The Bad Crowd

Chapter 2b -What's the word for that color?

How long until mom woke up?

I shook my head. Another swift kick to the side of my knee, pushing my shoe out from under it and spilling me sideways onto the floor.

The tile was cold. Slick. Real. I was finally feeling. And the feeling?

It was anger. It was pain. It was irritation and frustration and “What is your problem?”

I pushed myself back up, almost to my knees, when I felt his breath on my skin.

He was there, nose close enough for a bead of sweat to drip from his nose to mine. Gross. “What, your mom forget to teach you manners? This is the problem with brats like you. I bet the stupid b***h hasn’t given you a good smack your whole damn life.”

How f*****g dare he?

“Shut your goddamn mouth.”

His face scrunched, and he flinched back just enough for me to get to my feet. I took the opportunity, taking every inch he gave before he could realize he was talking to a ragged child in a hospital waiting room again. “You don’t talk about my mother like that.”

“Oh, I think I did,” he said, his sneer returning. “In fact, I think—“

He dropped.

I didn’t realize I’d kicked him square in the balls until I felt him collapse against my leg.

I wasn’t sorry.

I threw the empty cheese doodle bag at him as I stormed past, shoulder-checking the half wall on my way.

I barely felt it, but the exhaustion didn’t return. I did.

When the man with the radio on his shoulder jogged up to me, I saw him. He didn’t pop out of nowhere, he didn’t suddenly appear in front of me. No, I watched him leave the little guard shack. I watched his eyes lock on me. I saw him pull the radio toward his mouth, mutter something, and then move toward me.

I saw him.

I was back.

When the man got to me, I saw his expression.

I’d expected him to be stern and angry, but instead he looked like he was trying not to burst out laughing. The moment he opened his mouth, I knew I was right. “Goddamn, that was-,” he clapped a broad hand over his mouth, coughed around a laugh, and cleared his throat. “I mean, Sir, you can’t be out here if you're gonna be starting fights.”

Behind me, I could hear the man working himself into an absolute rage. His voice had the rip and scream of the siren that had been outside my house, but the guard’s amusement was infectious.

Despite everything, I smiled a little.

“I didn’t.”

The guard swallowed another laugh, and with another shake of his head, he tried to at least pretend to be serious. He cupped his hand around my shoulder, herding me away and toward the door he’d emerged from.

I let him.

“For the record, and ya know I prob'ly shouldn't tell ya this, because bad habits and whatnot, but I don't think you hit him hard enough. He's got too much breath in 'im and all of it’s hot air." He glanced over his shoulder at the man, who was being helped off the floor by a flurry of nurses.

I wondered if the one from earlier was among them. Why couldn’t I tell?

Both of us winced at the inhuman scream from behind us. “I want him in jail! Tonight!”

“Sir, that is a child,” a nurse snapped.

“You think I care? Juvie then! That little s**t—“

The guard cursed under his breath, putting up a finger, “Hold that thought,” before running back. He talked to one of the nurses, nodded after a moment. “Sir, you need to leave the premises.”

The man stopped cold, and I felt something in the back of my head click like a clock wound too tight.

“You can’t, this is a hospital. You can’t kick me out.”

“You? Yeah, I can absolutely kick you out, Alan. Now, look, we talked ‘bout this. You can’t be starting s**t with kids.”

“He was in front of the machine!”

“Yeah, and you were a d**k. Do I need to call my friends?”

The two of them stared at each other, ‘Alan’ still clutching his groin and the guard reaching pointedly for his radio, before the balance shifted and Alan snatched something from one of the nurses before storming out.

The dark beyond the doors swallowed him up.

It’s not safe outside at night.

Good.

The office was small, one wall covered in screens showing different parts of the hospital. Hallways, doors, the waiting room, though the rooms themselves were on another bank which the man powered off as he gestured to a free swivel chair. I sat, the creak too loud, and the humor of the Alan Debacle leeched out into the air, leaving me strangely cold again. My finger tapped, knee bouncing, and as I watched six or seven doctors on the screens, all I wanted to do was scream at all of them to get to my mother. She was the most important one. She was the one they needed to be saving, so why were they laughing and talking and running to rooms that weren’t hers?

Actually, which one was hers? I frowned, eyes dropping, and tried to remember what number they’d told me. It wouldn’t come.

Just as the clicks of the analogue clock behind me started feeling like needles under my skin, a voice came from my left.

“So… the name’s George.”

What was I supposed to do with that? I looked at him, and saw that his hand was extended toward me.

I thought of Manny.

After a moment, I took his hand, and something felt familiar about it, but he didn’t trap me there. He didn’t look like he had won some secret battle. In fact, he seemed to relax a little as I said “Eric.”

“Eric. Got it.” He squeezed my hand a little. My feet felt a bit more real on the floor for a moment.

“So, Eric, what started all that?”

I dropped his hand, and he leaned back in his chair. “You saw what happened.”

“Yeah, but I wanna hear you tell me.”

I didn’t. The thought of rehashing the reason I’d been sitting on the floor felt like a dangerous drop into something I still didn’t know how to look at. “He insulted my mother,” I said, already bracing for the inevitable question.

Instead, after a sigh, George said, “What an asshole. He’s always doing s**t like that, you know.”

“Why do you keep letting him in, then?”

“We’re a hospital. Can’t refuse service to anyone. Can still kick him out once he starts up, though, and he always does.”

He laughed, startling me, “Never seen anyone hit him back that good, before, though. I’ll have to see if I can get ahold of a copy of the tapes.”

I smiled a bit, but the idea of him having a copy of it didn’t exactly fill me with joy. I had the impression that I wouldn’t recognize the boy in that video.

“I’m kidding. Mostly.” George turned back to the cameras, which was where I ended up looking, too.

We watched them together in almost comfortable silence for a few minutes before a crackle from his walkie made both of us jump.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

I looked toward one screen, the one overlooking the front desk, and saw a man talking into the walkie, feeling a weird twisting drop when his voice came out of George’s shoulder again.

George looked at me. I nodded weakly. He said, “Yeah, he’ll be fine. I’ll be right out.”

“Yeah, I see ya,” he was still talking as he headed out of the security office frame on the monitor, and into the Lobby one.

It was a very strange sensation to watch them walk across and try to figure out where I was in relation to different perspectives. I would have to try and find the cameras when I got out there again.

I watched them talk silently in one camera, George taking a few steps away and rubbing the top of his bald head, before turning back and gesturing angrily at the end of the hall. I watched his shoulders slump, his arms find his hips, his head shake, and when the doctor looked directly at the camera, likely knowing I was watching, my stomach dropped.

George looked with him. I was glad the camera wasn’t good enough to make out the look on his face, but I could almost feel it through the screen anyway.

By the time they got back to the room and the door opened, my skin had come alive, tiny insects crawling under my skin and through my pores, like all of me wanted to turn into electricity and leap into the TV. I didn’t even let him talk. “Is she okay?”

The man paused.

"Is. She. Okay?" I asked again, more pointedly. That chant of “Not a dream. Mom is hurt. I’m Eric. Mom is hurt. Not a dream. Hospital. Mom is hurt. Not OK. Mom is hurt,” started up in my head again.

He hesitated, shifting from side to side. I heard him say something under his breath that sounded a lot like "Couldn’t have gotten literally anyone else to do this…" And then louder, "I'm sorry, son, but I'm afraid not."

Something cracked, creaked inside my head, and all that came out was a strangled “What do you mean?”

He wouldn't look at me. Instead, he seemed far more interested in the worn clipboard, with its dented edges and the slinking sound of the chain connecting the pen to the metal top.

Before the nervous and uncomfortable doctor could speak, the guard came around him and shot him a scowl, before cutting in, "Jesus, Louis, make it sound like the woman dropped dead, why don't you." He looked at me. "It's not what he's making it sound like."

“I told you he should hear it from someone else!” the doctor blurted.

“And I told you, you’re the Doctor! Tell him!”

“Tell me what?” My throat hurt from the force I used to spit the question into reality.

The doctor took a breath, and then the words spilled out so quickly that I wasn’t sure all of them were English. “The injury appears to have resulted in permanent paraplegia secondary to thoracic spinal trauma.”

“What does that mean?” I looked helplessly at George, and George sighed, “It means she broke her back, and she’s not gonna walk again.”

Whatever had cracked before broke fully at those words, but I was almost too tired to react to it. My eyes hurt, like I wanted to cry but there was nothing left, but I couldn’t even feel why I wanted to cry in the first place. “Never?”

The doctor was still talking, something about how there were treatments that may offer some amount of recovery, but at a sharp look from the guard, he cleared his throat and just said “We must… consider the possibility that… no. Probably not.”

I nodded like that made perfect sense, but nothing about this made sense. I wasn’t sure anything would ever make sense again.

"Would you like to see her?"

I didn't. This was all my fault. I wasn’t sure how, but I knew it had to be. How could I face her? I nodded anyway.