Chapter 47
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
It was itchy again. No pain. But so fucking itchy.
That was worse if you asked me—no one ever did—because I couldn’t feel how deep I was going whenever I did scratch at it.
Then one of the scabs would peel off, a stitch would come loose, and Doc would have a coronary.
His face turning red and steam coming out his ears.
His little glasses fogging up and those age lines getting deeper in his forehead.
I didn’t care about how mad he got. It was funny to watch him try to keep it all in. But it did get annoying to hear the same spiel over and over. He never switched it up. Not a word. And I was pretty sure he did it on purpose.
I dropped my hand before my nails got any redder and pulled my hospital gown closer to my chest. If I was lucky, he wouldn’t notice the blood on my fingers when he busted through that door in five… four… three… two…
“Good Morning, Casper.” My name. Not the three-digit number they assigned me when I got here. That was on purpose too. He wanted me to trust him. And it worked. I did trust him. But only slightly more than I trusted anyone else, which was not at all.
“Morning, Doc.” I offered him a salute, quickly hiding my hand back under the blanket when I spotted the red streak on my middle finger out of the corner of my eye.
It was too late, though, because Dr. Lambo had caught it.
He didn’t say anything, just quietly tsked his tongue and jotted something down in that little chart of his. It was different from the regular hospital charts the other docs kept around here. This one had his personal notes. Everything he did to me with or without the higher-ups knowing.
That part wasn’t different. All of ?em had some sick obsession with poking around my spine.
All of ?em kept the off-the-books shit they did to me to themselves.
But not for the same reasons as the man in front of me did.
They didn’t write it down. They hid it because they were worried what the rest of the world would think; he hid it because he was worried what they would do.
And because he was worried they would try to stop him.
The truth was… none of them really wanted me fixed. They wanted me more broken. They wanted to keep twisting me up like a wind-up toy until I finally snapped and all the parts stopped working. Then they’d move on to something more shiny.
The doc here wasn’t like them in that way. I had no doubt he would move on too. But it wouldn’t be because I was broken. It would be because I was fixed and he needed something else to hyperfocus on.
He stepped around my hospital bed, writing down numbers and mumbling to himself before clearing his throat and turning back to me.
“We’re increasing your antibiotic intake.
” He gave me a pointed glare, his eyes flicking from the blood droplets on my sheets back over to my grin.
“But this is it. Anything more and you’re just going to make the bacteria resistant to whatever we throw at it, which increases your chances of sepsis… organ failure… death…”
I shrugged a shoulder. I knew what he was doing. He was trying to scare me.
I wasn’t scared, though. Especially of that last one.
I’d been trying to off myself for years.
I wasn’t depressed or nothing. I was bored.
I was stuck. I wanted to feel something.
I wanted to be afraid. I wanted that last second before everything went black to stir something up inside me.
Reset the clock. Like rebooting a computer that didn’t work right.
Everyone insisted it was a gift to not feel anything. Everyone was an idiot. Pain wasn’t bad. It was neutral. A baseline. You never really knew when something was enjoyable if you didn’t have something less enjoyable to compare it to.
I knew touching the stove was hot because my mother yelled at me every time I did it. Not because I ever felt the burn. That was the problem. It wasn’t really a lesson if you only did it because someone else told ya to.
The doc set his chart down and crossed his arms. It was the same every day.
He would come in, look at the numbers on the machines, check my labs, yell at me for whatever I was doing wrong.
I would pretend to listen, wait for him to nudge my chair over, and then watch as he examined my legs.
Tugging and turning, lifting and dropping.
Stretching out muscles I wasn’t sure I had anymore.
Today, he leaned against the wall. A little farther than usual. My chair farther than that.
“No need to strain yourself, Doc. I’ll just crawl on over and get it myself.” I flipped the sheet off my lower body and tossed it aside, placing my arms on the ground first. Once each of my palms was flat out in front of me, I wiggled my hips back and forth until my legs followed me down.
There were much more graceful ways for me to get off this bed on my own. But I liked making people uncomfortable when they watched me. I didn’t like pity. I liked confusion. Knowing they didn’t know how to act or what to say. If helping was polite or an insult. Afraid to do either.
Doc was different with that too. His expression remained neutral. His glasses slightly lower on his nose when he dipped his chin, but other than that, exactly the same as when he was looking at the machines.
He was assessing me, instead of focusing on himself and what he was feeling.
I’d made it about halfway across the room, on my belly, when he finally pushed off the wall and blocked my path. I dug my elbows in and peered up at him. Batting my lashes as he stared down at me.
“Want a spit shine?” I hocked back a loogie in my throat and let the saliva pool in my mouth, making a wet deposit on the tip of his expensive loafer when he refused to move.
He tried to appear unbothered but I could see his glare bouncing between my face and his shoe. Another huff and he was wiping his foot on the side of my hospital gown, but he still didn’t step aside.
“Get up,” he grunted, dropping to his haunches to meet me at eye level.
He swung out a hand, and I lurched back.
I wasn’t afraid of him hitting me. The doc wasn’t violent like that.
Not that I had ever seen. He was violent in the slow burning way.
In the picking at someone, a layer at a time, without them ever realizing they were bleeding way. And by then, it was already too late.
Even if he did hit me, I’d been hit before. I was used to that. I wasn’t used to whatever this was. This change in routine all of a sudden. I liked it.
It was as if we’d been playing poker all this time and then one day, someone tossed out an Uno reverse card.
I glanced down at his open palm for another second or two, before slapping my hand down on top of it.
He curled his fingers up, grabbed on to the bed rail, and carefully lifted us both to our feet.
My legs were shaky. His weren’t as he braced us both against the frame.
My head reaching just under his nose. He seemed a lot taller when I was forced to look up at him.
“Next time I tell you to get up, you get up,” he said, lowering his mouth to my ear.
His voice calm. His tone even. He was neither.
The man hated being disobeyed. But I also think he was unsure.
There was a hesitation I could hear there.
He didn’t know if this was gonna work until it did. And now he was cocky about it.