They say when you die, your soul leaves your body first. And leaves you like an empty shell. Waiting for all your internal organs to shut down and stop functioning until you're dead. Fully. No life. Just the empty shell of who you used to be.
I'm not sure if I'm dying. I'm not sure if I'm already dead. I just know that I'm sitting above somewhere. And I'm watching myself as if it's not me. As if I'm watching some sick, twisted, scary movie.
I still don't know what happened to me. I'm not sure if I'll ever know, because right now, my memory is so fuzzy and blocked. But I do know the after effects on whatever happened to me. And I can honestly say that I have never been more frightened in my life.
And I can't believe that I'm watching all this happen, as if it's not me. As if I'm some third person. Just watching...
"Please, Demi. Please hold on a little longer." I'm lying between Selena's legs in a bathroom. My green half shirt is pulled up a little far, exposing the place just before my breasts start. My shirt is ripped. My body is unusually pale, even for me. I'm a naturally pale person, but my skin is translucent. Like the skin of an onion.
"Just hold on... Their coming." She's stroking my long, dark brown hair. I had it in a curly ponytail, but my ponytail is out and the curls are framing around my breasts.
"Please just hold on... I'm sorry, Demi." It's quiet in the bathroom. The only sound is coming from Selena in the form of desperate pleas. "I'm so sorry... I should've stayed with you."
I watch as my chest slows way down from the rhythmic pumping it was doing. My blue jean shorts are buttoned, but the zipper is broken.
"Please don't die, Demi. Please don't die..." She rubs my cheek. "They said they'd be here..." She finally looks up from my body and looks out the door of the bathroom. "Somebody please help..." I can tell that she knows I'm dying.
Her face is blotchy and red with tears collecting on her red lace shirt. Her mascara and eyeliner have ran from the tears and her usually unruly curly hair is wild and haggard.
"Selena... Selena, the paramedics are here. And so is her mom." Nick appears in the doorway of the bathroom. "They're coming..." He steps out the way.
It gets noisy all of a sudden as three people dressed in papery blue outfits flood into the bathroom. One of them is a girl and the other two are men. The girl has straight dark brown hair and round, beady eyes. Her nametag says "Hanna".
"Honey, my name is Hanna... Can you get up? So I can ask you a couple questions?" She bends down and rubs Selena's shoulder.
"I can't leave her..." Selena cries to her and shakes her head.
"Don't worry about her, honey. We're going to take very good care of her. I just need to ask you some questions about the party tonight... Okay?" She wraps a blanket around Selena and coaxes her into standing up.
When Selena stands up, I'm lying on the cool, hard linoleum floor of the bathroom.
The two men, one dark haired, the other red haired work together on me.
The dark haired doctor puts a thick, blue tube down my throat while the other attaches an inflatable bag to the tube. The red headed one, named Steve, starts squeezing the bag periodically, in the same rhythm as my breathing would be.
The dark haired one, named Charlie, lifts my nearly lifeless body onto an orange stretcher. Together, Steve and Charlie unhinge the sides of the stretcher and lift me up. They slowly wheel me out of the bathroom, Steve squeezing the bag to breathe for me the entire time.
They wheel me out of the house and down a long driveway. Alex, the host of the party is standing on the sidewalk watching. He's crying. His parents are holding onto him. His mom is crying too, his dad is mad as hell.
Next to Alex on the sidewalk is Miss Mandy. She's holding Selena close to her. Selena is not happy to be standing with her mom, I'll tell you that.
"Let me go, mom! I have to be with her!" She blubbers like a baby and tries her damnedest to pull away. "DEMI!"
Not even Nick can calm her down, because Nick can't calm himself down. He's not crying, but he's frantically talking to someone over the phone. "I don't know, man... I don't know. Selena said she wasn't breathin'. The paramedics just got here... They're about to take her away."
Steve and Charlie lift my stretcher up and place it in the back of an ambulance truck. Hanna is now talking to my aunt and my uncle.
Aunt Kathy is crying the hardest I've seen her cry all week, and Uncle Jason is the man of steel, trying to comfort her but obviously broken up about this too.
"We talked to her friend. Her friend said that she drank a little bit but then that's all she knows. According to what we were told, the friend left with her boyfriend after a few drinks and left her alone in the party. What happened next, she doesn't know."
"Is she going to be alright? Where do we go from here?" Aunt Kathy asks all her questions.
"From here, we're going to take her down to the Children's Hospital's Emergency Room. They'll get her a doctor and we'll go from there."
"Please tell me she's alright..."
"It's looking grim right now, but it's hard to tell. One of you may ride in the back of the truck to the hospital, but only one."
"I'm going." Aunt Kathy says without question. Carefully, she climbs up into the truck with me on my stretcher. "I'll meet you at the hospital, Jason."
Steve, Charlie and Hanna all climb into the back of the truck and Steve shuts the doors behind us. The driver turns the sirens on and starts speeding down the road, taking me to the hospital.
"When we get to the hospital, the resident on call will take her up to the emergency unit. She will need to be put on oxygen. Call for a district attorney." Charlie barks orders at Steve and Hanna.
Steve keeps squeezing the bag, breathing for me.
"Can she hear me?" Aunt Kathy holds my hand.
"It's not likely. She's not conscious." Charlie says to her.
"But she's alive, right?"
"Ma'am, as long as we keep breathing for her, she's alive. She's not functional on her own."
Aunt Kathy leans in and kisses my temple softly. "Don't die on me, kiddo. I already lost your mom. I can't lose you too." She whispers in my ear.
The truck pulls in to the garage of the hospital. The hospital is a purple building with orange letters on the outside. It's already kid friendly.
Hanna opens up the doors to the truck and Steve and Charlie bring my stretcher down onto the concrete.
Hanna takes my aunt from here.
"Ma'am, I'm going to need you to come with me. To answer all questions about her while they work on her."
"Alright."
And that's the last I see of my Aunt Kathy.
From the garage of the hospital, I'm rushed through a set of double doors. From the double doors, I'm met with a shorter, much younger woman. She has blonde hair and green eyes. She's very pretty, but she looks very serious.
"Get information on her, Roam. Parkson, stay with Roam. McCully, come with me." The blonde girl barks at Charlie, Steve and Hanna.
Steve stays with the blonde lady and the blonde lady, named Dr. Addalyn Osborne, rushes me onto a pink elevator.
The elevator goes up a couple floors and slows to a stop. When it stops on the third floor, Dr. Osborne wheels my stretcher into a wide, white room. Steve helps her lift me off the stretcher and onto a softer, more comfortable bed.
"Start the oxygen therapy. I'll need to get a blood sample to check her BAC."
Steve forces a thinner tube down my throat and one up my nose. He tapes the one up my nose to my cheek so it doesn't fall out. He turns on a machine and the machine starts breathing for me. Very gently, Steve uses scissors and cuts my shirt off. I don't have a bra on. I swear I had one on when I left the house...
Steve grabs a soft white gown and drapes it over my body, tying it around my neck and looping my arms through the holes.
Dr. Osborne wipes the crease of my arm off with an alcohol pad and pushes a needle into my vein. The needle makes a "crunch" sound when it goes in my vein.
"...Oh god." Dr. Osborne's eyes get wide. "...McCully, go down to the main supply closet, grab me a fresh roll of gauze and more alcohol pads. Find the DA, too. Tell him to come up here as soon as possible."
"What kind of gauze do you want, Dr.?" Steve asks her. He finishes cutting my shorts and my underwear off my body.
"Get me the softest kind you can find."
"May I ask what the gauze is for?"
Dr. Osborne takes the needle from my hand and closes the vile of my blood. She holds my arm up. "Looks like we've got a cutter."
Hanna opens up the curtains to my room and walks in. "Dr. Osborne, I need something to tell the family."
"Take her blood sample down to the lab. Order in a BAC IMMEDIATELY." She hands my blood to Hanna. "You tell her family that I'm doing everything I can for her at the moment."
"Condition? Life or death?" Hanna asks.
"You tell them that she's in critical condition. Don't alarm them, Dr. Roam. This girl is sixteen years old. I'm not going to let her die."
"Yes ma'am." Hanna says and disappears out of the room.
Dr. Osborne picks up my left arm again. She starts cleaning off my cuts. "Wonder if your family knows about this one." She asks me, even though I'm unconscious.
"I found a roll of extra strength gauze. The DA is right behind me." Steve comes back in the room and hands her the gauze.
Dr. Osborne wraps up my wrist. "Where is Hanna with her BAC?"
"I don't know, Dr. I didn't pass her."
Another man walks in my room. He's large and very muscular. He has on a grey suit and a grey top hat. I guess he's the District Attorney.
"What can I do for you, Miss Osborne?" He asks Dr. Osborne.
"I don't have her BAC just yet, and she's still unconscious, but I'd like authorization to run a rape kit on her."
"Do you have probable cause?"
"Apparently the friend she was at the party with found her in a bathroom almost nude and unconscious, so yes. I have probable cause."
"Any suspects of who might have raped her?"
"Her friend gave Dr. Roam a name.
"I'll open the case up. Run the kit on her, give me the results. I'll get the name of the kid and see if he's available for questioning."
"Thanks, Sam." Dr. Osborne goes back to me.
Hanna walks back into the room. "Results came back on her BAC, Dr. Osborne. Her blood alcohol count is .45."
"That's over six times the legal limit. It's a wonder this girl isn't dead yet. Prep her for a gastric lavage. I'm going to administer a rape kit." Dr. Osborne leaves the room for the first time.
Steve opens my mouth and shoves another thick tube down my throat, all the way to my stomach.
Hanna helps him out by getting the solution prepared.
"Squirt the solution down the tube, she's ready."
Hanna puts the milky white solution down my tube and directly into my stomach.
I will admit, it's weird to watch myself like this. It's very scary too.
And in that instant, I'm not watching myself anymore. I think my soul comes back to my body.
My eyelids are sore. They're very sore. So sore that when I open them, I immediately start to cry. Tears are just sliding out the corners of my eyes.
My jaw hurts too. And so does my throat.
There's a tube up my nose and another tube down my throat. I have a monitor on my finger and two monitors on my bare chest and an IV in my arm.
Someone is lying at the foot of my bed. It's a girl. She has light brown, curly hair and that's all I can see. She's lying face down.
It's not Aunt Kathy, because Aunt Kathy has dark brown hair. The person on my bed has really light hair. It's almost blonde, but brown.
It looks like my mom. Why am I in a hospital? Why is my mom lying on my hospital bed? Is this my heaven? With my mom?
"Mmmm..." I try to say "mommy", but my throat is so dry and scratchy that I can't speak more than a moan.
The light brown lump at the foot of my bed lifts her head up. "Demi?" She says. It even sounds like my mom's voice.
I blink twice to make my vision clearer. It's not my mom, but it's just as good as my mom. It's Dallas!
"Demi..." She holds me around my waist. "Hey baby... How you feelin?" She strokes my hair.
I start crying some more. I wish I could talk. "Mmmmm..."
"Shh. Don't talk, baby. Don't talk..." She kisses my cheek. "What we're you thinking? Getting drunk?" She rubs my head some more. "You scared me shitless."
I was drunk? When did I get drunk? I had a drink, yes. But I don't remember getting drunk... I had one drink.
"Aunt Kathy called me and told me you were bad off." She kisses my cheek again.
"...Mmmm..." I slowly lift my arms to hug her.
"It's alright." She hugs me tight. "I'm just glad you're okay." She kisses my cheek yet another time. "That kid down in the lobby... Is he your boyfriend? I think his name is Joe."
I nod very slowly.
"He's cute. And he's sweet. He won't leave..."
I wrinkle my eyebrows. "...W...hat ha...ppened?" It hurt so bad to say that.
"You don't remember?"
I shake my head.
"You got drunk at a party. And some kid... I think they said his name is Cody... He raped you, baby." She strokes my hair.
Cody raped me? Since when?! Oh my god, I'm so stupid. How did I let that happen?! I'm so stupid! I'm so mad at myself! How did I get that drunk?!
"Your doctor still thinks you need to get the rest of the alcohol out of your system. So you're gonna be on the stomach pump for a while longer. Dr. Osborne has been taking care of you... You remember Dr. Osborne?"
Who's Dr. Osborne? I don't remember anything besides the one drink I had at the party. That's all.
I'm so fucking mad at myself. How did I let Cody rape me? How?!
I'm so fucking stupid. Jesus Christ, I'm stupid.
I can't believe I let that happen.
I'm never drinking again.
Ever.