Eight Boys and a Walker girl

43 | Dad

43 | Dad

Elena finds me.

First, all I see is lines. Then colours, flooding my vision like paint. And light. It seems to be a hundred times more intense than it's supposed to be. It hurts my head. The sound in my ears is muffled, as if through a fog. I see a pair of blue eyes swim before me, and blink, trying to focus.

A hand reaches through the haze, taking mine, and I'm yanked up, making my head spin. I have no idea how long I've been unconscious, but what I do know is that I feel sick. I blink again, making out an oval face, blonde hair swinging forward.

"Get up."

I stare up into Elena's face. "What?"

She rolls her eyes. The Elena I know is back. "I said get up! Do you want your Mum to see you like this? You look like absolute shit."

I struggle upwards, hanging onto Elena's arm. The colour of everything seems to have been turned up in brightness and intensity. And my head hurts. And my chest still feels tight. Is this what it feels like to be high? I've read that colours are supposed to seem brighter than usual when you're high.

I look at Elena. "I think I'm going to be sick."

"Oh shit." She pulls me round a corner and shoves me through a blue door with a block image of a man above the door handle. "Here, chuck up in those."

"Those are men's urinals!" I may have just blacked out a second ago, but I'm pretty sure the cartoon figure on the door had trousers.

"So? They'll do just as well for being sick!"

I'm not in a position to argue. I stagger forward, place my hands on the sides of the urinals and heave. I feel disgusting. I probably look disgusting. I run a hand through my hair, heaving again. I feel sorry for the cleaner who does these rooms at the end of the day.

I wipe my mouth with a square of toilet paper, and turn towards Elena. She's stood in the doorway, her eyes on me. The look in them isn;t hateful or blaming. For the first time, she looks sad.

Without even realising it, my eyes slide down subconsciously to her belly. Elena is slim. Me and Zoe and Lauren were always so jealous of her metabolism, because she eats twenty McNuggets and looks like a Victoria Secret model, and I eat a single burger and look like bloated. Elena's stomach has always been flat and peachy-coloured, abs pushing against the skin, making her a goddess in a cropped top.

But now, for the first time in the three and a bit months since she and Jamie hooked up at the party none of us were meant to be at, I notice the swelling. It isn't huge, but it's there. She is over twelve weeks pregnant, after all. I nearly don't notice it, because she's in a baggy burgundy hoodie and black leggings. Does she wear hoodies on purpose? She's definitely been wearing them a lot recently. Probably to help conceal the bump.

Elena doesn't seem to notice my staring. She holds out a hand to me, and I take it uncertainly. She leads me back out into the hall, and I'm grateful for the stability of her arm. I feel like I'm walking on legs of jelly.

I'm expecting her to flood me with questions about why I was passed out outside Jamie's door, and I'm almost annoyed when she doesn't. Doesn't she care? No, of course she doesn't. She's Elena, and she hates me.

Even is Jamie is alive after all.

"Were you going to see Jamie?" I ask eventually, my voice slightly apprehensive. She might still be angry at me. But she doesn't snap at me, or shout, or anything. She just shakes her head.

"No. I'm- I'm not ready for that. Not just yet." She leads me into the foyer and out of the glass doors, into the maze of hallways that is the rest of the hospital. "There's a courtyard somewhere...let's go there."