14
Farlen
T his bed gets better and better every time I lay down in it. The head bed feels so much softer and fluffier. It must be dark outside, it’s dark in my room and it’s a lot quieter than it was during the light time. I gradually open my eyes and am terrified. No longer in my room at the hospital. I’m in another place completely. There are no white walls, no square on the wall, and there are three doors in this room. Black cloth is against two of the walls, but not all the way across the walls. It reminds me of the blanket that was on the pole in the shower.
Don’t make a sound. Don’t make a sound. No screaming, you know you get hurt more when you make noise. I try to calm myself down, ready myself for whatever pain is coming, as I hear footsteps getting closer to one door. Where is Connor at? Where is Agnes? Where am I? He said he was going to make sure no one hurt me again.
The door opens slowly and a bright light comes through the open door.
“Farlen, calm down, please. It’s just me.” I hear the door shut and relax. Connor. He didn’t leave me. He is still here. I open my eyes and look at him. He has his arms out and is bent over funny. He walks into a pole that is on one end of the bed.
“Hey, now that isn’t funny. Not all of us have as good of night vision as you. I can’t see a thing in here.” He makes it to the bottom of the bed and walks along sideways until he’s near the spot where the head beds go. I hear him laugh.
“Head beds is a new one. If you’re talking about these, they are called pillows. Now, before you start freaking out again, you’re at the academy. After your uh nap, they released you from the hospital. Agnes left you some clothes and dressed you before we left. The blankets on the wall are called curtains. They cover up the windows to make it dark in here so it doesn’t hurt your eyes. I have something called sun glasses that you can wear while outside during the daytime. Hopefully, they will help you. Now, we have to go meet with the healer here. He’s going to make sure you are healing. I have some food out in the kitchen for you. I’ve tried to make it as dark as I can for you, but it is still pretty bright out there. So let’s try a little test and put on the sunglasses and we will see if it is tolerable, okay?”
I don’t know what tolerable is, and he showed me the sunglasses as he was talking. They look a little like his glasses, but not really. These are black and made of something, not metal, and the inside of them is dark. I put them on and can’t see anything. Remembering that I need to work the muscles in my mouth more so it isn’t so hard to talk, and knowing that Connor won’t hurt me for making noise, I look towards where he was.
“I can’t see.”
“Alright sweetheart, let me turn on the light so I can help get you out of here.”
I hear him move around the room. He did something that made him go oomph. Abruptly it gets really bright around the outside of the glasses and I push them more on my face.
“Sorry about that. I should have warned you when I was going to turn it on. How bad is the light right now?”
It’s very strange. The room looks like it did while it was dark, but I can see more things in the room. The pole at the end of the bed has weird bumps on it and there is one on each end part of the bed. It hurts a little with the light coming in through the sides of the glasses, but it’s a lot better than it has ever been when I’ve been in the light.
“It’s not bad.”
I look at Connor and just look at him. When I first saw him, it was hard to pay attention to how he looked, other than his eyes. It was hard because of how my face felt like it was on fire. Connor is very tall and has lots of very big muscles on him. He doesn’t have a big belly like HE did; he doesn’t even have a belly at all, and it’s all flat like mine. His eyes are still the same piercing green with brown streaks in them. He still has his glasses on. His hair is brown and short. When he smiles at me, two little holes form near his mouth. He is wearing different clothes than he did when he was on the wheeled bed.
“Your leg!”
“It’s okay Farlen, my leg is okay, here look.”
He lifts his leg clothes up and shows me the leg that had the bone sticking out, and there is no blood leaking out of him. There are no marks left on him from it. I don’t understand. Every time HE hurt me, I woke up with more marks on me.
“A healer healed the broken bone and mended the skin. That’s why there are no marks on me, sweetheart. Maybe the healer we are going to go see can do something about your scars. First, I need to make sure you have something to eat before we leave. The door over here is to the bathroom, and the door over here is for your clothes. Which is something else we are going to need to take care of soon. Why don’t you use the bathroom, then come out through the door here, and let me feed you?”
I nod to him. I do need to pee, but I don’t want to say anything to him. He leaves out the door he told me to come out of to eat. I go to the door, he said, is the bathroom and look around. It’s so dark in here. I see a white rectangle on the wall that looks like the one he was standing near when the lights came on, and there is a white thing poking out of it, looking like it is pointing down. Trying to push it, and nothing happens. The one in the other room looked like it was pointing up. I try to move it up, and the room gets lighter.
There isn’t a shower in here, there is a big bowl, the toilet, and a sink. And when I say big bowl, I mean big bowl; it looks like it would hold twelve Connors. I used the bathroom and washed my hands like Agnes showed me. I only jumped a little when I “flushed” the toilet this time .
I go out to where Connor said food was waiting. It is even brighter out here, and my eyes are starting to leak a bit. This room is so big! It has really big chairs in it that look like a few people could sit on them. There is a table on the other side of the room that is filled with food. Connor is standing behind the table, rubbing his neck.
“So, I can’t cook, but I can order food like a pro. I wasn’t sure what to order you. Why not try a little of everything and see what you like?”
I have never, ever, in my entire life, seen so much food. I try a little of some of it, and before I have even gotten a bite of half of it, I am full. Connor told me what everything was when I tried it and seemed to be watching me when I ate. He would nod at something and write it down, or smile when I tried something I liked.
“So I’m going to guess it’s safe to say you like bacon, pineapple, sweet and sour chicken, chicken marsala, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and carrots.” I nod along with everything he is saying. They were all so good.
“Well, the positive news there is, I can make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and carrots don’t require any cooking skills! So I can make those for you anytime you want them. I can do canned pineapple, but I have no clue where to even begin to cut up a fresh one for you. Come on, let’s go meet the healer. Then we are going to go clothes shopping.”
Connor walks towards the door and has his hand held out to me. I walk over to him and he grabs my hand. He opens up the front door and I am not prepared for the first time I have been outside in a long time.
It is so much brighter outside than inside where we were. Connor is talking while we walk, but I can’t pay attention to anything he is saying. We are walking on a gray path that is hard. There is grass surrounding it. There are trees sprinkled around everywhere. I look back to where we came from and it looks like some places I used to live when I was little, but a lot nicer looking. As we walk farther along the gray path, some spots have places to sit down. There are round gray things that have pretty plants growing in them. Feeling the warmth on my skin from all around me, I look around to see where the heat is coming from and frown when I can’t figure it out. I like the feeling of it on my skin. There are big white fluffy pillows in the sky. I remember seeing things like that when I was a lot smaller.
The pathway curves and goes through a lot of trees. As we walk through the darkened area by the trees, it gets a lot colder. I wonder if the reason it is cold is that it’s dark here. I never noticed it being colder when the light was off before, or warmer when it was on. I don’t know when Connor stopped talking, but he still is holding my hand. His hand is warm. It feels nice around my tiny cold one.
We come out of the trees, and I stop walking. There is an immense building. Why is everything so big? The big bed I woke up in, the big bowl in the bathroom, the big chairs, big rooms, big tables, big buildings! Everything makes me feel so small. Even Connor is big! The building looks to be made of metal. There are a lot of really big windows that almost cover the entire building. There is a big stone thing in the front that has water coming out of it. It looks like a lot of stone creatures are in the water. I have never seen anything like it before.
Connor explains to me that the thing with the water is called a fountain and quickly told me that we don’t drink from it, the water in it could make me sick. I need to figure out what water I can and can’t drink. I don’t feel like I need to drink right now, but I don’t want to get sick, so it’s something I need to learn.
We begin walking and Connor begins moving his head around like he’s looking for something. He finds something and pulls me behind him with my hand. He comes to a stop at a flat chair and sits down on it.
“Sit next to me for a few minutes. We have a little before the healer is expecting us, but I wanted to talk to you about something that happened while you slept.”
I sit down next to Connor and he grabs both of my hands with his own .
“No matter what happens, Farlen, I am here to protect you no matter what, and when we find your other matches, they will be, too. So when you slept, uh, someone else talked through your body, they still sounded like you, but not really. They said that your magic cannot get out and you would keep sleeping like that anytime your body tried to use your magic until it gets out. I also met the police who found you. They found out more information about you. This is so much harder to talk about with you than I thought. All they know is your name is Farlen, you are twenty-four years old, and your birthday is the 46th day of midsummer. You spent eighteen years in that house. You were six years old when you went to live there.”
I don’t know what to say to him. He looks sad. What would Agnes do if she were here? Oh, I know! I pull my hands out of his and give him a hug. He hugs me back.
“It’s alright, sweetheart. Let’s go meet the healer. Then shopping. If you keep using your words and talking to me, maybe I can get you some new food to try that I have a feeling you’re going to like a lot. It is okay to talk to the healer. He isn’t going to hurt you. All Healers are here to help people not to hurt them.”
“O-o-oo-kay.”
“Good girl,” he says to me with a smile, and it does funny things to my stomach. He grabs my hand and we stand up and walk towards a little building that has a red shape surrounded by white.