I quickly type out an email to my advisor on my phone, explaining the gist of the situation and requesting his help in landing a new internship and asking my options for replacing the credits that I will now be missing for this semester.
There’s a lot of commotion on Mom’s floor as I step off the elevators, and it’s rather disorienting to hear so much noise on the normally quiet floor.
As I turn the corner to my mom’s hallway, though, I realize the disturbance is coming from Mom’s room. I toss my still-full coffee in the trash and race ahead, praying that whatever it is, it’s nothing too terrible.
Chapter Twenty-Six
My prayers, it seems, are going unanswered. A nurse stops me as I approach the room. “You can’t go in there right now,” she says.
“That’s my mom.”
“I know, and we’re doing everything we can. I just need to you to be patient while we help her, okay?” The nurse ushers me back from the doorway, and I crane my neck to see inside. There’s a group of nurses and physicians surrounding her bed, telling her to lay still while they do whatever it is that they’re doing.
It feels like hours, but it’s probably only minutes before they’re wheeling her out of the room, an oxygen mask on her face, a tube coming out of her chest, and her wrists strapped to the bed. Her eyes look wild, but hazy.
The last nurse to come out stops in front of me. “We’re taking her to surgery. Her moving around seems to have broken off a small piece of her rib, which has punctured one of her lungs. We need to remove the sliver of bone and repair the lung.”
“Is she going to be okay?” Lungs are important. She needs them to breathe. My mom and I have had our struggles and we’re not as close as I wish I could be with my mother, but I don’t want her to die or have anything bad happen to her.
“We’re going to do everything we can,” says the nurse, already glancing back toward where his colleagues disappeared down a hallway. “We’re hopeful that it will be a straightforward procedure, but we’ll have to see what it looks like when the doctor gets in there. Do you want me to walk you down to the waiting room?”
I shake my head. “I remember where it is.” If he needs to be in the operating room with my mom, I’d rather he be there than with me.
“All right.” He’s already walking away. “Check in with the receptionist when you get down there. She’ll get you the case number.”
All the nurses around me have gone back to their jobs, caring for the other patients. This is normal for them, but it’s life-changing for me. I wander in a daze down to the waiting room, where the receptionist points me to the same area I sat in last night with Ronnie.
Pulling out my phone, I text Ronnie.Mom is back in surgery. Broken rib punctured a lung.
Oh shit!Ronnie texts back almost immediately.Want me to come sit with you?
I check the time. Ronnie has class soon and I don’t want her to miss it because of me. She already has a tendency to be late, and her professor doesn’t love her as a result. She doesn’t need to miss a whole class.
It’s okay, you have class. I’m sure everything will be okay. Hopefully.I’ll keep you updated.
And I’ll keep my fingers crossed. I’m sorry everything is hitting you one thing after another, she tells me.
Not much I can do. I’m going to just sit and play on my phone while I wait for an update from the surgery. And maybe keep an eye on the updates from the upcoming WorldChampionship. Because if I’m going to suffer and be miserable, I might as well make it worse.
No speedcubers though!It’s as if she can read my mind.Those assholes don’t deserve a second of your thoughts or energy after what they did. They can rot in hell as far I’m concerned.
I feel bad that I’ve just let her think they were the ones to end things, but at this point so much time has passed that I don’t feel like I can tell her the truth now. And it doesn’t really matter who ended it. It’s over, and I’ll have to find a way to make my peace with that.No promises. I wish I could promise, but no matter how much I’ve tried to focus on school and work, I can’t stop thinking about them.
I’m just as bad as Mom. Worse, maybe, obsessing over multiple guys. But I refuse to let them become my entire personality. I will get over this. Eventually.
That doesn’t stop me from occasionally picking up my phone and opening up an internet browser window, typing the guys’ names into it so I can torture myself with their pictures and the Worlds promos. But if I’m going to avoid my mother’s fate, I need to stop. I know I need to stop.
But after I just look one last time to see when their first event is for the competition.
A familiar voice calls out my name. “Rebecca! Baby! Are you okay?” I look up to see Lukas hurrying across the waiting room. He scoops me into his arms, and over his shoulder I see Felix, Elliot, and Sebastian, all of them looking as worried as Lukas.
I’m completely stunned, and for a moment I just stand there in shock as Lukas holds me. But I’m so tired and stressed, and it feels so good to be swallowed up in his arms. I’ve missed them so much. I know I should be strong and push him away, tell them to leave me alone, but I can’t make myself do it.
“You should have called us.” Felix wraps his arms around both me and Lukas.
What are they even doing here? I ghosted these guys. They shouldn’t be here. How did they even find me?
Sebastian runs a hand over my hair. “Tell us what we can do to help,” he says.
