Here is Chapter 28! Here we go!
Mack paced back and forth in the waiting room. She had gotten to know it very well lately. She knew every tile, every corner, were the emergency room doors were located... she could walk around it in with her eyes shut. She hadn't been in the car alone for 5 minutes before her mom had ushered Troy back in the car, muttering words under her breath.
Words like internal bleeding.
Now she was in the waiting room, again. Troy had managed a lot in the past few weeks to get landed in the hospital. Mack didn't see how he could do that, he'd never been in the hospital before that she could remember. She sunk against a chair. Her dad was right, the chairs were uncomfortable.
She looked around the waiting room. There were kids with broken limbs, adults talking on cellphones holding their children's sticky hands as they tried to play with the pennies and dimes in their noses, elderly people were watching soap operas, and a couple of teenagers with cuts and scraps stood wanting to find out information on their friend who was in a car crash.
And the only thing she could think about was how stupid her brother was.
She watched as the kids were x-rayed and sent home in brightly colored casts, the adults walked out with cellphones still attached to their ears -although the pennies were out of their kid's nose- chatting away and the elderly were given rooms. She sat stone still as the doctor walked out and told the teenagers the worst news they could possibly imagine. As she looked, she remembered Troy and stood up.
"I'm taking a walk," she said to her mother.
"I'll come and find you if we hear anything." Her mother's voice was distant, but Mack shook it off. It was always distant when Troy was in the hospital.
She hated how natural those words felt to her. Troy was in the hospital, they seemed like peas in a pod. Like it was just normal for Troy to be in the hospital, like he had some horrible ailment that sent him there and any minute he could die.
But, she knew deep down that if Troy was going to die young, it wasn't going to be from some bad sickness that you immediately think when you hear some 16 almost 17-year-old's heart stopped beating. It was going to be his inability to control his actions around Cam Boucher and Cam's attitude that would be the death of her brother. Amazingly, she said that in her head calmly. She was predicting how her brother would die for fun. 'There must be something wrong with me,' she thought.
She stopped in front of a door, the door to the hospital's church. She wasn't religious, her life was fill with too much basketball to be religious. She opened the door and heard someone talking in a different language. Interested, she walked through the door and sat in the last pew. The woman kept talking in the foreign language that sounded so familiar to her. She only took Spanish, and this most defiantly wasn't Spanish.
But, then again, how would she know? She had a D+ in Spanish.
The woman stood and turned around. Seeing Mack she said, "oh, I'm sorry. Did you come here to be alone?"
"No, no," Mack said not wanting to make the lady feel bad. "I just needed to get out of that waiting room."
The woman sat next to her. She had silver hair tied back and wore a green shirt with blue skirt. "You know, it helps if you talk about it. I'm very good at listening."
"I don't know, it's not that bad. He's been in the hospital before."
"Brother?"
Mack's eyes widened. "How did you know?"
The woman smiled. "It's a gift." She paused, "so, what's wrong with him this time?"
"He was being stupid." When the lady didn't answer she continued, "he got in a fight."
The woman nodded and then smiled, "he'll be fine." She stood and opened the door. She looked back at Mack one more time, "he'll be okay," before walking out the door. The door closed shut leaving Mack alone in the large room.
"Is that suppose to mean something?" she asked.
The door opened again, but Mack didn't hear it. She was trying to figure out what had just happened.
"Mack," a voice said. She turned to see Calum. "What are you doing here?"
"Troy's in the hospital...again. What are you doing here?"
"My mom wanted to bring Cam in, she couldn't stop the bleeding."
"Oh," was all Mack could say. Calum sat next to her in the pew, "you know, they'll probably be out in a few days. It can't be that bad."
"I don't know, internal bleeding is pretty bad," Mack said rather coldly.
"Troy had internal bleeding?"
"Yep. By the time we got him here he was coughing up blood. But, of course, he's probably lost too much blood anyway."
Calum stayed silent, not wanting to say anything that could make Mack upset. Such as Cam had started to cough up blood too...or how his own arm was broken by his dad...
"They apologized!" She stood up and threw he arms in the air. "I was there! They shook hands and then Troy went and ruined it! I hate him, he's so stupid! Sometimes I want him to die!"
"Don't say that," Calum said standing up next to her. "Never ever say that. It is the worst feeling in the world to wish death upon someone and have it actually happen."
"How would you know?" Mack sneered.
"Remember how I threw pudding at you second grade, right after Keisha's dog got hit by that car? I was jealous. I had yelled at my dog, told him to die because he bit me, then he got run over by a car. I hated how she got to keep her dog and I didn't. I blamed myself." He took a quick breath. "Never say you want your brother dead, especially when he's in the hospital's emergency room, Mack!"
Mack sat back down on the pew. Calum sat next to her and noticed she had silent tears rolling down her face. "I'm scared Calum."
She laid her head on Calum's shoulder and he wrapped his arms around her, not wanting to let her go. "Me too," he said. "Me too."
Hope you liked it! Tell me what you think!
