She Means Everything to Me

Sophie could imagine how it had happened. Regent’s Hospital was criminally understaffed at the best of times, and it was a busy summer’s night. She couldn’t be angry at the nurses for something that was beyond their control - and the number of hospital rooms available to the ICU was definitely out of their control.

The nurse that had helped Sophie clamber out of the ambulance was babbling at her now, explaining something that Sophie was too distracted to hear. Her arm was throbbing, the painkillers taking away most (but not all) of the pain of the broken bone. She was trying to focus on anything but the dull ache of a limb she hadn’t thought to love until it was lost.

Fluorescent tubes were buzzing above her head, and a metal trolley rattled and crashed through the swinging double doors. The plastic soles of the nurses shoes were peeling off the linoleum ground with a plastic-peeling sound that made Sophie’s head want to hide in her neck.

And her arm still hurt.

“It’s not exactly a spare room,” the nurse explained, stopping abruptly beside a closed door and reaching for the handle. There was a clipboard in the pouch that was supposed to be empty.

“But it should be big enough for the both of you. She was sleeping when I last poked my head in, and it’s only for a few minutes anyway. It won’t even take an hour, I don’t think. You’re okay with that, aren’t you?”

Sophie’s smile was sickly and thin.

“It’s fine,” she said.

It really wasn’t fine.

But the nurse looked like she hadn’t taken a break in hours, and the last thing that Sophie wanted to be was a nuisance. They stood at the end of a long hallway lined with doors, each of which opened into a single-occupancy room. Sophie had spent enough time running around the hospital in search of her mother to know that these rooms were usually reserved for the terminally ill, or for those whose ailments were not to be observed.

“Come on in then,” the nurse said with a smile, and opened the door with her side. She hovered in the doorway as Sophie squished past her, stepping into the room and looking to the bed. Upon it lay a Girl of around Sophie’s age, with blonde hair that fanned out around Her head to disappear behind Her pillow. Her thin, hospital-issued blanket was pulled high around Her neck, and Her socked toes poked out of the bottom.

“Told you she’d be asleep,” the nurse said, ducking past Sophie to fuss with the Girl’s blanket. She straightened the edges and pulled the sides taut, tucking them into the mattress.

It looked, to Sophie, less like a hosital room than a prison.

“What do I do if She wakes up?” Sophie asked, standing on her toes to look at the Girl over the nurse’s shoulder. She had never slept in a hospital before, but she didn’t think she’d respond well to a stranger sitting at her bedside when she woke.

“She won’t wake up,” the nurse assured, and turned sharply away from Her bedside. She marched out of the room and said, even as the door was shutting in her face, “I’ll be back to collect you in an hour. Just try to relax until then.”

The door clicked shut with a whisper of air and Sophie sighed, pushing her hair back from her face with her unbroken arm. There were two chairs at the Girl’s bedside and she slid into one, stretching her legs out in front of her and glancing around the room. It was almost completely empty - there were no flowers on the bedside, no pitcher of water or stack of cups.

Relax, she thought, and supposed that it would be much easier to entertain herself for an hour if the fall hadn’t broken her phone.

Clucking her tongue she leaned back in her chair, arching her neck as far back as it would stretch. Her arm protested against the position, a twinge just shy of painful, and Sophie righted herself. She hadn’t realised before how connected her body was - she could feel her every move as it affected her arm. Even just tapping her foot jostled the break.

Joan (the receptionist) had tried to call Sophie’s mother, but she would never accept a call from the hospital on her day off. Sophie, she would say, I give six days a week to that job; they’re not taking number seven. Sophie couldn’t blame her mother for wanting a day off, but she wished that didn’t mean she had to sit and wait for her x-rays alone. It was eerie in the hospital, the sounds of sickness all around, and Sophie-

“Hey.”

She didn’t yelp, but she did jump out of her seat. Her arm screamed at the sudden movement, the pain so intense that she forgot for a moment what had startled her in the first place.

It had been the Girl on the bed. She didn’t open her eyes, but She was awake, her eyebrow lifted as though she were waiting for a response.

She said, “Is the nurse gone?”

Sophie stalled. “Um… yes?”

The Girl opened her eyes and smiled. “Perfect. I’ve been pretending to sleep for hours - you have no idea how bored I was getting.”

What? Sophie thought.

She said, “Oh,” and sat gingerly back down, careful of her arm this time, and pursed her lips. The room seemed quieter now that the Girl was awake, and Sophie wished she knew what else to say.

Sophie never knew what else to say.

The Girl was staring at her, a muscle in her cheek twisting and dimpling as though she were grinding the teeth underneath. Hers was a difficult gaze to hold, and Sophie found it easier to cast her eyes about the room instead. She found herself drawn to the Girl’s hand, which had poked its way out from under the covers. There were eight, clearly hand-poked tattoos on her knuckles, and her nails were painted with chipped black polish.

“You don’t say a lot,” She said, and sat up sharply. The blanket crumpled about her waist and she shook the hair out of her face. She rolled her neck and the bones clicked and cracked, as though she really had been lying there for hours. “What are you doing here?”

“They’ve run out of beds.”

“Sucks to be you,” the Girl said. She was staring at Sophie, but she barely noticed. She was looking at the bandages around the Girl’s fragile arms, and at the faint traces of dried blood peeking through them. The Girl made no attempt to hide herself from Sophie’s view, but she did grow still, less like a deer in headlights than a wild animal, poised to attack. Sophie desperately wanted to ask, until she remembered how it had felt to be questioned by the old woman, walking her dog, who had found her at the foot of the tree.

What were you thinking, climbing so high?

Why were you climbing at all?

Sophie said: “You’re avoiding your nurse.”

The Girl shook Her head, and the tension in the room seemed to sigh, relaxing all at once. “Not the nurse,” She said. She pushed a strand of hair back from Her face only to have it fall back again. “A friend of my mother’s has been hovering around all day, keeping tabs on me ‘cause my family can’t. If she catches me awake, I’ll never hear the end of it-”

“Your family isn’t allowed to see you?” Sophie asked, too curious to care if the question was intrusive. Sophie had been longing to see her mother ever since her fall - she had no idea what she would do if her family were so near, but not allowed inside. “Why not? Surely the nurses wouldn’t stop your mother from seeing you if you wanted-”

“I don’t,” the Girl snapped. Her tone was harsh, and when Sophie met Her eyes, they were dark and hard. “I refused to let them see me when I was brought in - that’s why they gave me the private room. I’m not supposed to have any visitors at all.”

Including me, Sophie thought. How could the nurse have brought her to a room that was supposed to be private?

“I see,” Sophie said. She wasn’t sure how to proceed. The Girl had made it clear that she wanted to be alone, but - if that were the case, why would she have revealed herself at all? She could have pretended to be asleep until Sophie was called away again. She must have heard that she would only be in the room for an hour.

“Don’t look like that,” the Girl said, and she reached through the bars on the side of her bed to poke at Sophie’s knee. “I’m not angry that you’re here, I just don’t want my parents interfering with me right now. They’re not-”

The girl was worrying at her lip, biting at a flake of dry skin. Sophie tried to school her expression into something more inviting - open, welcoming. If the Girl couldn’t speak to her parents, or her nurses, then...

Maybe Sophie could finally be of use.

The Girl said, “Every bad mother thinks she’s the best, you know?” She laid her head back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling. “And mine isn’t any different.”

“Oh?” Sophie was surprised. Her relationship with her own mother wasn’t always perfect, but she couldn’t imagine facing something like a hospital visit without her. She couldn’t even picture thinking of her mother as bad. “I’m sorry-”

“Don’t be,” the Girl said. “I’m going to uni in a few months and, after that, I’ll never have to see her again. It’s only a matter of time.”

“Is she really that bad?” Sophie asked, before she could stop herself.

The Girl startled Sophie with a laugh. “Yeah,” she said, grinning a little sadly. “She’s pretty terrible, actually. Here-”

She reached for the tape securing the bandage to Her right wrist and peeled it back. Underneath, Sophie could see that Her arm was covered in thin white lines. Years of self-inflicted scarring climbed towards Her elbow.

“-if she’s so great, would I be doing this?”

Sophie wasn’t sure that the Girl could blame Her mother for that; self-harm was typically a result of depression, or some other mental illness, rather than parental negligence. But then again, surely a loving and supportive parent would have helped their child by now - be that by taking them to therapy, or by removing any razor blades from the house.

Sophie opened her mouth-

“That was a rhetorical question, by the way,” the Girl continued, before Sophie could reply. “I’ve had enough people with no medical expertise try to psycho-analyse me already. I know my own head, and I don’t need to hear your interpretation of it.”

“I wasn’t going to-”

“Yes, you were.”

Sophie inhaled sharply.

“It’s okay, though. I’m not mad at you. It’s human nature to want to fix other people’s problems, I just don’t think you’re in any position to fix mine.”

“Okay,” Sophie said. She wasn’t sure what else there was to offer. She had never been spoken to so frankly before.

The Girl stared at her through the silence, Her gaze slicing through the space between them and daring Sophie to protest.

Sophie would do no such thing.

Instead she held the Girl’s gaze, her face growing warm in reaction to the tension but defiant nonetheless. She wasn’t the type of person to butt in where she wasn’t wanted, but she wasn’t about to cower in silence after she’d been dismissed, either.

She wouldn’t force her opinion on others, but she wouldn’t deny it either.

The Girl’s resolve broke first. Breathing a laugh, She smirked and looked away. “I like you,” She said, pulling open Her bedside drawer and rummaging around inside. She pulled out a phone with a cracked screen and unlocked it with both a thumbprint and a complicated pattern. “Do you want to be friends?”

Sophie startled. “Friends?”

“I don’t have many friends,” the Girl explained, “and you’re not too bad. You can put your number in my phone if you like, and we can be friends.”

Sophie didn’t want to admit that she didn’t have very many friends, either. There were people she sat with at school, but as soon as she was home, that was it for Sophie’s social life - she was all alone again. She took the phone and programmed in her number, then sent herself a text with it. When she handed the phone back, the Girl smiled with all Her teeth, and Sophie was in the process of smiling back when the Girl gasped and threw Herself back into bed. She closed Her eyes and held Her breath, and Sophie was confused until there came a knock at the door.

“Sophie Andrews?”

The nurse addressed the room, looking first to the sleeping Girl and then at Sophie. It was a different nurse from before, her body swallowed by the doorway. Her watery smile didn’t reach past the clipboard held close to her chest. “Your x-rays are ready. The specialist is waiting for you.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” Sophie eased out of her chair and followed after the nurse, who was already in the hall. Sophie had to pitch forward to catch the door before it swung shut in her face.

“Ready?”

Sophie nodded, allowing the door to ease shut behind her and following the nurse down the hall. She readjusted her broken arm and, as she passed by the window into their room, spared the Girl a final glance.

She was looking back.