Sometimes when Alicia watched Deanna interacting with the nurses, other patients, and staff in the hospital, she had to shake her head, amazed at the girl's repeated interpersonal exchanges. Although Deanna rarely volunteered information about herself to them, it seemed that she knew them all by name and knew information about their illnesses, in the case of the patients, and their family members, in the case of the nurses and staff. They all knew her by name as well, of course; she was the star patient, the one who everyone went out of their way to be kind to, in deference to the obvious bandaging of her head and the source of its injury. Every time Alicia saw Deanna around anyone, even people that, as it turned out, she didn't actually know, she was always smiling, always greeting them cheerfully, and never indicating to them that she herself felt anything less than perfectly well and sunny on that particular day.
"Do you ALWAYS have to be so damn personable?" Alicia asked her after standing impatiently through a ten minute conversation Deanna had allowed another patient to drag her into- only after which Alicia learned that Deanna had never seen the woman, whom she had assumed her to know previously, ever before in her life. "Do you ever just keep your head down and keep on moving and just get to wherever the hell you're going without stopping to listen to the life story of everyone who shuffles and drags their oxygen tanks over your path?"
Of course, Deanna had turned to look at her with that wide-eyed, earnest look Alicia was becoming so accustomed to, the look that never failed to make her roll her eyes and scoff inwardly, if not aloud, every time it was turned in her direction. "I don't have anywhere that important to be, Alicia. And it would be very rude to keep walking when someone wants to talk to me. People get lonely, you know? I wouldn't want to be mean to someone who needs someone to listen."
"I don't know how the hell you have time to be lonely, the way you bounce around chatting up anyone who has ears," Alicia had grumbled as she followed, slouching, after the younger girl.
But even as she said this, she knew that it wasn't the truth. She had seen the way Deanna's hospital room filled up with flowers and stuffed animals, notes and cards from those who wished her well, most of the ones she had read declaring that they were praying for her, that she was in their thoughts. And yet Alicia had spent enough time at the hospital with Deanna now to know that not a single one of those people had so much as picked up the phone to call her, let alone actually summoned up the caring, or perhaps the nerve, to come visit her in person.
She watched Deanna move and interact with others in a lively, lighthearted fashion, always smiling, always speaking in a cheerful inflection, telling everyone she encountered that she was doing well. Alicia, by contrast, slouched and clomped along behind her, giving everyone who looked at her the same irritable scowl or blank stare, and her hands rarely left their crossed position over her chest, certainly not extending out to touch or shake someone's hand. She wasted little energy and expended no effort, and she rolled her eyes that Deanna did.
And yet it was, perhaps, only Alicia who could see that Deanna's smile didn't meet her eyes, that sometimes when she turned away from the person she had just spoken with so warmly, a small shiver passed over her, and for just a moment before her smile had resumed, Alicia could see the screaming in her eyes. She could see the thoughts racing in her head through the surface of her gaze, and she knew that Deanna, unlike her, had not yet learned to numb.