Title: Elsewhere

Summary: It's an emotional rollercoaster, taking care of three little boys. Especially when they're not yours, and you don't know how long they're staying.

----------------

Chapter Four

Sharpay wondered if Andy ever talked. Except for the few sentences they'd exchanged this morning, he had been entirely silent, watching her with those luminous eyes. As soon as his temperature had fallen and the antibiotics began to take hold, he'd seemed a lot more alert, curious, even. Still, he hadn't talked; hadn't asked one question aloud. The more Sharpay watched him, the easier it became to see when his interest was piqued by something going on, whether it was a shot or the person in the next bed getting lunch. Andy's eyes slid toward the tray and back to Sharpay.

"You're hungry?" She asked.

Andy nodded. For the first time in a few days, he actually wanted to eat.

"They're going to give you lunch, too," she assured him. "Hold on a second."

Sure enough, a nurse came around to Andy's bed with a covered plastic tray. She set it on top of a rolling table and wheeled it over to him. "Here, angel," she said. "Do you like alphabet soup?"

Andy nodded. He wished he knew why people were always calling him angel. It wasn't like it was his name or anything.

"First, though, I have to give you a little shot," the nurse said. Andy winced. She sighed.

"I know, baby. It's not fun, is it?"

Andy shook his head. He didn't care if they were going to feed him. He wanted to go home. He wondered what his brothers were doing now. He wondered what Troy and Sharpay's house was like. He wondered where his mother was, if she'd gotten home yet. If she got home and they were gone, she'd be mad.

The shot hurt. Andy clenched his teeth together and told himself not to cry. "Honey, it's all done," said the nurse, holding out three bandages. "Which one do you want?"

Andy didn't have to think. He pointed to the one in the middle, the Superman one. "That one?" the nurse asked. He nodded.

"Superman," the nurse smiled. "He's cool, isn't he?"

Andy smiled, nodding emphatically. The nurse took the plastic cover off the lunch, and patted him on the head. "I'll see you later," she said aloud. To Sharpay, she mouthed, "He is adorable!"

Andy didn't see her. He had picked up a spoon and was poking at the letters in his alphabet soup. A, N, and D were easy to find. Y was a lot harder. ANDY. . .

Suddenly, Andy thought of Sharpay. He wondered if she was hungry. He wanted to ask her, but didn't want to talk. He glanced at her, picking up the cookie they'd given him. He held it out to her.

Through her sleep-deprived haze, it took Sharpay a moment to realize what he was doing.

When she did, she wanted to hug him. "Oh, honey. . ." she began. "Honey, that's yours. You have it."

Andy shook his head. He reached for her hand and put the cookie into it. He looked into her eyes. Did she understand?

She did. She smiled. "Thank you so much," she said. "That's very nice of you."

Andy smiled down at his alphabet soup. The A, N, D and Y had floated off into different corners of the bowl, but he didn't mind. He could find them again.

Sharpay noticed that Andy wasn't eating much. He couldn't be that hungry, with his fever still hovering around 102 and coughing fits that hit him every few minutes. Still, he appeared to be very busy doing something with that soup. She couldn't figure out what. That was when she glanced down at the tray. Next to his bowl of soup, Andy had arranged noodles to carefully spell out three words. KEVIN. ANDY. ZAC. "You thinking about your brothers?" she asked.

Andy nodded, looking down.

"I talked to Troy on the phone a little while ago. They're doing good. They miss you."

Andy swallowed. She was worried he might cry. For awhile, she was silent, listening to the other people in the room.

The other bed was occupied by a pale, puffy boy of eight or nine. He was quite rotund, and his concerned-looking parents even rounder. All three of them had milk-white skin and orangy-red hair, and Allen was covered in splotchy freckles. He wore thick, Coke-bottle glasses and had a spiky crew cut. Actually, he would have been rather cute, in a funny-looking Little Rascals sort of way, if he hadn't been such a whiny brat.

Allen was hospitalized because of an allergic reaction to shell-fish. Because of the severity of the reaction, he had been kept overnight for observation, and might have to stay another night. Admittedly, Sharpay thought, the kid was actually sick. But that was about all you could say for him. And the parents doted on him so much that it was sickening.

"Allen, honey," said his mother, "look at the videos I've brought you. Superman!"

Sharpay thought she saw Andy's eyes light up. If Allen got to watch Superman, he would be able to see it, too.

"That's for babies," Allen scoffed. "I want to see Transformers.'"

"Sweetie…"

"I want a candy bar!" Allen demanded. "I want a coloring book. I want to watch horror movies. I want you to buy me a Nintendo Wii!"

"When we get home, sweetie," his mother promised.

Allen's half of the room reminded Sharpay of Toys "R" US, there were so many stuffed animals and play things. She made a mental note to herself to buy Andy a teddy bear or something as soon as she got out of here. Then she would go home and sleep. . . the three hours she'd snagged last night left her with the woozy sensation that she was back in her intern days. Thank God Andy wasn't a demanding child. If she'd been Allen's mother, she probably would have slapped him. Long ago.

"Allen, Daddy and I love you very much, but this nurse has to give you a shot." Allen's mother had the bizarre habit of beginning every unpleasant statement with 'Daddy and I love you very much.' Sharpay wondered what strange sort of psychological implications that carried with it.

"NO!" Allen shouted. "NO NO NO NO NO NO NO! I DON'T WANNA GET A SHOT!" He kicked and flailed. Andy's eyes grew as wide as saucers.

"Don't get any ideas," Sharpay thought, glancing at Andy.

"NO!" Allen turned and looked accusingly at Andy. "HE DOESN'T HAVE TO GET A SHOT!"

"He did before," the nurse sighed. "He was very brave about it."

"HE WASN'T BRAVE ABOUT IT!" Allen bellowed. "NOT BRAVER THAN ME!"

"Yes, Allen," said Allen's mother. "Daddy and I love you very much, and you are a very brave boy. But the nurse must give you a shot."

"No." Allen crossed his arms and curled into a ball. "You can't."

Sharpay and Andy exchanged a glance. Andy looked half horrified, but very amused. My gosh, Sharpay thought. He is absolutely as nosy as I am, if not more. It dawned on her that Andy's silence was probably due to the fact that he was eavesdropping almost constantly. He seemed to pick up a lot by watching people. That kid had more going on than anyone suspected, she was willing to bet. In fact, when the nurse pulled the curtain between the two beds, Andy actually looked disappointed. He sighed.

"Shots aren't as bad as all that, are they?" Sharpay asked him, smiling. "You're being really brave."

Andy's eyes widened. "That boy," he whispered, in a tiny little voice, "why doesn't his mother hate him?"

"What?" Sharpay was doubly taken aback, first to hear him talking at all, and again when she realized what he'd said. "Why doesn't she hate him?"

"If you acts like that," Andy repeated, the slight lisp in his voice becoming readily apparent, "your mother, she hates you."

Sharpay didn't know how to respond to that. "Well, most mothers don't like it when their kids act like that, and they might yell, but they don't usually hate their kids."

"But his mother be's nice to him," Andy went on. "She didn't be mad."

"No." Sharpay shook her head. "But he is sick. So maybe she doesn't want to yell at him when he doesn't feel good."

"Why?" There was no self-pity or malice in Andy's voice. "When I don't feel good, my mother be's mad at me. And she yells. And then I don't do bad things."

"When you're sick, it doesn't mean you did something bad," Sharpay pointed out.

Andy didn't appear to hear her. "Sometimes, when I'm not good, she has to get mad at me. And then I'm always more betterer after."

Sharpay felt a chill run down her spine. She'd seen a lot of abuse cases, but had really wanted to believe that this was sheer neglect. "Andy, when your mother gets mad at you, what happens?"

He drew a long, shaky breath, glancing toward the ceiling. "She yells. But she has to hit us, really. And she doesn't hit us very hard."

Sharpay tried to think. His mother, according to the information gleaned from Kevin, was twenty five years old, a single mother who'd had three kids in four years with one man, who'd walked out on them a few months before Zac was born. She must get desperate, sometimes, and maybe, in the environment she'd been raised in, it was alright to hit a kid. Sharpay's own parents, in fact, had been spanked her once. It didn't hurt, and Sharpay hadn't suffered any psychological damage from it, as far as she could tell, but still, Mother and Daddy had had far more resources to draw on than Andy's mother did. Maybe she didn't know that she might hurt her kids, emotionally, anyway.

Still. . . Sharpay glanced at Andy's arm. A white, slightly raised scar ran from just above his elbow to the middle of his forearm. It was a strange place to have a scar, one hallmark of child abuse.

"Sweetie," she asked, "what is that from?"

Andy was nonchalant. "That was where I brokeded it. It was brokeded in two places."

"How did you break it?" Sharpay felt awful asking him questions that had the potential to hurt him so much, but she had to.

He didn't meet her eyes. "I fell."

"Where?" Sharpay had to pursue the topic. "Where did you fall?"

Andy sighed. "They already askeded me questions about it. I was only three. It was a long time ago."

Sharpay decided to let it drop. "Okay."

Andy closed his eyes, yawning. Sharpay put her hand on his forehead. "Are you tired, sweetie?"

"Yeah." Andy yawned again, burrowing under the covers. "Wake me up if anything happens."

Sharpay smiled. "I'll be back tonight, honey." Finding her car keys on the table beside the bed, she stood up and headed toward the door.

Andy bolted into a sitting position. The suddeness of the action sent him back into another coughing spasm, and it was awhile before he could talk. When he did, his eyes were wide and scared. "You're going to leave?" he stammered.

"While you were asleep, I was going to run home and take a shower." Sharpay felt a wave of guilt wash over her. He was already attached. . . and so was she.

"Oh. . ." Andy closed his eyes, struggling not to cry. He didn't want to be alone here. "I. . . I just thought you might stay. . ."

"I'll stay, sweetie," Sharpay promised. She thought of the room on the first floor that was reserved for doctors who spent the night in the hospital when they were on call. It was a tiny, stuffy room, lined with uncomfortable bunk beds, but when you'd been up for most of the night, it didn't really matter. "I might go down to a room to sleep while you're taking a nap, but I'll have my pager with me, and the nurses at the front desk will call me when you wake up, and I'll be there right away."

"Okay." Andy didn't sound very reassured, but he lay back down and closed his eyes. After awhile, Sharpay could tell he'd fallen asleep. It was now or never. . .

She stood up and started out of the room. As she passed by the front desk, one of the nurses called her over. "We located a medical file on the little angel boy you have in there," she said, grimly. "You need to take a look at this."

Sharpay felt goose bumps rise on her arm as she read through the chart of Andrew Taylor Patterson, swallowing hard as horror story after horror story rose to life in front of her. From his birth (three weeks early, classified as failure to thrive, readmitted at six weeks because of the serious respiratory illness RSV) Andy's life had apparently been one traumatic incident after the other. His records indicated that the first time he and Kevin had been taken away from their parents came about when neighbors reported that the people in the next apartment had a two year old and a baby, and the parents hadn't been around for a few days, but they could hear the baby crying. After six months in foster care, the parents had gotten them back, and, aside from a few immunization records, there was little in the file for about a year. Then, when he was nearly three years old, there came another chilling anecdote. Hospitalized after a severe beating, Andy had been in a coma for four days. At first, they thought he wouldn't recover. When he survived without any appreciable brain damage, it was a miracle. Confirming what Andy had told her, the next document detailed a compound fracture he'd had at the age of three and a half, reportedly after "falling out of bed." Uh huh, Sharpay thought, anger boiling within her. That would make complete sense. She knew what a little kid's bones were like, and she knew how they generally broke. There was no way in hell he'd gotten a compound fracture from falling out of bed. Out a window, maybe. Three feet to the ground, no.

Amazingly, they'd only been removed from their mother's custody three times, that first time when Andy was an infant and the second after he was beaten into the coma. Sharpay swallowed hard; anyone could have seen that these injuries weren't consistent with the stories the mother was telling. This was such an obvious, classic case of abuse that something had to be done.

She thought back to the physical examination she'd done when Andy was first admitted. There hadn't been any fresh bruises on his body, though she'd noticed a few fading yellow marks across his back. At some point within the past five to ten days, he'd been hit hard enough with something to cause bruising. Then she was struck by another chilling thought. Andy was only one of them. If she got a hold of Kevin and Zac's charts, God only knew what she'd find.

Sharpay swallowed hard. "My lord." This was potentially the worst case of child abuse she'd ever seen, and as a emergency room pediatrician, she'd seen far too many.

"This is sickening," agreed the nurse, shaking her head. "Sickening."

There was no way Sharpay would have been able to sleep after that. She went back into the hospital room, pulled the uncomfortable visitor's chair next to Andy's bed, and sat there watching him for awhile, hardly daring to think about the answers to all the questions that ran through her head.

-----------------

AN: Thanks so much for everyone's reviews! I've been working really hard to do some massive typing and editing, so that I can post a chapter about every other day. My mom's freaking out about how it's Mac's first Christmas and everything has to be perfect etc etc. Like she hasn't bought him 400 toys in his first seven months of life. And the kid can barely crawl. It's the most adorable thing—this bizarre one elbow opposite knee shuffle—but of course I have to say that, I'm his mom. Anyway—tell me what you think!

margaret