Sunny Sweet Is So Not Sorry

by Jennifer Ann Mann

  “Hmm,” he said. “She used a cold-setting epoxy.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t really care what materials the shrinky-dink snake used. But I was starting to like my medical barber more. The word “epoxy” made him sound official and smart, which meant that any minute he was going to pull a prescription out of his bag and remove this nightmare forever.

  “Is this a peanut?” he said, picking something out of my hair.

  I bit my lip. I didn’t want to tell him about the freezer or how my mom thought that since peanut butter was supposed to get gum out of your hair that it would somehow also remove fake flowers.

  He sniffed. “She must have mixed the epoxy with peanut butter,” he whispered, “but that doesn’t make any sense.”

  I sat with my mouth shut while he picked out a few more peanuts and examined them. He messed around with the flowers for fifteen minutes. Just when I was beginning to feel like a glass vase being arranged, my medical barber stood back and looked at me.

  “What?” I asked.

  “It looks like your sister used a thermosetting resin,” he said, looking serious, “which is characterized by monomeric units that are linked together by chemical bonds and form three-dimensional networks that are infusible and insoluble.”

  All of a sudden I didn’t like my medical barber anymore.

  “What?” I asked.

  “This stuff is not coming out,” he said, giving a little shake of his head.

  And I wished more than anything that I did have Calvin’s disease, because then at least I could be dying right now!

  “How am I supposed to live like this?” I cried.

  “You don’t,” said my medical barber, although I was beginning to suspect that he might just be a regular barber who happened to know a weird amount about glue.

  “What?” I asked.

  “We’ll have to shave your head,” he said.

  “WHAT!” I shouted.

  “We’ll have to …”

  I fell back onto the hospital bed and waved my hand at him to stop. I had heard him. I was just shouting to shout.

  My hair? He couldn’t take my hair! I had been growing my hair for as long as I could remember. And maybe no one ever paid attention to me at school unless they needed to look at my homework, and maybe I didn’t really have, you know, one particular best friend. But I had hair! And it was nice hair. Everybody said how nice my hair was. In fact, the only time Alex and Nicole ever talked to me was about my hair. The first month after we moved here, Alex and Nicole and I were in the girls’ bathroom together. Nicole took her brush and started brushing my hair. While she brushed, she said things like “Your hair is so beautiful” and “What a pretty dark color it is” and “It is so thick,” and her words, just like her hairbrush in my hair, made my skin tingle with happiness. I had beautiful hair. I had beautiful hair. And now I would be what? I couldn’t even think that word!

  “Listen,” my medical barber said, looking down at my chart, “Marsha …”

  “Masha,” I corrected into the bed sheets.

  “I know that hair is important. And I’m truly sorry. But there is no way to get these out of your hair without shaving them off.”

  His “explanation” wasn’t making me feel any better.

  “Let’s get in touch with your parents,” he said.

  “I just have a mom,” I blubbered, because I was sobbing now like a big fat baby.

  “Let’s give your mom a call,” he said.

  “No,” I said, sitting up.

  “Okay, listen,” he said, looking back at me. “Let me take a sample of the glue down to the lab and have it checked out.”

  “Because you think that maybe you’ll come up with another idea to get this off?” I asked, sitting up a little straighter in the bed.

  He looked at me with a long frown. Then he opened up his bag and pulled out a pair of scissors. Leaning over, he snipped off a small lock of my hair close to my scalp. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he said. And then he turned and left the room.

  Getting a Break

  The door hadn’t even finished closing before I hopped off the bed. The freaky little hobbit doctor could stay and finish her rounds, but I was getting out of here.

  Walking out the door seemed too risky. I ran to the window. It looked out onto the roof of another part of the hospital. It seemed to be about a twenty-foot drop. I wondered if I hung down by my fingertips how many feet less the fall would be. I might break a leg or something, but I’d pretty much survive. I thought about the guy in the ER with his leg in a cast, and then I imagined Nicole and Alex begging me to let them carry my books through the halls of school. I searched for a way to open the window, but it had no opening. How could this be? Wasn’t this a fire hazard? What would happen if there was an emergency and I needed to get out?

  I eyed the room for some sort of tool. There was the bed, a chair, and a bunch of cabinets. I opened up the cabinets, not knowing exactly what I was looking for. Maybe a screwdriver? Or a window-opening tool? All I found were shelves filled with medical stuff like cotton balls and plastic gloves. I spotted a box filled with big Popsicle sticks and plucked one out. Not sure how I might use it to open the window, I decided to stick it in my mouth. I scooted over to the mirror on the wall and opened wide, saying, “Ahhhhh.” My tonsils danced in the back of my throat. I did it again, but it wasn’t that exciting the second time. Plus the wood taste of the stick got kind of gross.

  I tossed the stick into the little garbage can and pulled out a couple of the plastic gloves. Maybe I could put them on and punch my fist through the glass so I wouldn’t get cut. They were harder to get on than they looked. I got two fingers into one of them and then gave up. I’d always wanted to blow these gloves up like you see in the movies. I put my mouth to the wrist part of the glove and blew, but I ended up with a mouth full of dusty powder that made me just about gag. I threw them both in the garbage with the Popsicle stick, rinsed my mouth in the tiny sink, and moved on to the next cabinet. It was filled with bandages, and each shelf was marked with the word “sterilized” across it, which made me want to pull everything out and touch it all, but I didn’t. I closed it up and opened the last cabinet. It was empty. Bummer.

  I heard voices outside my door, and I froze. The voices moved on down the hall and finally faded away.

  This was getting me absolutely nowhere. I wasn’t going to find a screwdriver, I wasn’t going to jump out the window, and I wasn’t going to leave Sunny and Mrs. Song. I was trapped.

  I stared at the door. It had been about fifteen minutes since my medical barber had left. He was bound to be back soon. Was I really going to sit here and let him shave my head? I grabbed my hair with both hands. No way! I had to act.

  I swiped Mrs. Song’s hat from the bed and crunched it down over my head, tying the ribbons under my chin. Then I tiptoed to the door and pulled it open two inches, sticking my nose out. I could hear voices and beeping and ringing of phones and stuff, but I didn’t see any people. I reached down and stretched the bracelet that the nurses had put on me when I almost had Calvin’s disease until I could pull it off. Then I stepped forward, letting my hospital room door close behind me with a soft click.

  I was out.

  I didn’t exactly have a fully formed plan, but I felt weirdly excited, like this was the first time today that I was in charge. I was the one who decided to leave my hospital room. I was the one who decided to walk down the hall … to turn the corner … to nod politely at a passing person even though my heart was beating so loud my ears throbbed.

  I knew that I had to find Sunny, so I started poking my head into random rooms. Mostly the people in the beds didn’t even look up. They were sleeping or reading or watching their TVs. A nurse passed me in the hall, and I held my breath. “Out for a stroll?” she asked. I nodded.

  I checked all the rooms on one hall and then started down the next. She could be anywhere. I tried to think what kind of doctor the nurse said Sunny was f
ollowing. It started with an O. I couldn’t remember.

  I passed by a nurses’ station and tried to look normal.

  “Can I help you?” asked a lady behind the desk. “I’m just out for a stroll,” I said, using the nurse’s line.

  She gave me a big smile and a nod. It worked!

  The hospital halls seemed to make a square, and I followed around it, looking and listening for any sign of Sunny. She wasn’t anywhere. I thought about going back to the front desk but didn’t want to risk bumping into my medical barber. Why, why, why did Sunny have to go and follow this doctor around? Why couldn’t she have just stayed in her room and eaten crackers like me?

  I decided to try another floor. I clomped down the staircase. There were lots of people on this floor, and no one stopped to notice me. There were also a million rooms. Most of them had closed doors, and I was too scared to open them. I walked slowly up and down the halls, trying to see if I could hear Sunny behind any of the doors. If only I knew what that doctor that she was following did. Wait. It had something to do with bones.

  I walked up to the first desk I saw. There was a girl sitting in her chair picking at her nails with a paper clip. “What kind of doctor helps your bones?” I asked.

  She looked up at me and just stared.

  “I’m … I’m doing a report at school,” I told her.

  “An orthopedist,” she said, going back to her nails. “The orthopedics department is on the sixth floor, west wing.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I got to the sixth floor easily enough, but finding the west wing was another problem. It took me ten minutes to locate it on the map and then another ten to walk over to it. I wandered around the west wing, checking in any door that was open. This floor wasn’t as crowded, and a couple of people asked if they could help me. I used my line “I’m just out for a stroll,” and they let me be. Some people did give me questioning looks, but this could have been because I was starting to sweat buckets. Where was my little sister? On my third trip around the same hallway, I officially began to freak out.

  I decided to go back and search the east wing. This plan seemed better than no plan at all, and I headed back. A door was open that had been closed before, so I poked my head in.

  It was a small waiting room. Against the back of the room was a giant fish tank filled with all kinds of colorful fish, plastic, swaying seaweed, and little toy reefs and shells. I walked over to the tank and leaned my tired head against the glass. It was nice to watch the fish instead of searching endlessly for Sunny. There were a bunch of long, skinny fish that stuck together in a little herd. There was one flat-looking, ugly brown fish with long whiskers like a cat that stayed at the bottom by the colorful stones. But mostly the tank was filled with these blue-and-yellow fish that looked like they were a big family of cousins or something. They kind of darted around in the water as if they were playing a game with each other. Watching the sluggish flat fish and the twitchy little skinny fish and all the pretty swooshing of the blue-and-yellow fish made me feel like this whole day wasn’t happening. I started to relax with the quiet swimming of fish. But then I caught my reflection in the glass of the tank. And there I was, standing all by myself with Mrs. Song’s hat on and my head still full of flowers.

  All of a sudden being in charge didn’t feel so good. My escape from the hospital room, the killer virus, Mrs. Song being sick, not knowing where the heck Sunny was … it all felt wrong. I wanted to be home in my own house. If only I could find Sunny.

  I called to her in my head, “Sunny, where are you?” I would do just about anything to see her spooky little face, stringy blond hair, and skinny arms and legs standing in front of me.

  I felt a little dizzy, and tired.

  As I slid into a chair next to the tank, a door opened up, making me jump back up. A nurse stuck her head into the room, spotted me, and smiled brightly. “Hi,” she said.

  My heart shook. I tried to smile back, but my mouth pulled itself down into a frown and all of a sudden I was struggling to hold back tears.

  “Maria?” she asked.

  “Masha,” I whispered.

  “Why don’t you come on in now,” she said, opening the door wide and waving me in.

  I didn’t move.

  She looked at me and sighed like she completely understood everything that I was going through. Then she let go of the door and walked toward me. “It’s all going to be okay,” she said, looking right into my eyes. And I believed her. Then she added, “I was just on the phone with your mom and …”

  The mention of my mom opened a tiny crack in my heart, and tears popped out onto the ledges of my eyes. Noticing, the nurse rushed to my side and put her arm gently around my shoulder, making the whole thing worse. “Oh, baby, it’s going to be okay,” she said as she led me through the door. “It won’t hurt nearly as bad as breaking it did. Trust me, I’ve done this a hundred times.”

  “Breaking what?” I sniffed through a few of the falling tears.

  “Now, come on,” she said, smiling at me. “It won’t be that bad, trust me.”

  “What won’t be that bad?”

  She sat me down on a long, hard, platformlike bed with a scratchy paper sheet on it and walked over to her supply cabinets. Another door opened and a second nurse walked in. He grunted a “hi” to the nice nurse and then glanced my way with a half smile. When his eyes landed on my hat, he stopped short, his white sneakers squeaking on the hospital floor. His face gave a twitch. I was sure that he was going to ask why I was wearing this ridiculous hat, but then the moment was gone and he headed over to a flat screen on the wall. I guess I wasn’t that interesting. He shoved a group of black papers onto the screen one at a time, and then flipped a switch. The black papers lit up. They were X-rays of the glowing white bones of an arm. And it was broken. Twice.

  “Um,” I gulped, sitting up and cradling my poor broken arm against my chest.

  The nurse walked over to me. “Hi, Maria,” he said, opening up a chart.

  “Masha,” I said, “but I think …”

  “Is your birthday March 7?” he asked.

  “No, but that’s my sister’s birthday,” I said, which it was.

  He rolled his eyes and then looked down at my wrist, I guess for that bracelet I had taken off.

  “She doesn’t have her ID bracelet,” he said over his shoulder to the nice nurse. His voice was loud, and it felt like it bounced off my chest.

  “I pulled it off,” I whispered.

  The nice nurse turned from collecting her stuff and walked over to us, looking at the mean nurse but really talking to me. “Maria is pretty nervous and in pain. It’s not every day that you break your arm. She doesn’t want to be here, and I understand that.” Then she smiled at me as if to say, ignore this guy, he doesn’t get us.

  “Um, I, you, have the wrong person. I didn’t break my arm. I was just looking at the fish.”

  “She took the splint off?” the mean nurse questioned. He reached for my left arm and I pulled it away, hugging it to my chest.

  The nice nurse glared at the back of the mean nurse’s head and rolled over a chair next to me, sitting down so her face was even with my face. Then she looked into my eyes, so sweet and kind, and my eyes filled with tears again. She put her hand on my leg. “Okay, honey, we realize that this day has been a real tough one for you.” I nodded and a couple of big, salty drips plopped onto my thighs. “But,” she continued, “it’s all going to be fine now. We are going to take care of everything from here on out, okay?”

  “Okay,” I whispered.

  “Anyway,” she said, grinning and reaching into her supplies and pulling out a book, “this is the fun part.” She opened the book and started flipping through the pages, holding them for me to see. They were filled with different squares of colors. “What is your favorite color?” she asked.

  I shrugged.

  “Green? Blue?” She kept turning the pages. “Orange?”

  “Orange,” I said.
Sunny was right. My favorite color was orange. Sunny was always right.

  “Orange it is,” she said, snapping the book closed and smiling. I smiled back.

  In the corner of my eye, I could see the mean nurse’s long face, but I tried to focus on my nice nurse. She told me to lie down and relax, which I did. Then she started talking about how great the cast was going to be. How I was going to be able to swim and take showers and how everybody was going to be able to sign it.

  I lay on the scratchy paper, shaking. Was I really about to get a cast … a real cast? I couldn’t believe it. I had wished for one for so long and here I was getting it, just like that. I wiped my face with my good arm and sniffed. All my sad thoughts from the fish tank disappeared and were replaced with visions of me walking into school with my new broken arm. And since I had broken my arm in two places, I bet that it was going to be one of those really good casts where it included your elbow and went all the way down over your hand so you couldn’t even use a pencil. From the glowing-white pictures, it looked like I had broken my left arm and I actually wrote with my right hand, but still, who cares because I was getting a cast! A giant white—no, wait—a giant orange cast! Then I remembered that you don’t get to walk on crutches if you have a broken arm and my happiness dimmed for a second, but only for a second because, duh, a cast was a cast! Everybody was going to be able to sign it. And everybody included Nicole and Alex.

  “Will the names come off if I get the cast wet?” I asked, a little worried.

  The nurse stopped prepping my arm and smiled. “That is the best part. If you use a permanent marker, you can have all your friends sign your cast and the ink won’t come off in the bath or shower. So you can scrub-a-dub-dub and all those signatures will stay right in place.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “That is so cool.” I giggled.

  She gently wrapped a rubbery bandage around my arm, from my wrist to my elbow, and then got out a roll of long, thin cotton. “See,” she said, breathing lightly on my arm, “this isn’t such a bad day after all. Right?” she asked, winding the cotton around the bandage.