When I wake up things are missing: the branch from my ribs, the hair on the right side of my head, my sister’s voice. There are things to take their places: a chest tube, catheter, stitches, and the serious face of a woman sitting by the side of my bed. She doesn’t know I’m awake yet, and she’s reading a yellow file that’s resting on her crossed legs, her nose crunched in concentration and her eyebrows stuck in a permanent worried position.
I’m not wearing the neck brace anymore but I quickly find out that moving my head isn’t the best option. My scalp feels stretched tight, as if there wasn’t enough skin to make ends meet but they sewed it together anyway. The music of my body is silent, but I can see a heart monitor by my bed, the sonic waves it makes erratic in places.
“Sasha?”
I turn back toward the woman, amending my earlier assessment down to girl when I hear her voice. It’s hesitant and unsure, with none of the conviction of an adult.
“Yes?” I ask, ignoring the feel of the pillowcase against my bare scalp, shockingly cool.
“I’m Amanda Cargrove, with family services,” she explains.
“Oh,” I say, closing my eyes. “That’s nice and everything but my parents have jobs. I’ve got insurance. The hospital doesn’t need to worry about how all this will be paid for.”
I make a small circle with my hand to indicate “all this,” an IV trailing in its wake. But even if I could make a big gesture it wouldn’t be able to cover everything, the squad, the helicopter, all the worried faces hovering over me that need to be compensated for their time.
I’m probably in a lot of trouble.
Amanda clears her throat. “I’m actually with mental health services,” she says.
“Oh,” I say again, but nothing else follows.
“Would you like to tell me about what was going on right before your accident?”
No, I would not like to tell her about the boy I was meeting who is not the boy I am dating, or the friends who called me a bad word. I would not like to tell her about the panic in my chest at the thought of Isaac leaving, angry with me, or the sound of glass breaking when it connected with my skull. I would not like to tell her about losing first chair and who knows what else in the small period of time it took for me to fall twenty feet.
I would not like to tell her these things, so I say nothing and stare at the blank gray screen of the TV mounted directly across from my bed. I can see myself reflected there, badly. I’m amorphous, a vague lump with no clear outlines of where I begin and end. I don’t know how much of that is because of the surface, or because that’s what I really look like right now.
Amanda flips over a piece of paper. “Your first responders said that you fell out a window. Can you tell me if that’s true?”
“Are you even supposed to be talking to me?” I ask her, the first synapses waking up inside my head to fire in irritation. “I’m a minor.”
“I have permission from your parents to be here,” Amanda says. “They’re very worried about you, Sasha.”
“Where is here?” I ask, glancing around the room again. I appear to have it to myself, which is a blessing. I don’t think I could stand listening to someone else’s noises with only a length of curtain in between us.
“You’re in the trauma ward at Stillwell Hospital,” she says. “Life flight brought you here from county. They didn’t have the necessary equipment to—”
“Put me back together again?”
Amanda only looks away from me, back down at the file balanced on her knee. She’s even blushing a little, like maybe she shouldn’t have said that.
“How old are you?” I ask her.
“Twenty-two,” she says, as if the gulf between seventeen and twenty-two is a vast thing I can’t possibly comprehend.
“Did you always want to be a social worker?” I ask.
“We really should be talking about you instead,” she says, eyes still on the papers as if they might provide a question for her to blurt before I come up with another one.
“What kind of a degree do you have? Where did you go to school? How long does it take to get certified in what you do?”
I know the answers because it’s something Lilly considered. They are: associate’s, community college, and not long. Someone with that kind of pedigree is not going to sit upright while I’m on my back and grill me about my personal choices.
Amanda clears her throat, going for a do-over. “Your parents know I’m speaking with you, and they’re very concerned about your fall.”
She says fall like I’m supposed to correct her.
Someone who is being evasive would concoct a story of how it happened, impossibly, while brushing their hair, tripping on piled clothes, or while performing some complicated dance move that built up speed right before meeting resistance. But I’m not a liar, and I’m not ashamed of what I did.
Because I didn’t do it.
“I didn’t fall out the window; I jumped,” I say, watching as her pen scratches across the file still on her knee, the writing a sloppy mess she’ll have to type up later. I could offer her the little table on wheels by my bedside, meant to hold nothing more substantial than cups of Jell-O. But I don’t.
There’s a knock on the door so tentative it has to be a nurse and not a doctor. Amanda looks to me for approval before giving permission for her to enter. This nurse is wearing scrubs with superheroes all over them, a mix of DC and Marvel that would have Heath declaring blasphemy if I didn’t shoot him a death glare first. He and his friends have been banned from geek philosophy in my presence.
There’s a second stab in my middle, like the tree branch might have scraped across organs before they took it out, microscopic cells rebuilding what Mother Nature damaged in my fall from grace.
“Are you sure that I’m okay?” I ask the nurse, her mouth opening in no doubt what was going to be an obvious statement like, “Look who’s awake,” as if she or Amanda have narcolepsy and were surprised to find themselves conscious.
Instead of answering, the nurse glances to Amanda for guidance. To her credit there’s no good way to handle that question. I have more things inside of me right now than the last time Isaac came over, and by the feel of it, my right ear is about half an inch higher than my left. Also the only person who has entered my room so far is a mental health worker so the safe answer probably is that no, she’s not sure I’m okay. But you don’t just say that to someone.
You also don’t just call people female dogs, but I’ll bring that up with the interested parties later.
“How do you mean, Sasha?” Amanda asks, sparing the nurse.
I wave the question away, suddenly tired. My head feels like a half-full water balloon, the kind you can squeeze really hard on one side but the other bulges out, ready to burst. I can open only one eye, the other swollen and heavy, my pulse a distinct beat coursing through puffy flesh. The nurse smiles at me and hooks a bag of something clear into my IV.