My Stupid Girl (33 page)

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,
which 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.