The music my body makes is not appealing.
I’m in the back of the ambulance listening to a concert of beeps and buzzes, all of them discordant, my body the only blamable orchestra. I have so many extra things inside of me: a needle in my arm, tubes in my nose, a tree branch sticking from my side. I felt my sister curling up as the medics worked, retreating into the fetal position with each foreign object that is introduced.
I’m only able to stare straight above me because of the brace they put around my neck, the sterile ceiling of the ambulance the only thing I can see except for the medics’ chests when they reach across me in response to some new wave of off-key noise. Their lanyards hang from their necks, one of them resting on my nose for a maddening instant, creating an itch I can’t scratch.
“This is not how I sound,” I tell the female, whose ID says her last name is JONES in all caps, an assertion of herself.
“What’s that?”
“I don’t sound like this,” I try to say again, but the words are frightened things, not willing to come out into the chaos of lights and noises, strangers’ hands becoming intimate with me in a matter of moments.
My eyes flick over to the male, FABER, whose jawline is tight in response to an erratic noise that won’t settle down. I try to make it keep time with the muscle ticking in his jaw, but there is no pattern where the two find common ground.
There’s an indignity to this cacophony, the idea that my body has created it an insult that goes deeper than the IV in my elbow. The music I create is breath exhaled into cold air, skin moving against skin, and the small noises Isaac makes in the dark to answer my own. Not this barrage that only rises with no falls, counter beats the only punctuation in a song with no rhythm.
I want to tell the medics this because I am embarrassed of my body’s song, ashamed of the jarring quality that we all are being forced to endure in such a small space. But I don’t get the chance. I’m whisked out of the squad and into a hospital, the sirens cut out to be replaced by my mother’s sobs as she exits the front of the squad. I get a single moment of darkness and quiet, a breath in between an inhale where Mom isn’t crying, and then the doors of the ER slide open and I’m plunged headfirst into sterile light and tightly controlled voices.
Mom disappears behind doors that my gurney crashes through, a lady wearing scrubs with kittens all over them forcing her back through when she tries to follow. The kittens are seriously misleading because the woman has a voice of steel and her biceps nearly pop the stitching right next to a fuzzy calico. I’m thinking about that sweet little face with a tear right down the middle of it when I realize I probably don’t look much different right now.
“How bad?” I ask.
Jones glances down at me, a drop of sweat on her nose. She’s running, the fluorescents flashing by above as I try to get someone to answer me. The medics are joined by people from the hospital, more hands are on me, new voices creating crisscrossing paths over my body as words are exchanged, most of them unintelligible.
“My face. How bad?”
“Don’t worry about that right now, sweetheart,” one of the women says, which as terms of affection go is a terrible choice in my situation. We come to a sudden halt that makes me woozy and a quarter turn that sends my head spinning even after the gurney stops moving, and then we’re in an elevator being subjected to a truly abysmal rendition of Beethoven.
“I can’t die—”
“You’re not going to,” Jones interrupts me.
“—listening to this music,” I finish. “It’s unbearable.”
“That’s the spirit, keep fighting,” Faber says, but I see Jones glance over at him, eyebrows slightly pinched like maybe her internal bitch meter just pinged. It seems my so-called friends would agree with her, so maybe she’s reading me right.
I can still hear Lilly’s and Brooke’s voices following me as I went down, tree branches snapping around me, the ground rising up—the only thing that’s truly welcomed me in years. I covered the space in between me and it more quickly than any that’s ever existed between myself and my friends, or my parents.
“I’m not a very nice person sometimes,” I tell Jones, as the elevator moves upward. Whatever has broken inside seems to be leaking truth, words I’ve clamped my mouth shut over for years. I feel the dropping of my stomach, and hope that it’s the movement causing it and not the organ actually falling out of me.
“Nobody’s perfect,” she says, but her eyes are on the bank of buttons, the light climbing as we ascend.
“I was close,” I tell her. “Until now.” I point to the flap of skin hanging against the side of my face.
“Sense of humor, that’ll help pull you through,” Faber says, but I ignore him. Everything he says ends with an upbeat, like he’s making a car commercial.
“It’s not me though,” I go on, still trying to catch Jones’s eye. “Whenever I’m not a nice person, or if I make a bad choice. That’s my sister.”
“Uh-huh,” she says, and stabs a button as if that will make the elevator go faster.
“Are you in much pain?” Faber asks.
I don’t answer him, because I am in pain. Rather tremendous pain, if I’m being honest. I’m breathing, but never enough, like a balloon that only fills halfway and then ejects everything in a halfhearted wheeze. My lungs feel like a cheap party favor, my head the piñata that took the brunt of the hit, my heart the soundtrack that keeps skipping.
The only thing still working well is my mind, and whatever part of the body willpower is located in. I won’t lose consciousness again, won’t switch off and let others discover all the hideous things inside of me. I take a deep breath and try to focus, causing a bubbling noise from my side.
The elevator doors open, and we’re greeted by a wall of people in white, and finally, some consistency. There’s a deep thwump-thwump coming from somewhere, methodical and perfect. I relax as it fills my ears, my chest cavity, the hole where my sister’s apology should be, still vacant. Voices are lost, like mutterings in another room that are easily dismissed. I’ve left the elevator music and senseless sounds of the ambulance behind me to come to this point, a helicopter on the roof creating the great, deep pulse of sound, a black mechanical heart to lift me into the sky.
I go willingly, some of the people in white climbing in beside me. Jones and Faber are left behind as we lift off, this feeling of weightlessness so different from my fall to the ground. From the corner of my eye I can just see Jones turn to Faber, spinning her index finger next to her ear.
I’ll have to try harder. Argue louder. Explain better. Maybe someone has to know me before they can see that I would never do these things; use a boy for sex, throw myself out a window to keep him from leaving, have friends who hate me. Sasha Stone is not that person; Shanna Stone is.
But Shanna has been terribly quiet since we landed, as if the fall knocked her into silence. If she’s anything like me at all she’s putting together the right words for an apology—or as I like to call it, an explanation. She’ll find the right things to say, just enough to make it better without actually humbling herself. And when that happens, we’re going to have a long talk about personal safety.
And hopefully punctuation.
I can’t hear anything except the rush of wind outside and the constant thwump of the blades, but one of the women in white looks down at me and rests a hand on my cheek. I smile at her, even though I know there’s blood in my teeth.
I smile because everything is going to be okay.
Shanna will be back.