Sunny Sweet Is So Not Sorry

by Jennifer Ann Mann

  “No,” I agreed. “Maybe not.”

  The mean nurse hovered in the background.

  “Nice hat,” he said.

  I ignored him.

  Dr. Sonya Sweet

  My cast was awesometastic! It was bright orange and went all the way from almost my shoulder down to my hand, just like I hoped it would. It was thick and hard and just so, so real. I have a broken arm! I broke my arm in two places! I can’t wait to get out in the world and show everybody.

  Shawna got done casting it in fifteen minutes. That was the nice nurse’s name, Shawna. And she wasn’t really a nurse, but a resident. That meant she was pretty much almost a doctor. She was putting my cast in a big blue sling when there was a light knock on the door.

  “Come on in,” Shawna sang.

  The door opened and in walked a small woman in a white coat followed by an even smaller figure in a white coat … Sunny Sweet!

  My body jolted, and I slipped off the bed.

  “Whoa,” Shawna laughed, catching me. “It’s only Dr. Dorney. She’s the attending physician, so she’s going to take a quick look at my work and then you’re on your way home.”

  Sunny and I stared at each other while the doctor and Shawna said hello and began to talk about my arm, or rather, Maria’s arm.

  Oh my gosh, I just stole someone’s broken arm!

  Dr. Dorney introduced Sunny to Shawna and me as her “little assistant,” and Shawna introduced me to the doctor. I think I said hello, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Sunny. Neither of us knew what to do. Sunny recovered before I did.

  “How did you break your arm, Maria?” she asked. I could see the corners of her tiny mouth holding back a smile.

  “My little sister pushed me in front of a car,” I said. Shawna and the doctor gasped.

  “Just joking,” I mumbled.

  The doctor called Sunny over to see “my” X-rays. I tried to escape by telling Shawna that I had to use the bathroom.

  “Let’s wait until the doctor is finished,” Shawna said.

  “I see she broke both her ulna and her radius,” Sunny said. Turning to me, she added, “You must be in a lot of pain, Maria.”

  “I’m fine.” I coughed.

  The doctor picked up my chart from the small desk by the X-ray board. “It’s been about three hours since you came through the ER, Maria,” she said to me. And then she turned to Shawna. “Have you given her anything for the pain, Shawna?”

  “I don’t need anything,” I told them. “I feel super great.”

  “I’ve read a lot about pain management,” Sunny said. “Isn’t it best to keep on a steady dosage to keep the pain from returning, Dr. Dorney?”

  The doctor looked at Sunny like she was one of the Seven Wonders of the World instead of the freak of nature that she was. “I think that Dr. Sonya Sweet is correct,” said the doctor.

  “I’m on it,” said Shawna, coming at me with a needle.

  “No!” was all I got out before she stuck me in my good arm.

  My mouth fell open, and I looked over at Sunny. She backed away a little and giggled.

  “That will take care of the pain for a while,” said the doctor, “although it may make you a little sleepy.”

  A warm feeling ran through me like someone had covered me in a soft, cozy blanket. Shawna rolled a wheelchair into the room, and the doctor and Shawna helped me into it. Shawna then wheeled me back out into the waiting room. I tried to catch Sunny’s eye, but she was busy playing with a piece of X-ray equipment. I guess the joy of poisoning her sister didn’t last as long as the actual poison did.

  Shawna positioned me next to the fish tank. “I will be right back,” she said. I waited for Sunny to follow me out of the room, but she didn’t. After staring at the closed door between Sunny and me for five minutes, I began to forget why I cared whether Sunny came through it or not. My cast sat in my lap. I ran my hand lovingly over it. It was still a little wet, but Shawna said it would dry in about half an hour. At least I still had my cast. It was so orange, and I mean really orange.

  The swimming fish caught my attention. I watched them until my eyes started to water, then I let out a giant yawn. Sunny once told me that scientists learned that animals were attracted to certain colors, and that sharks were attracted to the color orange. I made a note in my head that I better not go swimming in the ocean in the next six weeks. That is how long Shawna said I would get to wear it. Six whole weeks.

  To test the shark theory, I clunked my cast up against the glass of the fish tank to see if any of the fish noticed. Before I could tell if they liked the color orange, I was interrupted by a lady walking into the waiting room, followed by a girl my age with her arm in a splint and a blue sling just like mine. The girl looked pale and was moaning, and the lady seemed a little angry. She glanced around the room, and then with a sigh sank into one of the seats. The girl sat down next to her. She sniffed a couple of times and then started moaning again. I knew exactly who they were: Maria, who was born the same day of the year as Sunny, and her mother. I slid down into my wheelchair.

  “Look at that brave little girl,” the mother said to Maria, motioning over to me. “She isn’t whining about her arm.” The mother gave me a tight smile. “And her arm looks like it’s been broken much worse than yours.”

  I choked on a breath of air that was trying to get down into my lungs. And then I couldn’t stop coughing. It sounded like I was coughing inside a tin can.

  I needed to get out of here. I tried to wheel my chair with my good arm, but all I did was turn myself in a semicircle so I totally faced Maria and her mother.

  Maria glanced up at me. I could tell she wished I would disappear in a puff of smoke. I kind of wished I would too. Maybe she somehow knew that this was actually her broken arm I was wearing.

  Somewhere inside my head a voice was shouting at me to get out of there, but that voice didn’t seem to have control over my legs. Weirdly, I wanted to close my eyes and take a nap, even though I knew that if Shawna came through that door and saw Maria and her mother, I was going to be in huge, huge trouble.

  The door opened, and out walked Shawna with juice and crackers in her hand for me. She looked over at Maria and her mother. “I’ll be with you in just a moment,” she said. She put the crackers in my lap and tried to hand me the juice, but my arm wouldn’t move from the arm of the wheelchair. I blinked at Shawna, waiting for her to realize what was happening, when there was a pinging of a few notes over a sound system followed by a woman’s soft voice, “Code yellow, department 66, room 452. Code yellow. Code yellow, department 66, room 452. Code yellow.”

  Shawna stood next to me until the woman over the sound system had repeated the message. Then she put my juice next to the fish tank, gave my head a quick pat, and hurried from the room.

  I swallowed a giant breath of air, and relief washed over me.

  Once again the pinging sounded overhead. “Great, another one,” I thought. Hopefully this would keep everyone busy until I could figure out how to use my legs again and I could get out of here.

  The same female voice came back over the sound system. “Would Marsha Sweet please come to the front desk on the main floor of the Shapiro Building? Marsha Sweet, please come to the front desk on the main floor of the Shapiro Building.”

  My face flushed red, and I started to sweat. I looked over at Maria and her mother, but of course they just looked back at me. They didn’t know that I was “Marsha.”

  The door opened again. I closed my eyes and waited for the world to end.

  “Let’s get out of here,” whispered a voice that wasn’t Shawna’s.

  I opened my eyes.

  Sunny.

  I’d never been so happy to see my little sister in all my life!

  The Fix

  Sunny pushed me out the door and away from poor Maria and her mean mother. We headed down a hallway, and then we made a right and headed down another. My neck felt like a rubber band, and every time I blinked I had to pull
my eyelids back open again.

  “Where are we going?” I mumbled.

  “Don’t worry,” Sunny said, “no place bad.”

  “I wasn’t worried until you said that!” I said.

  A lady with a plastic name tag swinging on a string around her neck walked toward us. She slowed her high-heeled step as we approached each other. “We’re just out for a stroll,” I said, as a tiny bit of drool made its way over my lip and down my chin. And then I yawned so wide and long that my jaw just about cracked in two. When the yawn was finally over, the lady was gone and we were sitting in front of a row of elevators.

  Again, the soft notes played over the sound system, followed by the lady’s voice. “Would Marsha Sweet please come to the front desk on the main floor of the Shapiro Building? Marsha Sweet, please come to the front desk on the main floor of the Shapiro Building.”

  “Th-they’re afterrr usss,” I slurred, closing my eyes and leaning my head back in my wheelchair. I wanted to care that they were after us, but I was just so tired.

  “Don’t worry. I’m going to fix everything.”

  “Nooo!” I shouted, but only in my dreams. Because I was now definitely, mostly, and unfortunately asleee …

  * * *

  “It pinches,” I said.

  “I’m fixing it,” said Sunny as she loosened the strap on my helmet.

  “I don’t want to go,” I whined.

  “Stop complaining,” my mother said. “Just think—you’re going to be the very first fifth grader in space! What a special gift your little sister is giving you.”

  Sunny strapped me down into her rocket and then lit a fiery torch. “Good-bye, Marsha,” she said, smiling.

  “Nooo!”

  I sat up, sucking in a giant gulp of air like I’d just come up after a really deep dive into a pool. I wasn’t in a rocket. I wasn’t blasting off from Earth. I wasn’t exploding into a million pieces.

  It was a dream … just a dream. I laughed out loud—the sound of my laughter bouncing off the walls and coming back at me. I was alone in a dark room lying on a hard bed. Where was I? Maybe this was a dream too.

  The door opened, and Sunny peeked in.

  “You’re awake,” she said.

  “Where are we?”

  “The basement of the hospital,” she said.

  “Huh?” I scooted off the bed, noticing the cast on my arm. And then it all came back to me—Mrs. Song on the bike, the ambulance, Calvin, my arm, the lady on the loudspeaker, and Sunny wheeling me away.

  I stared hard at Sunny. She had that look.

  “What did you do?”

  “Now, don’t be mad, Masha,” she said, taking a step backward.

  “Sunny … what did you do?” My hands flew to my head. I felt hair. I felt flowers. I felt itchy and damp. I felt nothing different.

  “You didn’t do anything?”

  “I couldn’t dissolve the glue,” she said, her skinny little shoulders falling an inch. “I tried, Masha, I really did.” She stepped all the way through the door, holding her hands behind her back.

  “What’s behind your back?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Sunny,” I growled.

  She glanced over her shoulder. “It’s just a simple pair of levers hinged at the fulcrum,” she said.

  “Sunny,” I demanded, “what is in your hands?”

  She pulled out a large pair of scissors.

  “Sunny!”

  My shout made her drop the scissors. “I was going to try to cut them off. You weren’t even going to notice.”

  “I would have killed you,” I said. “Let’s go.” I grabbed her by the elbow. The sleep had felt good and I was no longer groggy. “We’re getting out of here.”

  “What about Mrs. Song?”

  “We’re going to go down and get Mrs. Song and then we’re going home. Where’s Mrs. Song’s hat?”

  Sunny handed me the hat from off the counter, and I looked around the room for a mirror. There was none, so I stepped in front of a small, silver paper-towel dispenser pinned to the wall over the sink to see myself and pulled Mrs. Song’s hat on. And then I yanked it off with a scream.

  “Sunny Sweet! What did you do?”

  “I told you not to get mad,” Sunny said.

  “Why is my hair green?”

  “Well, first I tried acetone, but that didn’t work. So I found bleach, thinking that—”

  “Stop!” I said. “I don’t need to hear about your evil scientific methods.”

  I gazed into the towel dispenser. My hair was shamrock-shake green.

  I turned to Sunny. “You have to fix this!”

  She picked up the scissors.

  “Not like that.”

  “Masha, let me cut them out and then we can dye your hair back to brown. You’ll never be able to tell this even happened.”

  I looked back into the paper-towel dispenser. A giant leprechaun looked back. “Okay,” I said, giving up. I slowly climbed back onto the bed that I’d woken up on.

  Smiling, Sunny dragged a stool over to the table and switched on a light over my head. Her skinny little arms loomed in front of my face and I could hear her short, excited breaths in my ear. Her fingers filtered through my hair and I felt her choose a flower. There was a glint of metal from the scissors as they moved toward my head, a moment of silence, and then there was the horrible crunching of scissors meeting, and slicing through, hair. And then there was a tiny sting. “Whoops,” said Sunny.

  “Ouch!” My hand flew to my head, forgetting that it had a heavy cast attached to it. The weight of the cast made me lose control of the speed of my arm, and it socked me right in my eye, hard. Silver sparks floated inches from my pupils … or in my pupils, I couldn’t tell which, and I slid down onto the bed with a moan.

  When I turned my head, I saw a tiny bit of blood on my hand. My blood!

  I jumped up, my head spinning, and clomped like Frankenstein’s monster over to the paper-towel dispenser. My mouth fell open. “Ahhh,” I howled. I now had a huge bald spot on the top right side of my head, along with a small cut by my scalp, and worst of all, a very fast-forming black eye!

  I was a monster. I was Sunny’s monster.

  “It’s a very small avulsion,” Sunny said. “Let me try again. I promise not to cut you this time. Let’s call that strike one.”

  I didn’t answer. I gazed into that silver dispenser at myself in horror.

  “That’s a sports metaphor,” Sunny said. “Strike one.” Like I cared about sports after what she had just done to me.

  “This can’t get worse,” I whispered.

  “Maybe it can,” said Sunny. “They keep calling you over the loudspeaker. I’m pretty sure security is searching for you.”

  I sighed and rolled my head back, looking up at the ceiling.

  “Let’s just go home, Masha,” she said. “We can take the bus. I can look up the bus number right now. And we can call Mrs. Song and tell her we’re going home.”

  “You’ve had your cell phone with you the whole time?”

  “I always have my cell phone,” she said.

  I leaned against the table and ran my fingers lightly under my throbbing eye, wiping away the tears. I knew that I had only one hope left, and that was my medical barber.

  “No, Sunny, we’re not going home. We’re going to the front desk on the main floor of the Shapiro Building, and I’m going to face the music.”

  “Facing the music was what soldiers did when they were being dishonorably discharged from the army,” Sunny said. “They would play drums at the discharge ceremony and make the dishonored soldiers walk past them. Are we discharging ourselves?” she asked, her giant blue eyes blinking up at me.

  “No,” I told her. “We’re checking in.”

  Being Marsha Sweet

  Enough was enough. I had ten different shades of daisies glued to my head, green hair, my arm in an orange cast, and a black eye. I was like some crazy nightmare rainbow.

 
I put Mrs. Song’s hat back over my head and crammed tissues into the side of it to stop the bleeding from where Sunny nicked me. And then I marched us down the hallway, following the signs to the Shapiro Building. We crossed over a little bridge that took us above a street and past a bunch of people. Nobody stopped us, but some of them followed us with their eyes as we passed.

  Once we got to the Shapiro Building, finding the main lobby was easy, but crossing the expanse of brown-tiled floor to the giant desk in the center wasn’t. I froze about twenty-five feet out. I swear I could hear those drums that Sunny talked about pounding inside my head.

  “What?” asked Sunny, stopping alongside me. “Do you want to run?”

  I did want to run. But I knew that I couldn’t. My feet started walking toward the desk even as a voice deep in my flowered skull shouted, “No, no, no!”

  Sunny grabbed my hand and held me back. “Come on, Masha, the door is right there.”

  I looked over to where she was motioning. I could see the blue sky and the trees outside the front of the hospital. It was weird that today was still today. It felt like we’d been running around this hospital for three weeks.

  “Let’s just leave,” Sunny begged. “The bus stop is right out front—I checked.”

  “You can’t go around doing whatever you want, Sunny. You have to follow the rules sometimes,” I told her.

  “I do follow the rules. I’m following the rules of gravity right now. You don’t see me floating around in this lobby, do you?”

  I rolled my eyes. I never knew what she was talking about. I started toward the front desk again.

  “Wait!” Sunny whispered, holding my arm. “I know I can figure out how to get the glue to dissolve once we get home, Masha.”

  I looked down at her. I so wanted to believe her. She got excited. She had me. “All I need is my chem set C3000, and …”