~~~~~~~~
The first truly clear thought she has is that she is absolutely freezing. Her head is cold, her arms are cold, her fingers feel nearly numb, her legs are cold where her knees are drawn up against her chest, and her whole body is shivering. Everything that she is touching feels equally (if not more) cold to the touch.
The second clear thought that she has is that the surface beneath her head (beneath all of her really) is uncomfortable and hard. She flexes her fingers in an attempt to counter the numbness. She thinks she may have been resting with them underneath her head and that what she is feeling is that they’ve gone numb with lack of blood flow. When they seem mostly functional (or they at least have gained some sense of feeling), she reaches out to explore whatever it is that is both making her so cold and (she is sure) leaving imprint marks on the side of her face. She should probably do something about that -- like try sitting. She should also probably open her eyes, but they feel kind of gluey.
Her questing fingers finish their assessment, and she decides that the cold surface is tile. She is prone on a tile floor, and that tile floor is cold. She’s having trouble letting go of that thought; she hasn’t stopped shivering since she because aware of the fact that she was cold. She pushes herself up while forcing open her eyes. This is a mistake. The only thing that registers for several moments is how dizzy being upright causes her to be. It overrides everything else (everything being for the most part the fact that she is freezing), and she sinks back down to the tile in order to escape from it.
Along with the dizziness comes a wave of nausea and she focuses on trying to will it away. She only has marginal success, but she fells infinitely better than she did when she first sat up, so she stays down. Of course, there are drawbacks to being down again. She’s shivering, but she decides it’s a fair trade off for the moment -- at least until she can manage to get her bearings. She’s sick -- that much is obvious, but it isn’t very helpful as she can’t remember what she was doing before she got sick. The one thing that registered in the brief time that she had her eyes open before the dizziness set in is that she doesn’t recognize where she is.
That thought does nothing to settle her nausea, and she loses the battle to contain it completely. This was more important than the dizziness, and she forced herself up (managing to smack her head against something in the process). Between the heaving, the lightheadedness, the stars in her vision inducing ache in her head, and the general feeling of awfulness that made up her present circumstances, she found herself feeling exhausted. Knowing that if she chose to stand she wouldn’t be making it very far, she curled herself into a ball on the floor (protecting herself from the cold as best she could). It wasn’t ideal, but nothing about the moment is ideal -- not the position, not the fact that she is sick, not the fact that she doesn’t know where she is, and not the fact that trying to think only makes her head more muddled. She tried to pay no attention to the cold, and she let herself fall asleep. She was counting on being able to make sense of it all when she woke.
She wasn’t cold the next time she was capable of clear headed thinking. She wasn’t camped out on a tile covered floor either. She was in a bed, and while it didn’t have the most comfortable of mattresses, it was a great deal softer than the tile had been. She wasn’t going to grouse about the upgrade. Figuring out what was going on was better accomplished from a place with a pillow that didn’t make her feel as if she was devolving into an ice cube. She had wondered if she had been sick enough that she had been admitted to a hospital, but she quickly dismissed that idea. More things seemed to be clicking into place in her mind the longer she was awake.
She was in a fairly large room that contained five beds each containing a girl (including herself) who were displaying various degrees of what seemed to be the same illness. She was at a school. She knew that now. She had settled on that explanation as soon as she had dismissed the notion that she might have been hospitalized. This was her new school. This was where Meredyth had sent her to get her out of the way. She didn’t recognize the place, but she knew that that was where she was supposed to be. This particular place must be the infirmary. She had read that boarding schools had such places. Her previous school (private, but day only) had had no such place (it wasn’t needed as sick students were merely sent home). An open door led to what was obviously the nurse’s office.
It bothered her that she couldn’t remember much about the school. She decided that she must have come down sick shortly after arriving. Between whatever fever she had run and what they had given her for it she must have some short term memory issues. It should clear up soon enough now that she was . . . well, she wasn’t completely better. She still felt decidedly ill, but she felt much better than she had when she had been cemented to the floor. Just not being cemented to the floor was a vast enough improvement to take her from feeling awful to only feeling lousy.
The woman who came out of the office and began bustling from girl to girl she felt fairly confident in assigning the title of “nurse.” She visited two other girls before she got to Lia, and Lia wasn’t too distracted by the still lingering unsettledness of her stomach to notice that she didn’t seem to have much of a bedside manner. She appeared to be very no nonsense and very efficient. She issued directions with a strict glare, and Lia decided that she wasn’t a woman who would take kindly to being questioned. She would hold back her curiosity and figure out what day it was from some other source.
When the woman came to her bedside, she made some (really unconvincing) comment about hoping that she was feeling better. She didn’t pause for Lia to make any response, so she figured that one wasn’t wanted. She took the little cup of pills that she was handed and let the nurse hand her a cup of water from the bedside table. Her stomach revolted just from looking at the cup. Water sounded really good, but the thought of swallowing something solid was making her stomach churn. She didn’t think that the school nurse wanted to hear that. She was sticking with her theory that arguing with the nurse wouldn’t end well. She would just avoid argument all together. There was no reason to provoke a direct confrontation.
She took the cup and tilted it back. She sipped some water and swallowed. The nurse nodded (Lia thought that she looked pleased which made her think that she had read the woman’s lack of tolerance for dissent accurately) and went on to the next girl (who was currently throwing up into a small trash can). Lia could have done without seeing that (or hearing it). It certainly wasn’t helping her issues. She leaned back and closed her eyes. The other girl stopped, and Lia was infinitely grateful for both that and the fact that the nurse had finished her “rounds” and returned to her office.
She snagged a tissue from next to her water glass, and swiped it across her mouth. That was better. The pills had begun to dissolve under her tongue. That was nasty by itself without adding her upset stomach to the equation. She just couldn’t swallow them. It would set her off again, and she had no desire to echo the next girl over. Whatever it was that the nurse was trying to give her, she would just do without it. What she had felt like stomach flu, and (in her experience) that was best dealt with via sleeping rather than medication.
Only now that she was clearer headed, the noise of the other occupants of the room was likely to interfere with that. Sick or not, it was a wonder that she had managed to sleep at all with all of the rustling and hacking and assorted other noises created by a room full of sick girls. Maybe that was what the nurse had given her -- something to help her sleep. In that case, she would definitely pass. She was muddled up enough. She didn’t need anything additional making her groggy.
She was plenty groggy already -- too groggy really. She wondered if maybe she was dehydrated. That might explain the difficulty she seemed to be having getting her brain to function appropriately. She made a grab for the glass on her bedside table, and she managed to hang onto it over the gap betwee
n its resting place and her bed. She took a couple of sips, but decided that she better not push it. She, at least, didn’t have the bitter taste of the pill residue bothering her. She settled herself further into the pillow behind her and let her eyes drift shut.
She was plenty tired (in that you’ve done nothing but been sick for a while and it’s left you exhausted even though you’ve been doing nothing but resting kind of a way). She would just have to tune out the noise. Her hand was still clenched around the tissue. She would have to do something about that. She wasn’t trying to pick a fight with the nurse, but she was really sure that she wouldn’t be able to keep anything solid down. She curled up on her side and pondered what the odds were of getting busted if she dropped the pills in their wadded up tissue into her bedside trash can. She was still pondering when she slid into sleep.
That pondering had apparently stuck with her throughout the time that she was unconscious since her right hand was numb from the manner in which she had it clenched around that tissue. It was mostly quiet, and it was dark except for a light coming from off to her right side. She squinted that way for a moment and tried to figure out what it was that was so well lit. She processed that it was coming from the bathroom and that everyone else must be sleeping. That worked out well. It would solve her pill disposal problem provided that she could make it there. (She remembered what had happened the last time that she had tried to get up.) There was no way that she was telling that woman that she had skipped out on taking whatever it was she had shoved at her.
She was sitting up with her legs swung over the side of her bed when it hit her. A wave of memory washed over her, and she barely bit back a gasp as it did. The last thing she needed was someone coming to check on her (or to draw attention from one of the other girls). She needed to think. She sank back onto the bed and closed her eyes in an attempt to help herself focus. She hadn’t just arrived at school. She had been here for she didn’t know how long, but it had been far longer than it should have been.
It could have been weeks. There was no sense of time in what little of her memories she seemed to be able to access. Mostly, they consisted of feeling groggy and not being able to do much of anything. She couldn’t possibly have been sick for that long. She hadn’t been feeling groggy because she was sick -- not for the amount of time that her mind was frantically trying to account for as she sat there trying to make sense of all of the information that had her head spinning. She unclenched her hand and carefully spread out the tissue. It wasn’t all that easy as it had been in contact with things that were wet and then all wadded up for what had likely been hours. She did it anyway. It was then that she realized that there wasn’t enough light for her to really see anything.
Still holding carefully onto the tissue and its contents, she managed to stand with only moderate wobbling and make her way across the room. She wasn’t overly steady for long (and still a bit lightheaded), so she allowed herself to sink to a seated position on the floor once she arrived. She was back to dealing with freezing cold tile again, but she couldn’t be bothered about that at the moment. She couldn’t really tell anything about the pills in front of her (they weren’t in the best of conditions after all) except that there were three of them. She didn’t know what it would accomplish if she could see them in their original condition; it wasn’t as though she was walking around with a pharmaceutical desk reference.
She was feeling nauseous again, and it had nothing to do with the lingering effects of her illness. This was pure disbelieving, stress induced nausea -- the kind that fictional characters always got when confronted with some sort of particularly nasty, evil surprise. Well, that was what she had gotten, wasn’t it? It was a nasty, evil surprise to find out that your sister would do something like medicate you into oblivion. She couldn’t wrap her head around that. It was a crazy thought. She wasn’t remembering time correctly or something. It had to be anything that wasn’t what it was that she was thinking.
She wouldn’t have. That was too far over the line to even contemplate. She stopped herself mid thought. Was it? Was there even a line anymore? Had there been a line with anything else? Had there been a line when Meredyth had shipped her off to wherever it was that she was sitting now? That was different, of course, that had been to get her away from Connor. That had been to get her out of the way. She had only sent her here to get her out of the way of whatever she thought Lia might be interfering with by spending time with Connor and Kyle. Well, wasn’t this just another way of ensuring that she stayed out of the way? It couldn’t be. It was different. This was beyond that. Was it? Was it really that far removed from the realm of possibility? Was she that certain that Meredyth had lines that she wouldn’t cross? Had there been a line when she was helping Wyatt cover up a kidnapping attempt? Had there been a line in the way she still held a grudge against Connor? Had there been a line in the way Lia had watched her playing people for as long as she had been old enough to recognize what it was that her sister was doing?
There should have been a line, but she didn’t know that she could say that there was. She knew what Meredyth was capable of doing. She had seen those files after all. The odds of her ever losing the knowledge of what she had seen in those files (drug induced periods of nonfunctioning aside apparently) were slim to none. She couldn’t unsee that information. She couldn’t undo the knowledge of some of the things that her sister and her fiancé made a habit of doing. She couldn’t lose the emotions that she had felt looking at the pictures of that little girl.
Was it reasonable to expect that she was somehow exempt just because she was blood? Why should she be special? She wasn’t special -- not to Meredyth. The evidence of that was still sitting in her hand. Accepting that premise made everything make sense even though she didn’t want it to be what made sense. Meredyth was having her drugged. She was keeping her “out of it” so that she didn’t have to concern herself with whom she might be talking to or what she might be doing.
Was that even possible? Surely the school would just . . . but would they even ask any questions as long as they had a copy of a prescription in hand? She sat on the floor for far longer than she should have before she shook herself back from pondering and into focus. She didn’t need anyone wandering in on her. She needed to figure things out not get busted and redrugged. There was one thing that she did know already. It didn’t matter what it was that she was holding in her hand; she wouldn’t be taking any more of them.
She didn’t do much sleeping for the rest of the night. Her brain was too busy to let her relax. It didn’t seem to matter as far as her recovery went because the nurse sent her back to her dorm room the next afternoon. The woman seemed happy to be sending her on her way, and Lia was happy to be going. The whole place was severely lacking in privacy, and she was in need of some of that. Besides, being away from the still in the middle of being sick other girls was nothing but a plus all the way around.