Mia the Magnificent (14 page)

“Buzz. Wrong answer. Try again, Preppy.”

“Zoë?” I rasped. My throat felt as if someone had rammed a tube down it. And then I remembered—someone
had
rammed a tube down it.

“Hi, Mia,” Eric said as he picked up my hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “How do you feel?”

I blinked away the last shadows of gray creeping around my brain. “What are you doing here?”

“We’re here to see you,” Eric said. “I finished my set-work early, and thought I’d see if you were free to hang out for a belated birthday
celebration. So I called your house this morning, and your mom said you’d been in a car accident. I picked up Zoë and we came right over.”

I tried to smile, but it hurt too much. “Thanks for coming.”

“Are you kidding me?” Zoë said, scooting her chair closer to my bed. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world. You look like the living dead. Your face is freaking huge! I wouldn’t have known it was you if the nurse hadn’t told me. And you should see what your hair looks like! The blood oozing out of your scalp is—”

“I think she gets the point,” Eric said.

“Do I really look that bad?” I asked, tentatively touching my face.

“Yeah,” Zoë said, “but don’t worry about it, because you smell even worse.”

“I thought I heard voices,” the Hello Kitty nurse chirped as she opened the door and scooted into the room. “How are you doing, Mia?”

“I’m really thirsty,” I rasped.

“That’s to be expected,” the nurse replied as she filled a glass with some water and handed it to me. “Now, don’t go drinking this in one big gulp. You need to take tiny sips or you’ll end up getting sick all over that cute boyfriend of yours.”

Blushing through my bruises, I sipped the water. “Uh, he’s not my boyfriend.”

“Oh,” the nurse said with a knowing tone. “So, this must be the guy you almost kissed right before you got in the accident.”

Choking on the water in my mouth, I shot the nurse a look of disbelief. Wasn’t there supposed to be some kind of nurse-patient confidentiality rule?

“What guy is she talking about, Princess?” Zoë asked as I wiped the spilled water off the front of my hospital gown. “I know it wasn’t Eric, because he was with me last night.”

“Oops,” the nurse said apologetically as she took the water from my hand and placed it back on the tray. “Guess I shouldn’t have said anything.”

Fighting the urge to roll my swollen, black eyes at her, I turned to Eric and tried to do some quick damage control. “She’s talking about Tim. But I promise there was a really good explanation why I almost kissed him.”

“If this has something to do with stage crew,” Eric replied, “I’m going to have a hard time believing it.”

I eyed my morphine drip, wondering how many clicks of the button it would take for me to slip back into that comfortable haze of sleep. After all, if I couldn’t even explain to myself why I almost kissed Tim, how could I explain it to them?

Zoë, sensing my desperate desire to escape, put her hand over the button. “Spill it, Preppy.”

Knowing I was no match for Zoë even in the best of health, I sighed. “Tim didn’t believe I didn’t like him anymore, so he wanted me to prove it by looking him in the eyes when I said it. So I took my eyes off the road for a second, and that’s when the dog ran in front of us.”

“And the kiss?” Eric said.

“There was no kiss,” I stated with more force than necessary, hoping the urgency in my voice would cover up how close Tim and I had come to a meeting of the mouths.

“So,” Eric said, “you and Tim aren’t back together?”

“No, we’re not.” I shook my head. “I told you, it was all a big mistake.”

“That’s it?” Zoë complained. “Jeez. Only you, Princess, could take a kiss and crash story and turn it into the snooze of the century.”

“I don’t know,” Eric said, reaching out to squeeze my hand once more. “I kind of liked the story.”

Zoë stood up and headed for the door. “This is getting way too sappy for me. I’m going to the emergency room to see if there are
any good freak accident victims down there. Maybe I’ll get lucky and some guy will have a nail through his hand or something. You coming, cuz?”

“I’ll meet you there in a little while,” Eric replied. “I think I’m going to hang out with Mia a bit longer.”

“I’ll take that as my cue to leave,” the nurse said, digging out a black sharpie from her scrubs pocket and handing it to Eric. “What do you say, Mia? Does this guy get the honor of being the first to sign your cast?”

I nodded, thinking how stupid I had been to almost let Tim come between Eric and me getting together someday. After all, Eric was my own private superhero who gave me hope and happiness. The only things Tim had ever given me were a broken heart and a broken leg.

I’d just found a really good documentary about the hidden secrets of the
Leave it to Beaver
cast when my nurse, now wearing bright blue Garfield scrubs, walked into my room.

“It’s time to get up and at ’em, Mia,” she said brightly.

“Up and at ’em?” I replied, slightly annoyed at having my show interrupted just as they were about to reveal how Barbara Billings-ley (a.k.a. June Cleaver) didn’t really wear pearls while cleaning her house. “In case you’ve forgotten, I have a broken leg and a sprained ankle. There’s no chance of me getting up or at anything.”

“Mia,” my mom said, looking up from her laptop, “don’t be rude.”

“Don’t worry about it, Mrs. Fullerton,” the nurse replied. “All the patients get a little surly after being stuck in bed for a couple of days. That’s why we need to get this girl upright and moving.”

As my self-preservation instincts kicked in, I forgot all about the Beaver and his dirty little secrets. “What do you mean, get moving?” I said. “I can’t get out of this bed. I’ll fall.”

“No, you won’t,” the nurse said, grabbing me under the armpits. “It’s my job to catch you.”

I relaxed a little as I looked to my mom for support. After all, she was the most overprotective mother on the face of the planet. There was no way she was going to let this lady pull me out of bed.

“Do you want me to grab an arm?” my mom asked.

“Mom!” I exclaimed, feeling like an injured baby animal abandoned in the wild. “Do you want me to get hurt again?”

“No,” my mom answered, setting down her laptop, “but I do want
you to get better. And the sooner you get up, the sooner you can go home and I can get back to work.”

I hated it when she made sense.

My mom walked over to my bed, and both she and the nurse grabbed an arm and slowly pulled me upright. The second my head left the pillow, all the blood drained out of it, and the room started spinning like I was on an out-of-control Tilt-a-Whirl. Certain I was going to pass out, I clutched their arms even tighter.

“That’s always the toughest part,” the nurse said. “Now, as soon as the lightheadedness goes away, let us know, and we’ll get you into the wheelchair.”

I took a couple of deep breaths. When I finally felt like I wasn’t going to throw up, I opened my eyes and looked around, amazed at how everything looked so different from this angle. I wondered if this was how babies felt when they sat up for the first time.

“Mia,” my mom said, bringing me back to reality, “my arms are starting to go numb. Are you about ready?”

I eyed the wheelchair pushed against my bed. “I’m ready.”

The nurse and my mom hoisted me from the bed and placed me in the chair. Setting my broken leg into the footrest, the nurse cheered, “You did it!”

“I didn’t do anything.” I said, a bit grumpy at how utterly fatigued I was by the simple act of sitting up. “You guys did all the work.”

“Hey, you got out of bed, which is a great start,” the nurse said. “And now that you’re up, how about if I wheel you into the bathroom for a sponge bath?”

I couldn’t believe it. In only three days flat, I’d gone from the total independence of getting my driver’s license to the utter dependency of having someone bathe me.

“Ow! You’re hurting me!” I said a few days later as my mom propped my cast up on the coffee table. “Where’s the morphine when you really need it?”

“All that morphine is the reason you were in the hospital for six days,” my mom said, plumping up a pillow behind my back. “You were so constipated. Thank goodness you finally went poo last night after the nurse gave you a suppository.”

“Mom!” I yelled, my eyes darting toward Lisa across the room. “TMI!”

“Sorry. I forgot you don’t like me talking about your potty experiences in front of your friends.” Gathering up the dirty dishes scattered across the coffee table from my lunch as she walked out of the room, she said, “Since you have Lisa here to entertain you, I think I’m going to spend some time writing. I keep getting more and more ideas for my novel.”

After she left, Lisa said, “Don’t worry about your mom telling me about your digestive tract. I know all about bowel movements after surgery. In fact, after researching your case, I might even become an orthopedic surgeon.”

“I thought you were going to become a psychologist or chemist,” I said, trying to find a comfortable spot for my rear end. After a week of doing nothing but sitting, it was about worn out.

“Haven’t you heard of a triple major?” Lisa said, unzipping her backpack and pulling out a pile of books. “So, how was your last night in the hospital?”

I groaned. “Horrible. Alyssa stopped by to ‘talk’ again. And I swear I came this close to throwing myself off the bed and breaking my other leg just so I wouldn’t have to listen to her ramble on.”

“Come on! She couldn’t have been that bad,” Lisa said.

“No, she was worse. She said she felt sorry for me because of the accident, so every night she stopped by to cheer me up by telling me all about her cats. And when I say all about them, I mean all about them. She has three of them, you know: Fluffy, Sabrina,
and Tinkerbell. And they are just soooo cute. Fluffy dances when the radio is on, Sabrina loves to play with rolled-up socks, and Tinkerbell changes the channel on the remote. They are soooo clever, too! And let me tell you about the time they all got tangled up in a yarn basket. You see, Fluffy is soooo mischievous and Tinkerbell is a daredevil, and Sabrina—”

“OK!” Lisa held up her hand to stop me. “I get your drift.”

“But the worst part was that I was trapped! It was like I was stuck in some sort of cute... kitty... story... hell!” I said as I fidgeted, trying to find a spot on my bottom that wasn’t sore.

“Well, at least you’re home now, where you can finally get some privacy,” Lisa soothed.

“Privacy?” I scoffed. “I wish. I can’t get to my room upstairs, so my parents moved my bedroom to the office on the main floor, which has a glass door. Plus, I still can’t go to the bathroom by myself, and this morning, my dad had to help me get dressed because my mom had to get back to work. My life has become a spectator sport.”

“Um, maybe we should skip the talking,” Lisa said, opening up one of the books and spreading it on the table, “and just get started on your assignments.”

“I’m really not in the mood,” I said as I reached for a couch cushion and stuck it under my behind, hoping to ease some of my discomfort. “I mean, I just got home this morning. Can’t they wait?”

“But you’re already a week behind!” Lisa said, frowning. “You don’t want to wait too long or you’ll never catch up.”

“Isn’t there some way you can maybe do a few of them for me?” I said, deciding our couch cushions must be made of bricks. “I mean, just until I feel better.”

Lisa stared at me like I’d just told her I’d held up a dozen banks. “You want me to cheat for you?”

“Not cheat,” I replied. “Just do my assignments for me until I get back to school.”

“But that would be dishonest.” Lisa pursed her lips disapprovingly.
“In all the years we’ve been friends, you’ve never—”

I angrily chucked the cushion onto the floor, giving up all hope of ever being comfortable again. “Forget it. I’m sorry I asked.”

“Me, too,” Lisa replied curtly.

We sat in silence for a few moments, glaring at each other, until the pain overrode my desire to pout. Gritting my teeth, I asked, “If it’s not too inconvenient for you, could you hand me those pills on the table over there?”