Ed's POV
15:30

I give them another half hour of alone time before I return to the room. I listen first, and when I hear the sounds of quiet conversation (see, I knew they would be girl-talking!) instead of tears I knock politely. Kelly's voice greets me:

"Door's open."

"Thanks. How we doin?"

"A bit better. Jeez, what's in the bag? A Cuisinart?"

"Just some souvenirs. We can't let all of our memories of this place be bad ones."

"Sure we can." Kelly looks down at her shoes. "Sorry, Ed, I'll always envy your ability to be optimistic about everything."

I sneak a peak at Alara's face. Looks like somebody cleaned the tear tracks off of it. She still doesn't look like a happy camper, though, and appears to have clammed up. So she'll talk to Kelly but not me. If it were anybody else I might put my hands on my hips and go "Hmmmph!" but this is Alara - she's just a kid and is obviously embarrassed about crying in front of me.

"You just missed the doctor. She said that the belly wound needs to be reopened and drained."

"Ooh, that sounds lovely. They gonna put her out for it or what?"

"No, they'll just give her a local. Apparently because the wound doesn't penetrate the abdominal cavity they don't need to take her back into the OR. I think they'll be back any minute, actually."

"Don't count on it. You know doctors - they say they'll be right back but really they're visiting their fifty other patients and you don't see them again for five hours. You know, I had appendicitis when I was ten, and, I kid you not, they admitted me at 2:30 PM on a Friday afternoon and I didn't go into the OR until 3:00 AM Saturday. The doctors spent a total of about an hour actually seeing me and running tests. You should've seen my parents - my dad slumped over in the chair and my mom asleep on the floor. I kept waking my dad up, begging for food. I recall him saying at around 1 AM 'Eddie, I'm gonna be pissed if it turns out you're fine.'"

"Aww, poor Eddie. I'm sure he was just joking, though. Your dad's a pretty nice guy."

"Well…I kinda left out what prompted him to say that. So hours before they gave me this contrast stuff to drink so they could do a scan and see my guts better. It was delicious, by the way - tasted just like fruit punch and I was freaking starving by that point. Anyway, the after-effect of it is that it gives you the trots. So my poor dad was having to get up from his chair every ten minutes to take me down the hall to the crapper because I was too shy to go by myself. Well, I wound up falling asleep and crapping myself in the bed."

"Oh, Ed! I don't need to hear this!"

"Anyway, my dad didn't want to bother my nurse or wake up my mom, so he cleaned me - and the bed - up by himself. Let's just say it was a disaster zone. Like a tsunami of -"

"Okay, okay, Ed, I get the idea! Please, no more, or I'll kick you out again!"

"Sorry. Well, anyway, now that I'm an adult I can understand why my dad was a bit peeved by that point."

"Precisely. Reason #1,701 why not to have children."

"Yeah, they're pretty gross. But for the record, I think you'd have made a good mother."

Oops. I didn't quite mean to say that. I quickly look away so I'll never know what her immediate reaction is.