Chapter 11
I died on a Monday.
It was 9:52 PM.
There was no rain beating dramatically against windows and no thunderous crashes from the clouds; no jagged forks of lightning illuminated a sad and quiet room. The sky did not cry for me. Nor did my family. My father had come to the hospital earlier to pick up my siblings. He's told them that there was no sense in waiting. Their presence would not prevent Death from claiming me. He had not bothered to inform my mother where I was all day.
One nurse briefly wiped her eyes, feeling sorry for me. But it turned out she had an eyelash stuck there, anyways.
Riku, Tidus, and Wakka in the waiting room had not gone home when their parents called and asked them to. Tidus' father had always taught him crying was weak. So instead of shedding tears he sat in an angry and brooding silence, glaring at a floor tile. Wakka tossed a rubber bouncy ball into the air, caught it, squeezed it hard. Tried to coax Tidus into saying something.
The third of my friends– he hasn't cried a single tear since he was 4 years old and fell down a flight of stairs. That night, he sobbed.
Riku cried for me. No one else did.
I died on a Monday.
It was 9:52 PM.
Seven minutes later, with doctors and nurses shouting and running about, with surgeons wiping their brows from intensive surgery, and the beeping of a heart monitor, I was alive again.
I didn't want to be. I didn't much deserve it either.
A nurse told the three teens in the waiting room that they were far from short of miracles, but that I was still in critical condition. Wakka prayed to God, thanked Him. Tidus, never quite the religious type, he just rolled his eyes when he saw Wakka praying, but secretly he told God that if He even existed, He was a good being. Then he thanked the doctors. Riku kept crying.
Just a moment or two after the nurse left the room, it occurred to him how much he hated my dad.
When I wake up, stabilized and in a different ward of the hospital on Wednesday, my parents are both at work. My siblings and friends are at school. Flowers and get well cards on the bed stand beside me are actually the only signs that people care. There's a young nurse setting up another bouquet, trying to find room on the tiny table (one of three or four that's covered). I can see Selphie's name on the card stuffed between the flowers.
I snickered when I saw that Selphie had signed it as being from "Selphie and Kairi." She was trying to make me feel better, perhaps. But when I peered closer I saw that the handwriting on Kairi's signature was different. Maybe she had signed it herself. I grinned like a fool and then cast my glance back to the table, my eye caught.
What really concerned me was the slip of paper wedged between two gifts. It was signed by the coroner and some other doctor; it stated that two days earlier at 9:52 PM, I was dead.
"I died?"
The nurse looks up in shock, follows my line of sight. Blushes.
"Oh. I was supposed to... get rid of that. But.. You did, for about seven minutes."
"Can I keep it?" I ask, still looking at it.
"Oh. Well. I guess. We were just going to toss it anyways." Now this was cool. How many people– how many living people, could say that they had a CERTIFICATE OF DEATH, or whatever they're called. "But you're awake!" she continues, forcing a smile. "How do you feel?"
Yeah, ha, "Like I just went through reconstructive lung surgery." I think it's a pretty good answer.
That must have been exactly what happened (like I thought) because she just blinks in surprise as if she'd been expecting a 'normal' answer.
I may have been mostly dead, stuck in a hospital, and very much alone, but that was no reason to stop being my usual, witty self.