Citrus | ONC 2024 ✔️

7: Good Plan

I didn't hear Mathew come back or sit down in his respective seat. My ears were double lanes that looked like singles on a highway under construction. The whole illusion was a trick, coaxing jingles to funnel to my brain first, happy harmonies after with melodies to boot. Words came last, jumbled between the lines of real voices and electronic replications of what was.

"I brought water too, if you don't want it." A whoosh of air swept over me, fresh but suffocating all at once.

Bringing my eyes level with his, I fought off a smile. There was nothing to smile about or feel any sort of pleasure in. This Christmas morning, gloom and doom were the sole captors. I shouldn't have smiled or let my chest lighten like a great vine had been disentangled from my exterior. I shouldn't have been happy. Morgan wasn't okay. I couldn't be okay.

Yet, I took the plastic cup of orange liquid with a grin on my face.

Mathew mirrored my expression.

Diverting my gaze to the guy stringing the thrum of music into the brown palace, I lifted the cup to my lips. Bittersweet orange shot up my nose as I inhaled. I closed my eyes and felt the alcohol like airport orange juice drop from my existence, clipped off to drift into the great beyond.

Artificial sugars mixed over my tongue. Suddenly, the smell was vile and somehow worse than watered-down airport orange juice. There was sugar and orange and water. Was there water? Orange lapsed every inch of my nostrils, still prevalent after I leaned back and lowered my cup, counting the ticking seconds and sequential beats of carols.

I grabbed the bottle of water. Mathew's eyes pinned on my hands making quick work of the cap and half the bottle of water. The other half was gone in the span of five awkward minutes of Mathew pretending to not watch me chug water and me attempting to balance the speed of consumption with the acceptable amount of time to finish a sixteen liquid ounce bottle.

Shifting the bottle between my hands, I kept my eyes on my tennis shoes. They looked the same. All of my things looked the same save for a broken arm I couldn't bother to remember about, a missing jacket, and a chunk of memory gone like dead leaves in autumn wind.

There were cones and 11:58 and last words about sleep. Nothing and nothing and more nothing. Then, beeping and severe injury and over-saturated orange juice invaded the supposedly chaotic nothing.

"It might have been a mistake to drink that so fast," Mathew said. He looked at me, all acts gone, and his dull brown eyes on me like the burn of wind in my face, inescapable if I wanted to take this path. "I didn't see a bathroom anywhere close to this part."

I beg to differ. Careful to keep my jaw clenched tight, I schooled my face into an easy smile. "I'll ask that guy for help" —I motioned to the front desk— "It's not that difficult."

Mathew sucked in a sharp stream of air, his gaze shooting across the room. Notes jammed his expression into a forced crescendo, and he didn't come out of the petrified high. His jaw was slacked, his eyes wide, and his chest lifted and tense, a huge breath held in.

I continued, "Unless, that is difficult."

"Good plan." Mathew smiled, tension leaving his shoulders as I stood. His mouth moved. I tried to feel the words, but they weren't mine, too distant to coherently capture in the length of my palms, not quick like a vine. He probably said, "Sometimes it is."

Turning the orange juice between my palms, the ever elusive mango smoothie and even rarer mango juice happened to latch itself into the workings of the hospital cafeteria where food was barely worth it but was better than sitting in a hospital waiting. Then again, it was still part of the hospital. I was asking for directions. Morgan was still doing whatever no one would actually say. Mathew was wallowing in whatever mixture of emotions could make him keel over prematurely. The only commonality was the simple fact we were all waiting in a hospital at an awful hour in the morning on the twentieth of December.