room being treated for “superficial burns.” A nurse had mentioned that I was one of the lucky ones, but it didn’t really feel like it. My face was red and swollen and I still had a “non-rebreather” mask wrapped around my head. They’d explained that it was for my lungs which were in shock and needed to cleanse themselves, whatever that meant. They hurt, if possible, even more than my face. Someone had stitched up a few deep gashes I had from being run over by heels; I didn’t remember that, but the stitches were evidence. I knew because I’m a regular Sherlock Holmes.

  Before she left, the last nurse in the room had patted me on the knee and told me that it was going to get worse before it got better, which was exactly what I wanted to hear. A burly guy in scrubs bustled in a few minutes later. He introduced himself and explained that he was there to walk me through the discharge process. What he actually said was, “I gotta’ get this bed ready for someone who actually needs it, buddy,” which kind of made me feel better. Once he’d gone over all the papers with me and I’d signed everything I was supposed to, he walked me out. As soon as we left the room everything got a lot louder. Nurses were barking at each other, I passed kids laying on beds in the hall, some moaning, and one guy in a room somewhere was yelling his head off.

  I made my way to a huge room with plenty of plush chairs and like six televisions. As I wound my way through the maze of dazed students, all sitting around waiting to be picked up, I felt a little creeped out. The whole room had a faint smell of smoke; almost all of us were wearing scorched or stained prom-gear. None of us were talking. Everyone who wasn’t asleep was watching the nurses running around. We could still periodically hear that guy screaming in one of the nearby rooms; looked like a lot of people were in and out of that one. I tried to ignore it, laying my head back on the chair and thinking about something else, anything else. I wondered if anyone had called my grandma but was too tired to get up and find a phone. And I didn’t even know were Lucy was. They had shuffled her off in another ambulance. But I wasn’t really worried about finding her right now; I knew she was safe. Eventually someone would find me. Or I’d get the energy to figure it out myself.

  One of the TVs in my line of sight was tuned to a news channel that kept playing clips of the barn in flames and people running around screaming. It was like a zombie movie. I readjusted myself so I was facing a TV with cartoons. A harsh cry echoed through the room again, and everyone tensed up until it faded. I couldn’t imagine the kind of pain you had to be in to make a guy yell like that. The waiting room was almost full, but really quiet; everyone was re-living the last hour. I heard a tiny girl (probably a freshman) say that both hospitals in our town were so crowded with our prom that they were shoving as many people in a room as they were allowed. I guess that was why I got discharged so quickly, even though my lungs still hurt. That guy in scrubs hadn’t been lying about someone needing a bed more than me. I tried to tune out the sounds of the hospital but it was too bright and too weird. That one guy kept screaming. After a few minutes trying to ignore it, I suddenly realized that I recognized the voice. It was Isaiah.

  Everyone could hear the screaming and swearing from down the hall. Each time he started up we all winced. Most of them had no idea who it was. Even if they’d seen him being rolled in, they wouldn’t have known Isaiah Patrick. Because he kept to himself, a silent guy with a heart as big as his giant smart mouth. He was the boy who would take his shirt off for anyone in this room, and no one even knew his name. It infuriated me, every time he would yell out in agony, that everyone looked so concerned, like they cared. I just knew he had done something stupid to get here, too, like going back in that burning barn to try to save someone.

  Lucy always said I was a hero because I helped a stranger out of a freezing lake, but tonight all I had worried about was getting her out of that barn. I could have cared less for anyone else. I hadn’t even looked behind me to see if anyone else needed help. Now here I was, sitting in a room filled with the very people who had been running over me to save themselves. And Isaiah, the only one who had gone back into the barn, the most heroic one in the whole hospital, was down the hall screaming his head off. This was even worse than being in a burning building. At least at the barn I could actively think about how to respond and get out. Here I had to wait, choose between news or cartoons, not allowed to see Isaiah or ask questions about how he was. I was just expected to sit here and listen to my best friend scream alone in a room with no one he knew.

  My muscles coiled together as Isaiah screamed again, this time louder and harsher than before. Each scream acted like a string connected to my arms, I was unable to keep them still or control how they tensed with my own brand of agony. Goosebumps raised instantly as soon as my muscles locked up, every time I heard him. Each time he screamed I tried to relax. I gripped the arms of the chair until my knuckles turned white, tried to breathe evenly and mentally talk myself through it.

  But I couldn’t handle it anymore; I’d been trying to ignore my best friend’s cries for too long. I got up and walked directly past the charge desk, toward the yells. None of the nurses even looked at me; they were all running around tending to someone. They didn’t give me a second glance.

  A group of nurses and orderlies were coming in and out of a room that was only two doors down from me. Every time the door opened Isaiah’s howling was louder. As I made my way toward the room, I glanced into the rooms I was passing and saw a set of eyes that I knew very well. Johnny and Lucy were in a room just one door down from Isaiah’s. Both were sitting on hospital beds, biting their lips and looking like they were going to be sick. I looked around to see if anyone had spotted me out wandering around but everyone was so busy they paid me no attention. Lucy saw me in the hall, and jumped off her bed to run toward me. We met right in the doorway; Lucy fell into me. Her face was so white that her patch of freckles looked like they had lost their color. I caught her in my arms and held her. Her hair smelled like smoke.

  “Hey,” I said, feeling stupid and kind of guilty for not looking for her earlier. I turned Lucy around, back into the room she and Johnny had been sitting in. There were two other kids in there but I ignored them. They were both watching TV.

  “How come you don’t have a mask on?” I asked, grabbing the one sitting next to Johnny’s bed once we sat down. It felt like air was flowing through it. I put it to my face an instantly felt my lungs sigh with relief.

  “After Isaiah came, they just stopped coming in. I think they took care of your room then got under-staffed or something,” he replied.

  “A few people that needed stitches got them, but other than that we haven’t seen anyone,” Lucy looked dismally at me as she spoke. I looked down at her legs and, like I expected, I saw a few gashes in her legs that were sewn closed.

  “Did you see him?” I asked, jerking my head in the direction of Isaiah’s screams, which we could still hear.

  “No.” Johnny shook his head. His usually perky face seemed to age in front of me.

  “He looked bad, man,” I said, remembering the frenzy at the barn, and not able to lie about it. It was already obvious from the noise he was making that Isaiah wasn’t in good shape.

  “I just wish they would tell us something,” Lucy said, rocking back and forth in her chair. Tears streamed down her face, w
hich killed me. I realized that it didn’t hurt to breathe anymore, but the mask on my face was the only one I saw in the room. I offered it to Johnny, who took it willingly. His shoulders relaxed instantly. Everyone in the room had red faces like mine, so they should probably all have been given masks, but I was glad the nurses were putting all their efforts on Isaiah.

  “What was he thinking?” I said, under my breath, to no one in particular.

  “I don’t know,“ Johnny said, his head still shaking. “He had gone out before that crazy crowd, him and Evelyn, and the next thing I know he is in there screaming.” Johnny pointed to the room next to us, on cue for Isaiah to let out another wail of agony.

  “Where is Evelyn?” I asked.

  “I’m assuming they took her to get an x-ray for her leg. She’s probably getting a cast or something. It had to have been broken,” Lucy answered. She bit her lip again, the flow of tears slowing, now looking torn between anger and worry. Johnny handed her the mask, which she took gratefully.

  “I saw what happened.” All three of us looked over to one of the other patients, a guy, shorter than average, which made him look too young to be in our class. Maybe he was an underclassman that someone had invited. “That girl, the one with the curly black hair…”

  “Evelyn,” I interrupted.

  “Yeah, she went running back into the barn, I don’t know why. But she got knocked over by a group of people and that’s when she broke her leg.” He winced like he remembered hearing the bone snap. “Then that boy, the one screaming, came running in, fighting the crowd. He picked her up and started running back with her, but a beam fell and it hit him and he dropped her and he rolled right into the fire.”

  The kid had a horrible look on his face, like the image would be etched on the back of his eyelids forever. “A fireman grabbed him and dragged him out. They had to put out the fire on his legs; he were burning even after they got him outside.” He shook his head again. “I didn’t do anything; I just ran out, I didn’t help him.”

  I knew the boy felt guilty, but I couldn’t help feeling angry at him for abandoning Isaiah. I wiped my eyes and stood up, walking away from the three of them, back toward the door. What that kid had said didn’t explain anything. I could have guessed most of it from the way Evelyn was acting when the firemen and EMTs had been moving them away from the barn.

  I turned around and looked at every person in the room, sitting there, not doing anything but waiting till someone told them they were allowed to. It reminded me of being at the prom, during those first few minutes of the fire, when no one knew what to do. Instead of something, anything productive, they’d all just stood around until it was too late. Until beams were collapsing on my best friend and burning the crap out of him. And now they were just sitting in here, listening to him scream, watching cartoons. I couldn’t handle it anymore. I didn’t even tell Johnny and Lucy I was leaving. I was afraid of losing my nerve. I pushed open the door and went flying down the hall and slipped into Isaiah’s room.

  There was no way to prepare myself for what I saw. He was jerking around on his hospital bed like a huge, wrong fish. He was naked; any clothes he’d had left when he came in had been cut off. Even though most of his skin was sealed shut with burns, blood, from where his skin had cracked or split open, was smeared across the sheets and on the fronts of all three of the nurses who were closest to him. It smelled so bad, like burnt hair but a lot worse. The nurses were trying to hold him down which was difficult because every time they got near the right side of his body he would freak out. The worst part, though, was the part I hadn’t been able to hear out in the hall. I thought the screams were bad, but between every scream was a whimper.

  “Evelyn,” Isaiah mumbled, then howled in pain when a nurse tried to put a long needle in his right side. I jumped toward him, to do what I didn’t know, but I really needed to help somehow.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” A nurse came running over to me. “You can’t be in here!” She turned me around and started pushing me toward the door but I fought back and ran to Isaiah’s bed.

  “I will call security--” she started to say, but stopped when she saw that Isaiah had calmed down instantly when he saw me.

  I looked down on him and, like a balloon that had air let out of it, I crumpled, relief washing over me. Isaiah’s face didn’t have one burn on it, although it was extremely red. His right arm, starting from above his elbow and, then the whole right side of his body, stretching all the way down to his feet, was dark discolored, shrunken and tightened, cracks were oozing and the smell got a lot worse as I got closer to him. Those nurses were good, though. It was only a few seconds, but the one with the needle used the distraction I caused to stick Isaiah near his collarbone. The other one quickly grabbed his left hand and did the same on the back of that hand. By the time his attention was back on her, they had hooked him up to tube things attached to clear lines and bulging bags hanging on a metal rack next to his bed.

  “Ahhh,” Isaiah sucked in air and looked over, wide-eyed, at the nurse who had just hooked him up to a morphine drip.

  “Can you stay in here?” the bouncer nurse asked me desperately. “We have been trying to get him to still for twenty minutes, so we could help him.”

  I nodded and looked back down at him.

  “Man, why are you giving these nice ladies such a hard time? You look like crap; they don’t want to talk to you.” I knew some light banter was what he would have given me, so it came naturally.

  “Is Evelyn alright?” He asked, breathing heavily, but looking much calmer now that I was here and the medications were starting to kick in.

  “I think so.”

  The bouncer nurse spoke to me in a low voice, “A lot of times,” she explained, “when someone is in a traumatic situation the only thing their mind can focus on is what they were doing before the event happened.” The needle nurse nodded agreement. I locked eyes with my best friend.

  “Oh you got a crush on a church chick now? You joining the club?” I teased, wanting so badly to touch him. He sighed and closed his eyes, the affects of the medicine already showing.

  “She’s too pretty. Honestly, I don’t even think she’s real,” he said slowly.

  Needle nurse looked up from one of the machines next to his bed. “He’s going to get very drowsy. You should stay, if you can. This is the calmest he has been since he got here.” I looked around the room and saw bouncer nurse and a third one looking grateful but tired. They got busy with different things in the room, preparing to clean and wrap Isaiah’s burns. I couldn’t even begin to think about how much pain he was in right now. My face was constantly throbbing, like a sunburn, but his skin was actually gone. He still had patches left, but he must have been on fire for a while.

  “Isaiah, NOT the best decision-making today, man.” I bent down and gently put my forehead against his. He put his good arm up and patted the top of my head clumsily. Needle nurse grabbed his hand and put it back down, probably afraid of trying to stick him with a needle again.

  “I saw her getting run over by those people; she couldn’t get up and everyone was just running around her…” His words were beginning to slur, which I was grateful for. He seemed like he was in a lot less pain.

  “Besides, you’re one to talk, ice princess.” He smirked. Only one side of his face went up, the other side was numb.

  “Excuse me.” Bouncer nurse came up behind me and gently moved me to the side so she could start cleaning his mangled arm. She smiled ruefully at me; I was part of the caretaking team now, it seemed. I had never had people so grateful for my presence before.

  “Is he going to be ok?” I asked the third nurse. She was pouring liquid on Isaiah’s skin.

  “He should be okay. This side of his body is going to need grafts and will still be seriously scarred. But he is lucky.” She stopped and shook her head. “The fire didn’t even touch his face. I can’t believe it.”

  “He is tall,” I said stupidly. She huffed am
usedly and continued cleaning.

  Isaiah was completely out now, and once I saw his burns cleaned I was relieved even more. It still looked bad, and the smell hadn’t gotten any less terrible, but Isaiah still seemed much better than I originally thought, with his blood on everyone in the room and him screaming. I knew this was only temporary, that when he woke up he would be in pain again, but I was glad that he was resting peacefully for now. As the nurses finished up they spent a few minutes talking about who would prep Isaiah for surgery and then started to trickle out. Bouncer nurse was the last one left in the room. She gave me a pat on the shoulder and told me to go home and get some sleep. I thought of Grandma again; I kind of hoped she was sleeping through all this.

  I left the room feeling like I could have done so much more. Why didn’t I go in there the moment I heard him screaming? What kind of a friend was I? I felt very disappointed in myself, almost like I somehow had caused all this. I had been pretending to be a cool kid with a beautiful girlfriend who went to the prom. But Isaiah wouldn’t even have been at the prom if it wasn’t for me. And at the hospital I just sat around with everyone else, listening to him scream. I knew I didn’t cause the fire or any injuries but I couldn’t help feeling like me being a big phony was the real reason behind all this.

  Then I saw Lucy standing in the middle of the hall, both her parents running at her and holding her tight in their arms. I slowly walked over to them and, to my surprise, her dad scooped me up without warning and included me in their group hug. The faint scent of his cologne and Lucy’s mom’s perfume was a welcome change from the dark smell in Isaiah’s room. I buried my face in her dad’s shoulder and hugged him back, not wanting him to let me go. I felt more comfortable with Lucy’s father than I ever had with my own.