Aerius

Koukonei

[u][b]Chapter 1[/b][/u]
The heart monitor beeped feebly – each little jump promised me my life. If only I had known it would be taken away.
[i]My name is Scarlet. Scarlet Redbird. I’m fifteen years old and I was the most popular girl at school – everyone loved me, and I loved everyone in return. I was always the smartest in my class, and the teachers favoured me the best. With my high cheekbones, piercing green eyes and golden hair, I was the object of desire for many of the opposite sex, but my only interest was in my best friend – Taylor Mearison. He was as beautiful as I was – in a manly sort of way, and I loved him. I loved him, but I never did have the heart to say anything. It was agony. Three years ago, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I didn’t tell anyone, as I didn’t want to scare them – and anyway, the doctors got rid of the tumour. Or so they thought. Five months later, that tumour started to form again, and I – being stupid and clueless – didn’t bother to check. When I did finally discover it, it was in the very late stages, and so I was rushed into hospital, which is where I sit now, awaiting my latest test results. Hoping and praying that everything was going to be alright. Boy, was I wrong.[/i]
I listened to the usual hustle and bustle of the daily hospital routine, and wished it would all just end. Everything. The cancer, the noise, the horrible back-less cotton hospital garments, and the constant smell of illness that lingered in the air, like a deadly fog just waiting for someone to inhale its nauseous stench.
My mother was sleeping in a chair by the window, and her low, rumbling snores were starting to get on my nerves. I tossed and turned a few times, before settling on my side – one ear pressed into the soft foam bedding, with the other turned towards the noise that was annoying me so much. From this point of view, I observed the room.
Places are always so weird when you view them with one eye partially squashed into fabric – they begin to be distorted by this fuzzy obstruction in front of your pupil, and soon, it seems as if you can see [i]through[/i] stuff. As crazy as I sounded inside the empty dome that was my mind, I rambled on, eyeing the various artefacts of hospital-life that were scattered about my room like toys.
There was of course, my heart monitor - which was still beeping repeatedly – some strange device with wires and stuff attached to it, a funny little bag full of fluid that, for some reason, wasn’t attached to my arm – I mean, come on! Isn’t it supposed to be like those cliché hospital movies, where they have all the doodads and whatnots attached to them?
And then a thought struck me that made my heart monitor’s beeps dissolve into one long [i]beeeeeeeeeeeeeep[/i], and my body set in a rigid sitting position. Y’know how in those movies, when someone’s ill? Most of the time...it’s a happy ending, which meant that I...I had a nine out of ten chance of dying.
Because this wasn’t a movie. This was real. The cancer was real, and my death would be too...
I shook myself, cursing my name and my mind for thinking such pessimistic thoughts, and then flopped down onto my back, staring at the bare ceiling with remorse in my eyes and self-hate in my soul.
“Dammit, God, why did you have to do this to me?” I groaned, whipping out my pillow from underneath my head. My blonde head of hair – with skull, skin and organs attached – fell to the foamy softness of the hospital bed, and I muttered a half-hearted [i]ow[/i], dropping the pillow over my face to try and block out [i]reality[/i]. I admit, it was a bit of desperate optimism, but I was always known to be a dreamer – maybe this time I wouldn’t be that crazy, and I’d pull that old-people-smelling pillow off of my face and there I would be, back at home, with no trace of cancer in my body, with my favourite nightgown on and a bowl of popcorn by my side as I watched re-runs of [i]Friends[/i], cuddling my favourite teddy bear – Otis, who just happened to be a whale.
I lay there imagining that scene as vividly as possible – right from what Phoebe and Monica were arguing about, to each and every stitch in Otis’s scruffy body. I guess I forgot where I really was, because for the first time since being in that hospital, I [i]smiled[/i]. Crazy, right?
That was how I was lying when the nurse came in – pillow smooshed up against my face, grabbing invisible bits of popcorn and ‘stuffing’ them under the pillow into my waiting pie-hole. I could’ve called it Heaven.
Apparently she had a word for it too.
[i]Insanity.[/i]
I mean, geez! The way she reacted, I might as well have pulled out a gun and started firing at all the hospitally-technology-stuffs.
“OH MY GOD!” was the first thing she said – well, screamed.
That caused my pillow to explode into the air like some sort of squishy white rocket. It also awoke my mother. She screamed even louder.
They continued screaming like this for a moment or two, until I finally let the air out of my cheeks – that invisible popcorn’s just so damn addicting.
“DON’T SCARE US LIKE THAT!” My mother started off on one of her signature ‘I thought you were this...’, ‘I thought you were that...’ rants, and I suddenly started groping for my pillow – asking whatever the heck was up there to give me just a [i]moment[/i] of peace.
It took a few moments until everyone calmed down. When everything was silent in the room, the nurse walked over and picked up the clipboard hanging at the end of my bed. She glanced at it, then nodded and [i]mhmmmm[/i]’d – I mean, what is that? What does that mean anyway? Does that mean ‘good’? Because if it does, I’m sure I deserve at least a bloody ‘WOW!’ - that’s a perfectly good clipboard, that is!
“She needs chemo.”
My hands flew to my head in a split-second – I really think I hold the record for that. What is the record anyway? 0.06 seconds? Could beat it any day! – and I cut off the babble inside my head to listen more intently.
“W-what? No. No, no, no, noooo!” I battered my feet against the bed, clutching my hair tightly.
“Sorry, hun. If you want to live, you’re going to have to deal with it.”
I didn’t like her attitude. Not one bit. The way she just casually said that sentence – it chilled me right to the bone. I was dealing with a woman who knew her stuff – I was dealing with someone who had seen deaths before. She wasn’t bothered by it anymore. It was just another part of her job – seeing those cold, lifeless eyes, and watching as the bodies get taken away to...I dunno...The hospital’s big creepy place of doom with all the bodies and the skeletons and stuff? Yeah. That works. So, she watches as the bodies get taken to this creepy thing with all these bodies and dead stuff and she doesn’t even[i] care[/i]. I wonder if she has a husband. He must be pretty freaked out by it all. He could die and she’d just say ‘oh well’ and skip off down to the local pub for a drink. Yeah...I can imagine it now.
[i]“Hey Shirley!”
“Hey Carolyn, anything new happen tonight?”
“Husband died.”
“Harsh.”[/i]
And then they’d just keep on drinking their pints, as if it was no big deal! Man, those must be some messed up women. Mind you, I’d need to be pretty messed up to even imagine a scene like that, so...
Snapping back to the present, I realised the nurse had been standing there staring at me while I made all those disgusted faces. Wow, she must think I’ve got a brain disorder too.
“...Will it hurt?” I asked, raking my fingers through my hair – trying to imagine what it’d feel like when I had nothing.
“Nah, not really.”
“Oh, okay then.” I quite liked the idea of having a breeze on my head – I mean, who doesn’t? After all, it does get quite sweaty up there...Ew. And anyway, I’d save [i]buttloads[/i] on shampoo. I figured the negatives out-weighed the positives.
“We’ll set you up for a consultation with Doctor Marks tomorrow, and he’ll tell you what needs to be done.”
With that, the nurse was away, barely leaving time to clip the clipboard back in place – hah, geddit? Clip the clipboard? No? Nevermind then.
My mother had been sitting in the corner watching the whole time, and she hadn’t spoken since her last outburst when I was hugging a whale that didn’t even exist – at least, not in the hospital.
“My baby, my poor little baby...” she cooed in a creepy kind of way – and I mean, more than your usual mother-creepiness, I’m talkin’ about some morbidly deformed cooing, the way you might speak to a child if they were dying, which, in hindsight, gave her every right to speak like that – the only fault was, I wasn’t either a child, or a baby.
“Mum. Please.”
“Of all the people,” she stood swiftly, letting the magazine she had been poring over fall to the floor, “it just [i]had[/i] to be you...Oh, God, why me? Why us?”
I feared she was on the verge of a mental breakdown, so I decided to try and reassure her.
“Nah, mum, I’m fine. I’ll be getting chemo, and the cancer will go away. Easy peasy – I’ll be fine in no time, you just wait and see!”
My mother turned her gaze towards me, and gave me a look that was a mix between disbelief and sympathy. She knew I was lying – anybody could tell I was. I knew this wasn’t going to end well. It was just a feeling. A gut reaction to the very first news of the tumour.
In an attempt at pulling the wool over her own eyes and lying to herself about the outcome of this cancer, she nodded, and smiled.
“You get some rest now, you have that consultation with Doctor Marks tomorrow – wouldn’t want to be sleepy during it, now would you?”
“No, I wouldn’t want to miss any important information like [i]my hair falling out[/i]!”
She stared at me one last time – her expression unreadable, and then breezed out of the room – probably to go prowl the gift shops and see what other useless crap she could buy for me.
So far, I had gathered a collection of a singing card, a tiny teddy bear – which, okay, yeah, I loved, but still useless! – and a balloon, which obviously wasn’t very good quality, as it deflated the first day she got me it, but I kept the deflated piece of rubber by my bedside, along with the teddy and the card.
I would probably have had more cards if anyone at school knew I was back in hospital, or that I’d ever been in hospital in the first place – I decided to not tell them, and lie about where I was. According to what they knew, I was lounging by a pool somewhere in Spain, getting brain freeze from ice lollies and sunburn from the ever-present solar buddy up there in the sky.
I lay there for a while, before deciding to try and reach over and grab the magazine my mother had been reading.
I ended up in an awkward half-in, half-out position, with my legs still in bed, and my upper body stretched to its limits, reaching to the floor in some sort of crude snake-impression. My finger tips managed to brush the edge of the magazine, and I used this to my advantage.
[i]Brush, slide, brush, slide, brush, slide. [/i]
Finally, when it was close enough to reach, I picked it up and slapped it down onto my lap.
I noted the fact that it was a teen magazine – my mother either bought it for the free make-up that usually came along with it, or she had hoped to give it to me, but had gotten so bored that she ended up reading it herself.
Flicking open the pages – starting at the real-life section, because, man, I loved those stories – I began to read. Headlines jumped out at me, like:
[i]Help, I’m a Teenage Mother![/i]
Or
[i]Drug Wars: The Battle to End Teenage Drug-Use[/i]
“Yuck,” was all I could say when I saw some of the ‘teenage mothers’ – they all had that same hair colour, dark brown with bleach blonde dyed through it. It always did look tacky to me. They were wearing tracksuits in a multitude of colours, and barely of them had any teeth – what was still remaining was terribly rotted.
It did raise the question of, “Who the [i]hell[/i] would want to do [i]them[/i]?”
Obviously someone equally as horrid.
I flicked through the magazine absentmindedly – not really paying attention to what I was reading , and eventually, I drifted off to sleep – and began dreaming about weird things like cats. With afros.
At least [i]they[/i] didn’t need to worry about losing their hair.

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CC?

Srsly.
I need it.
D;