Flesh and Bone

Chapter 4: But the Lord said, "What have you done?". Listen!

When the hug finally ended, Otis insisted on carrying Cecile's backpack in for her. She had no complaints, so long as they got inside before someone saw her in this hobbled state after that run of good luck with avoiding people.

Their co-ed room was entirely unique not only in its nature as a space shared by a boy and a girl, but also in its design. All the other rooms in Wellston's dormitories for both boys and girls had three or even four bedrooms per unit, which were then supplemented with a small and basic kitchenette-slash-common area and a bathroom. Cecile's was, however, built with only two bedrooms due to an architectural error involving the dorm's HVAC system during construction.

Having multiple bedrooms traditionally gives you more options in terms of whom you'll be able to get along with as dorm-mates. Even if almost everyone you're assigned with are vain, whiny, greedy, noisy, grating, or whom are otherwise disagreeable, you might get a dorm-mate who wasn't. Whether they were a good one or a neutral one, though, again was left to fate.

Cecile did not rely on fate.

"Come on, Otis, put it down, now, I'm fine." But it was no use; her confidant was insistent on carrying her bag all the way to her room. Giving in and just accepting that he was going to do it whether she wanted him to or not, she settled down into one of the two dark-purple velvet chairs they had in their common area, placing her cane between her left leg and the full armrest.

Otis came running back from the hall after tossing her bag into her bedroom, sitting down at the chair opposite of hers. Practically touching his clasped hands onto the low-lying table between the chairs as he leaned forward, it looked like it dawned on him that he had nothing to really say. Just a little bit of surprise on his face, stammering until he finally opened with candor. "How are you, Cecile? I mean, are you okay? Are you better now, or—?" And he stopped, realizing that that last question being idiotic in that it was both obvious and yet necessary to ask.

But she understood where he was coming from completely. Reassuring him at first to assuage his tenacity for awkwardness, Cecile decided to lay it all out for him about what had happened. Swearing to tell absolutely no one of what he was going to hear, Otis sat in completely rapt attention as he listened to her explain.

Choosing certain words and plucking pieces of information here or there under the guise of brevity so as to soften the landings on her most pertinent medical issues, she told him what she experienced and what she knew. Cecile told him about her hospital stay and the good nature of the staff, which seemed to offer him some comfort before she got into the step-by-step of what had happened after he was locked out by the staff. Generally it was a description of how she'd been woken up, a bit of an overview of her pharmaceutical treatments, and her physical therapy with the nurses.

But she couldn't stay away from the heavier subjects forever. Even though he was a year behind her academically, he still operated as her personal liaison at the school paper and more importantly as her closest friend. Otis was definitely her only friend at Wellston, that was for sure. It was pertinent that he learned this information now, before it would become an issue down the line.

With an abrupt turn in the conversation, Cecile laid out what her medical problem was. 'A chronic, unexplained imbalance in the motor cortex' was how Doctor Ezwa described it, but she also included his caveat that as far as he could see from her scans these areas were perfectly fine. Looking confused, Otis asked if this disability was going to be permanent; that was one question that she did not have an answer for. Maybe, maybe not. These next few weeks were going to be critical. It could stay with her for life, or it could just sort itself out with exercise, therapy, and potentially more medication; almost as if the brain would find a way to reset itself, to find sense and reason in a sudden jumble of information and chaos.