“For the pain,” she says.
Pain. It was an echo when I woke up, a voice already spent in an empty room. But it’s been growing while I talked to Amanda. I settle into my pillow as my vision grows fuzzy, noticing the tiny professional frown on her face when the nurse glances at my heart monitor.
“What—” I begin.
“I need you to rate your pain on a scale of zero to ten,” she says, pulling a rectangle of cardboard from the plastic holder at the foot of my bed.
The diagram she’s holding shows a series of faces, the one on the far left the ubiquitous happy face seen on everything from denim jackets to bumper stickers. His smile flattens as the faces evolve on their journey to the right, heating from a mellow orange to a burning red, mouth a wide O of pain, eyes squeezed shut like bird tracks in the snow. I can’t help but notice that the red face with the number ten underneath it has a worn spot on its cheek from years of people touching it, maybe mistaking it for a cherry scratch and sniff.
“Five,” I say blithely, settling on the one that seems as if it would smell like peaches. That face is mildly concerned, but it could be distracted from its pain by decent conversation or maybe some chamber music. It has no bearing whatsoever on how I actually feel. Zero is Isaac under the trees and ten is a bad name from my friends, in stereo. But they don’t have that diagram here.
The nurse makes a note in her chart, and Amanda in hers. “We’ll do this again in about ten minutes to see how you’re reacting to your pain meds and adjust accordingly,” the nurse says.
But I’m already reacting, sliding down the irritation scale of red to the sunny haze of yellow, ten to zero in sixty seconds, a C minor scale even though it only has eight notes and this is definitely a double-digit process. I’m at a negative two on the pain scale and sliding into the black when I remember Amanda is still in the room, and maybe she’s okay.
“I’m high as fuck,” I tell her.
I smile and falter on the last step into unconsciousness, until I wonder why I haven’t seen my parents yet.
Or Heath.
Or Isaac.
Or Brooke.
Or Lilly.
Or if there’s anybody left who gives a shit.
A crack of light in the darkness, the creak of hinges.
I’m awake, what should be the monotonous tones of my heart monitor nearly on tempo but not quite. It will never be fully black in this room, I realize. Too many machines, shiny with reflective surfaces. Too many lights blinking. Red. Green. Orange. Stop. Go. Slow. The light widens, a form slipping through.
“Mom?”
Funny that I know this from her shadow, a less dark patch in the room, vague yet familiar.
“Shh . . . ,” she whispers, moving toward my bed. “I thought you’d still be asleep.”
It feels like I might be. My tongue is as heavy as my eyelids, but they’re all pulling toward a central point—it stuck to the roof of my mouth, then sliding inexorably down.
“Slept enough,” I say, managing to flick one finger toward the windows. It’ll never be dark out there either, I suppose. Headlights. Lamplights. Streetlights. Halogen. Fluorescent. Radiating.
“How are you feeling?” Mom asks, flipping on the lights. She drags a chair to my bedside, its legs scraping on the floor. I close my eyes against the sound, and my head tilts to the side, tiny pinpricks of hair already growing back in.
I want my hair back. I want my scalp in the right place and my eyes both able to open all the way. I want there to be something in my middle instead of nothing, a blank cavity that only negative things swell from. I want there to be an easy answer like when I was a kid: a Band-Aid, some ice cream. I want to cry.
That’s how I’m feeling.
So I just do, because I can now. My mom is here, and somehow that makes me feel safe and terrified at the same time. Safe enough to cry but terrified I won’t be able to stop. Tears slide out from under my swollen eyelid, the pressure of more liquid adding a new vibration to the constant thumping in my head, the barometer of the pressure inside of Sasha Stone rising even higher.
“Honey, honey, honey,” Mom says, pressing as close as she can to me without getting hands and arms and fingers tangled in all my cords. I cry into the crook of her arm, my pulse a hot thing in my face, pressed against the coolness of her skin.
I finally pull back, dried out, lips cracked and tongue still sticking to everything inside my mouth as if it were flypaper. As I do, there’s a new sound, like packing tape being peeled off the roll.
This new sound came from me.
“Whoops,” Mom says as one of my machines begins to beep hysterically. She reaches down the front of my shirt as if it were the most normal thing in the world, and presses a sticky pad back in place, covering an irritated patch of skin where it had been before.
“What?” I look down at my chest, fascinated. I’m dotted with them, pale gray pads with wires that spool down my front to crawl out from under my gown, winding their way around each other back up to the heart monitor.
“And Dad always says I’m disconnected,” I joke, and it’s Mom’s turn to cry. She does it quietly, holding my hand while I take inventory now that I’m fully conscious.
There’s a tube in my nose, an IV in the top of my left hand, and while the heart monitors on my chest aren’t exactly in me, they’re definitely violating my privacy.
“Can I have a mirror?” I ask Mom. She wipes away her last tear using my hospital gown, and shakes her head.
“Not yet.”
“That bad?”
“Yeah it’s . . . it’s pretty bad, Sasha.”
“The nurse said she’d be back in ten minutes to check my reaction to the pain meds,” I tell Mom.
“You had a reaction, all right,” Mom says, smiling a little. “I didn’t think you knew some of those words.”
“Oh . . . was it . . .” I try to remember, but those moments must be kept somewhere else, stored away for Shanna. “Was I bad?”
Mom waves away whatever potty mouth I grew while medicated. “It doesn’t matter, honey. You were out cold by the time the nurse got back. Dad and I were here, and that girl from the county . . .” She fades out, like someone popped a mute in her horn.
“The social worker,” I finish for her. “Amanda.”
“The medics called her in because they thought you . . .” She doesn’t finish, eyes searching my face like maybe I’ll volunteer a word that isn’t suicide, something much closer to the sane, well-adjusted daughter she thought she had.
I don’t say anything.
“We’ll get you a real therapist, honey. Someone older, with more experience.”
I think about Amanda and her ink-stained pants, the little sore in the corner of her mouth where she poked her tongue while she was thinking. Then I think of a lined face, a wood-paneled office with rubber plants and leather-bound books. A place where I’m not in charge and can’t outwit anyone.
“I want Amanda,” I say.