Alone: My Cursed Fate

Time to Heal

*Vienna*

The hot sun beats down on my skin. I hear the muffled voices of people around me, the voices slowly get clearer and clearer.

"Would you stop staring, Travis? You are such a perv!", a girl angrily whispers.

"I am not staring", a boy whispers back.

"Yes you are! Give her your shirt or something!"

"I am not going to give my lucky t-shirt to some dead chick."

"She isn't dead. Look, she is waking up."

I slowly open my eyes. The sun is high in the sky, I blink as my eyes adjust to the light. The girl's face comes into view as she leans over me. She has brown hair tied back into a French braid and brown eyes. She pushes her black-rimmed glasses up the bridge of her nose with her index finger as she leans over me. "Hey, are you alright?"

I try to respond, but my throat is so dry that it just comes out as a squeak. "Travis, get her some water."

A tall, lanky teenage boy with curly red hair and a face full of acne comes into view and hands me a bottle of water. I graciously take it and gulp it down. I hand it back to him and he hands me a gray Avengers t-shirt as he diverts his eyes and his cheeks redden. Confused, I look down. Oh! I quickly try to cover myself and grab the t-shirt, pulling it over my head. It just barely covers my ass, but it is better than nothing.

"Thank you", I say, my voice coming out in barely a whisper, "Um, where am I?"

"Sedona, Arizona. We were out hiking when we spotted you off the trail. My name is Chloe, this is Travis". I just nod in response, a little in shock from the events of last night. "Did you get bit by a rattler, or... a few of them?", the boy, Travis asks.

"Oh, um... Yeah, I think so...", I look down at the vampire bites. Thankfully, they are no longer bleeding and the venom must have passed out of my system by now.

"You should probably get that checked out. Those things are poisonous.", the boy continues.

"I'm sure I will be fine. I'll just get going... thanks".

The girl continues to try to convince me to go to the hospital, telling me that I will die if I don't. I don't think that she is going to let it go, so I agree to let them take me to the hospital. I am either going to have to ditch them before I am seen by a doctor or I'll have to figure out what I am going to tell the doctor because these obviously aren't rattle snake bites. We have to walk a mile back to their car. My feet are bleeding by the time we reach the vehicle from walking barefoot on the rocky ground.

We drive in awkward silence. I am sitting in the backseat while the girl is driving. The guy awkwardly asks, "so... why were you naked?", my face goes beat red, not really knowing what to say. The girl smacks him on the back, "You can't just ask people why they were naked, Travis!". His face gets red again in return, "Oh, uh, sorry. My bad."

Thankfully, the conversation changed after that. I learned that they are cousins. By the smell of them, they are both human. He is visiting her from Ohio and is a freshman in high school. She goes to high school here in Arizona and is a senior. She is really sweet. If the circumstances were different, I think we could have been good friends.

We arrive at the hospital and all three of us get out of the car. Looking at Travis standing there shirtless in jeans and tennis shoes, I tell them that I can just go in by myself and I can find them afterwards to give Travis back his t-shirt. He tells me I can just keep it. After thanking them for their help and for the t-shirt, I wave my goodbyes and head into the hospital.

I intended to just walk into the hospital until they drove away and then leave, but a nurse quickly approached me the second I walked in the door. A few hours later, I am sitting in a hospital room after the ER doctor was obviously very confused by my bites and decided I needed to be admitted for observation. They found that I was incredibly anemic (no surprise there), so they started a blood transfusion. A nice nurse named Sharon has stopped by a few times to check on me. Sharon insisted on helping me shower, which was weird, but I was grateful to be able to thoroughly clean my body and hair, a luxury for me now. After my shower, Sharon cleaned and bandaged my wounds which were not healing because of the vampire venom. She tried to get me to change into a hospital gown, but I convinced her to just give me some scrub pants. Now I am currently curled up in a hospital bed in my new oversized Avengers t-shirt, teal scrub pants, and yellow grippy socks.

Life could be worse. Yeah, I almost got eaten by a vampire, but I am still kicking. I have clean clothes, a warm bed, a hot meal to be delivered to my room shortly, and unlimited crappy television. I am getting sick of the cooking show that I was watching, so now I am channel surfing. I watch a couple minutes of a hallmark movie but can't stand the lady crying over her cheating fiance, so I switch the channel again; hallmark movies all have the same plot anyway. I click to the next channel again and, just my luck, Twilight comes on. I start hysterically laughing at the absurdity of it all, but my laughter soon turns into violent sobbing.

I cry because of the trauma of last night and the fact that I was so close to seeing my family yesterday. I cry for the life that I once had and may never get back. I cry because I miss my parents, my friends, and Matty. I cry because my life is meaningless- I will never chase my dreams because I will always be too busy running. I even cry for stupid reasons like the fact that I once loved the movie, Twilight, and I will never see it in the same way again.

Once my eyes are red and puffy and snot runs down my face, I finally stop crying. I think that I have been holding that in for quite some time and it is a relief to finally get it off my chest. I quickly switch the channel before I start up all over again. I settle on Spongebob because no one can ever be sad while watching Spongebob. After a feast of steaming beef stew, a dinner roll, some lime jello, and apple juice, I fall asleep to the beeping of all the machines around me.