Cry Until You Bleed

51- Avoiding Calls

"I just want to thank all of you. Especially Desiree, who came in a little later than most of you but she has still put a 110% effort into this dance and a lot of last night's success. Everything went so amazingly and we all did so awesome," Quinn announces on Saturday as the whole party committee is in the meeting room to celebrate our awesome party last night and how successful it was. It's kinda early in the morning so the nurses had brought us donuts and orange juice which is nice. "And I know that most of you have heard already but I'm leaving in a few weeks and Desiree is going to be taking over the committee so let's give it up for Des!"

Everyone sitting in the chairs facing Quinn and Desiree start to applaud but I'm too busy eating my donut to be able to clap so I just smile and then chew.

"She does seem less uptight than she used to," Renée says quietly from my right and Mia, sitting on my left, nods in agreement. "Isn't Katie getting out soon too?"

"Next week, actually," Katie pipes from the other side of Mia as Quinn starts talking about Thanksgiving. "On Friday."

"Everybody's leaving, it's insane," Renée mentions as Mia is giving me a strange look as I stuff my face with a chocolate sprinkled donut from the pile of donuts on my lap.

"Do you think that you have enough donuts?" Mia randomly changes the subject, still looking at me suspiciously.

"Maybe," I shrug. "I'm just eating my feelings a little bit."

"Eating your feelings? Why?" Renée wonders. "What's wrong? I thought that you had an awesome time last night with Niles."

"Yeah, it was great," I assure her with a nod. "Niles is great and last night was great and it all was just so great. It's just that last night, he started bringing up the whole 'they have a point, I don't want to hurt you' thing and this morning, he didn't answer my call so I'm just a little worried that Dr. Lombardi talked to Sophie and then Sophie talked Niles into believing that he's doing more harm than good."

They're all pretty quiet for a minute before Katie breaks the silence as I'm munching on my fifth donut. "Wow, that is pretty tough. Just punch him in the face until he understands that you can make your own decisions."

"I've tried that. I mean, without the punching of faces. It's no big deal, really, I'm probably just being incredibly paranoid about it. We barely even talked about it but the way that he started talking about it, it was kind of worrying. I nipped that conversation in the bud but I still think that he's thinking about it."

"You are perfect, Ana," Renée assures me. "You have absolutely nothing to worry about."

"I appreciate that," I say with a small laugh as I start on my next donut. I'm not incredibly worried about what had happened it's just that it'd been a long time since we've talked like that, about our relationship being harmful, and it seemed kind of random yesterday. Other than that two second conversation though, the whole night was perfect. We danced and we ate and we laughed so much that I had tears rolling down my cheeks. It was perfect.

I wouldn't be worrying about it so much if he didn't ignore my call this morning when I called him before this meeting. And I know that he didn't just miss the call but it rang three times and then just stopped so I know that he ignored my call. If he didn't hear it ring or he was busy or something then it would have rang, like, five times or something and then his voicemail would have picked up but this was only three rings and no voicemail. I realize how crazy I sound but I'm just a little worried and slightly paranoid.

"What do you think that we're going to get stuck with for Thanksgiving?" Mia wonders curiously as we're listening to Quinn explain how we're going to have a nice dinner thanks to the chefs but our job is going to be to decorate the cafeteria with Thanksgiving-like decorations for the tables and walls which doesn't seem too bad.