Chapter 8

I got a lift to the hospital with Mikael on the Tuesday afternoon, having thought about the guy in the coma unit who lay alone in the corner of the room without a name for the entire day at school. After the dream the night before I found it difficult to call him “John Doe” in my mind, Morpheus had replaced it with a resounding echo even though I knew that it couldn’t possibly be his name. I had clearly watched The Matrix a few too many times.

The ward was buzzing when I arrived. Apparently there was a new addition to the coma unit – a twenty two year old who had driven her car into a brick wall after her fiancé told her that he was actually gay. At first I thought that she had driven into the wall because she couldn’t bear to be without him, a bit dramatic I won’t lie, but then I heard that he had decided to tell her his true sexual orientation as she drove them to their wedding rehearsal. The tactless fiancé lay in the morgue downstairs, in retribution for his error.

After being filled in by the sister on duty, Doc put me to work making sure all the patients were comfortable and helping the nurses turn the coma patients. We came to a halt beside the new addition’s bed. She would have been beautiful had her face not been covered in a patchwork of bruises and cuts. A blonde, slender woman with sharp features and a well toned body, it was surprising that her fiancé had been gay at all.

“How come she’s not up in ICU?” I asked the nurse, puzzled.

The nurse tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear before her gaze met mine. “Miss Clark was saved by an airbag and sustained only bruising on her body. Her head received most of the trauma which we are able to deal with most efficiently here in the coma unit. ICU wouldn’t know what to do with a sleeper; to them she would just be a waste of a bed.”

It was sad to think how cold and callous the system was but there was nothing I could do. We finished making Miss Clark presumably more comfortable and moved on to where ‘John Doe’ lay in peaceful slumber, his chest rising and falling in rhythm with the beeping of the machine next to his bed. The nurse muttered something about having to shave his rapidly growing beard before she went to fetch a razor and some shaving cream, leaving me alone with him.

“Hey.” I whispered to him, feeling a bit awkward. “This may sound a bit strange but I’ve been dreaming about you.”

His hand lay by his side and I unconsciously took it in mine, entwining our fingers. Strangely it felt like a natural thing to do and I didn’t let go when the nurse returned carrying a bag of toiletries and a book.

“Doc asked if you could please read again. He doesn’t have time to send someone else in to do it.”

I took the book from her, the same Sherlock Holms book from the previous week, and set it down on the bedside table. She glanced down at my hand interlinked with his but said nothing. Instead she squirted a liberal amount of shaving cream onto her fingers and smeared it over his stubble before she applied the razor in quick, careful strokes. Within seconds he was clean shaven and the excess shaving cream had been wiped off by a fluffy white towel. The nurse smiled with pride at her masterpiece and made her way back to the main ward to see to the rest of the patients, leaving me alone once again.

Reluctantly, I turned and faced the rest of the coma unit.

“I hope you all like Sherlock Holms.” I said aloud and perched myself on the bed beside ‘John Doe’, still holding his hand as I began to read.

Once again, I got lost in the book. The twists and turns enthralled me and I got caught up with Holms and Watson as their lives were put in danger once again, a madman with a musket in hot pursuit of the duo. As Watson rounded a corner, having lost Holms in the alleys of London, the madman launched himself from the shadows and cornered him. In the midst of the building suspense I felt something squeeze my hand and launched myself off of the bed and into reality as I got a fright. It took me a few moments to realise that the hand that had been squeezed had been intertwined with John Doe’s moments prior to my unscheduled flight. I peered down at him, wondering if I had imagined what I had felt – after all, it had happened at the crux of the story.

“Did you squeeze my hand?” I heard myself ask him, as if I blindly expected a reply.

I held his hand again, anticipating my hand to be squeezed again but was sorely disappointed when nothing happened and so I chalked it up to being purely my imagination running wild and free with me. I continued to read for a few more minutes but couldn’t get back into the book as I was concentrating more on my hand than the printed words on the pristine white pages.

In the car on the way home I questioned whether or not I should tell Doc what I had thought happened, instead I asked him what the purpose of my reading to the patients served.

“Well, Callie, it’s quite experimental in Carmel at the moment but in Russia they found that reading to patients with head trauma, especially to those who were in comas, encouraged a faster recovery rate. In fact, you can see the spikes in their brain activity in the listening and processing areas of the brain whenever you open a book. We still don’t have solid proof of the benefits in American society but it doesn’t hurt to try.”

Doc continued to speak about other experimental procedures that were being tested throughout the hospital, his voice turning into a dull drone as I watched the scenery fly passed through the window. A few minutes later I said goodbye to him as I climbed out the car, waving as he drove off into the sunset – another cheesy film moment.

“Mama, Baba, I’m home!” I called from the front door as I hung up my bag on the coat rack in the entrance hall.

The smell of freshly baked cookies assaulted my senses and motivated me to make a detour through the kitchen to see what I could scavenge from the cookie jar before dinner. I found my mother pouring glasses of milk and placing them on a tray with a pile of her famous choc-chip cookies.

“Ah, there you are.” she placed an extra glass on the tray and filled it with milk before handing me the tray. “I sent your friends up to your room. Please tell them to tell their parents that they are staying for dinner.”

I was a little puzzled but did what my mother said, kicking my closed bedroom door with my toe until someone opened the door from the inside. Robert stood grinning like an idiot as he held the door open for me, remembering his manners a few seconds later and taking the heavy tray from me.

“Look guys, service and a smile.” he chuckled at my confused expression.

I entered my room to find Kayla and Violet lying on my bed with their textbooks open, Josh sitting on the floor sketching on the back of a notepad and Ricky standing by my window. The scene would have been completely ordinary if not for the appearance of Ricky. He may have revealed how he had actually been saved by my lie to Mr Porter and the school nurse to his jock and cheerleader followers, but we were far from friends.

“Ooh! Milk and cookies, definitely my favourite Georgiou tradition.” Violet sprung up from the bed to claim her share in the treats.

“My mother says you’re all staying for dinner so you’d better call your folks.” I said as I sat down on the end of my bed with my milk.

“Already did.” Kay piped up as she chewed a cookie. “Your mom never changes. I told Ricky she’d tell us to stay for dinner but he didn’t believe me.”

I turned and looked at Ricky, seeming more subdued than I’d ever seen him.

“Which brings me to ask, why are you here Ricky?”

Josh put down the pencil he had been using and turned to me. “He came to me after class today and said he’d heard some stuff about Kayla being blackmailed by the English stud muffin, so I thought we’d set some things right.”

I felt my eyebrows rise in surprise. No one would have known about Kay and Mr Peterson unless they had been eavesdropping.

“Ok, I admit. I heard snippets of what you guys have been saying over the past few days and I saw how each of you reacted to Mr Peterson. Josh gave away the game when I asked him if Mr Peterson had done anything wrong, but I don’t understand why you don’t just tell the principle and counsellor. They would sort it out without a problem.”

Kay jumped up and glared at Josh before she confronted Ricky. “Actually, I can’t. They will involve my parents and my parents thought I had stayed with my aunt when I went for my cousin’s twenty-first. In reality, I stayed over at Daniel Peterson’s flat because my aunt had thought I was going to stay with friends and didn’t have room for me in her house. My cousin backed me and there was no trouble, Daniel even slept on the couch, but my parents will be furious if they know the truth and that’ll be it for my dream of going to design school. They weren’t very enthusiastic about the idea in the first place and they’re searching for an excuse to say I can’t go.”

There was silence for a moment before she continued.

“Plus, if my mom finds out that I didn’t stay with my aunt I’ll be sent to a military-styled boarding school in Louisiana! She even has it picked out already.”

We all cringed in thought and I noticed Josh turn a shade paler, obviously imagining dainty Kayla scrubbing bathroom stalls with a toothbrush. He had more experience with the military style of life thanks to his aunt and uncle, but unlike him, Kayla did not suit it.

“Gees, I’m sorry I even suggested it.” Ricky was clearly trying to recover from the lecture, obviously never having seen this side of her.

Luckily for him, my mom chose that moment to call us to dinner so he was saved from any further embarrassment. It took half the night for my house to be evacuated by my friends, but I was used to that. What I wasn’t used to was having Ricky Ballios sitting on my bed and blending in with my circle as if we had all been best friends for years. When he finally said goodnight he put his arm around my shoulders and gave me an awkward side-hug which Kayla roughly translated into “he’s so into you”.

I didn’t really need a guy in my life who would just complicate things... my life was already filled with complications. Kay was the last to leave, as usual, walking the few short blocks with Robert to where he lived and where she had parked her car. I watched as they made their way down the street before returning to the house.

I could hear by father swearing in Greek in the study and chuckled to myself. I leaned against the doorframe of my father’s haven and watched him scribble furiously all over a piece of paper with his favourite red pen – the one which was guaranteed to seep through onto the next page if you pressed hard enough, therefore displaying your displeasure in blatant detail.

He mumbled something about the idiots he was forced to lecture before turning over the page, not even noticing me as I crept closer. He slammed closed the wad of paper which had been stapled into a booklet and dumped it onto a pile before picking up the next piece of work destined for his scrutiny. Curiosity got the better of me; I felt the burning desire to see which part of my history had ensnared some poor student enrolled in my father’s class. I picked up the neglected assignment and turned it so I could read its title.

There on the front, one word stood out amongst the rest. That word was “Morpheus”.