e It.
Michaela Gorin
Copyright 2014 Michaela Gorin
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I can see it now and how I wish it was true.
The four of us crammed in the back seat, screaming the lyrics to the Time Warp as it blasts from the radio, and with every laugh filled verse the seat belt keeping both Kit and myself in the seat seems to cut the circulation off to one half of my body. “Cops!” Mitch whisper-screams, turning down the music and one of us bops down in our seat. Cora shakes her head from the front seat against our people packing abilities from the start but Mitch told her we’d all fit in his car, he didn’t say safely.
“Gone,” Chesh chirps from her window seat and the radio gets cranked up again.
“Anyone want a drink?” Ben laughs lifting a bottle of tequila and taking a gulp with a curse and a shake of his head, “no salt! no lime!” he hisses handing the bottle off to me, which Kit snatches away quickly swallowing two shots worth and dangling the bottle between Cora and Mitch. “Drink up.” Neither reaches for the bottle and Kit frowns behind her sunglasses.
“Are Nanna and Grandad keen to get us home in time for bingo?” It does the trick, Cora takes a sip and passes it back but Kit doesn’t move, now holding the bottle against Mitch’s shoulder. “Driving, K.”
“Live a little, it’s not like you’ll get caught.”
“No.”
Kit grumbles at his reply, unbuckling the seat belt and cramming herself into the foot space behind the centre console, forcing Ben to spread his legs to let her fit. For her little frame she’s got a good reach, able to still push the cold glass against Mitch’s neck. He pushes it away with minor growls and I watch his face get angrier with every prod of his buttons. “Kit, I'll have a drink.”
“Mitch hasn’t had one Olive, wait your turn.”
She manages to get his face with the corner of the bottle and he snaps, turning around to snatch the bottle and send it to the floor of the passenger seat. “Kit! For fuck’s sake cut it out.” With his attention back on the road, in the mirror I see his eyes widen. “Shit.”
It’s the smells that stick. Burnt rubber, smoke and blood. It stays in the fibres of my clothes, the strand of my hair and the creases of my skin. A crude, rough smell that burns my airways and scratches at my lungs, covering the sterile medical smell I usually associate with hospitals. I particularly don’t like them, it seems someone is dying, whenever I do step in one, perhaps this will break the streak.
My eyes are stiff, the creases filled with what I presume is my own blood though with the mess we created, it could be Mitch, Kit’s or Ben’s. I'm going to hurl if it is though. It’s one thing to see your friend’s naked and be so close that you’re comfortable with that but to be coated in their blood is a bit different and way too close.
I force the creases to clear though, the sight I receive isn’t a comforting one. Cora is the first I see, the only one I see. It makes sense she was only in the passenger seat, the furthest away from the impact.
Cora is the first apart from myself to really have an acknowledgement of what has happened as the least injured. Her mild cuts and bruises paired with her mild concussion make her the luckiest of us, physically. As a natural born worrier, she’s the worst off mentally.
She’s the quietest of us, she made the honour role in school and is on full scholarship for her dream as an anthropologist. We’d never really been friends and it wasn’t until she started dating Mitch that we even thought of adding her to our little group. We did though much to my chagrin and then it was just a surprise when we became friends. Envy usually clouds things like that.
Cora’s hands are to her face, shaking and pale. From my hospital bed a good half a room away I see the stiffness in her small movements, the wincing when she brushes a crazy black curl behind her ear and nicks the stitches that run from check to chin on her right side. She swallows as she straightens her back, taking a deep breath, then doubling over as she throws up whatever was in her stomach into the vomit bag. Her hand rubbing soothing circles over the bloated mound of her belly, something I had presumed was just one burger too many. She didn’t even take a sip from that bottle, did she?
Past Cora is like staring into a parallel universe, where the people look like my friends but aren’t.
There’s a reason no one calls Vanessa Vandenburg by her name. She’s one of those rare eversmiling people, who even with the world crashing around her she still finds a reason to smile, even a small one. Granted all her reasons are usually the same one syllable, three letter name but she always smiles. It gave her the title of Cheshire Cat by fifth grade when we all watched the pink and purple cat disappear on the old roll out class tv. It seems like a lifetime ago now, after this. I was nine when we met, she was all pigtails and freckles, the constant but reluctant companion to a heckling and troublemaking yellow haired boy.
Together she and Ben may as well be two different sides of a coin from opposite sides of the world. Ches is optimistic and thoughtful. Ben, a charming and deceitful ass. Though we didn’t know that when we met him he would grow up to charm the panties off any female creature. Myself included. Of course at nine we’re barely getting over the fact that boys don’t have cooties, so how could we have predicted that?
He did though and he’s got so many notches in his bed, it’s falling apart and every one of those notch girls believed he’d stop for them, the sexual shark. I've only seen him do that once and he didn’t just stop, he replaced the bed. And we all thought he and Ches were inseparable as kids.
This kind of inseparable becomes heartbreaking in moments like this though. Ches is curled up in the chair by his bedside, her arm in a sling, her face a palet of blue and purple, her spare hand clutched around his. Ben’s mouth is polluted with a breathing tube. His usual head of sunshine has been dipped in tomato sauce, matting the locks to his scalp.
I don’t think I've ever seen Ben so still and Ches so broken.
Tinkling, like bells rings out to me over the silent buzzing of the E.R., pausing every so often only to stop all together. A lull falling to its place to my left. There’s just a curtain there, a grey-pink sheet separating two cubicles, two accidents, two patients and two stories. At least that would have been the idea had the material not shifted and shown me who laid there. Kit.
From the first time I met Kit, she has never been without a pair of the darkest tint you can get sunglasses. There’s something about them that makes everything ok. My best friend has that effect on people. One smile from behind her shades and everything is right in the world. No one would think it though, she’s not exactly a calming figure even with her small size. Kit’s made a habit of almost exclusively wearing black over the years, her only exceptions being her precious candy apple red jacket and her current pair of everchanging shades. With that, her military boots on some guy’s lap and her devil may care attitude, she’s invincible. No one can touch her. If she arches her eyebrow at you, you’re gone. She’s done with you.
In the time I've known her, Kit’s gone through eleven pairs of sunglasses. The first were a pink so bright it’d put Barbie to shame, stolen from the chemist the day we had our ears pierced. Her latest being a pair of classic Holly Golightly glasses, paid in full. Now missing from her face. I'm one of the few who’s seen her both with and without the protection of her glasses but seeing white gauze in the place of them just seems like cruel irony to me.
Shredded
candy apple peeks out from under the bed, her bare arms on show for the first time in a long while. The irregular thin and thick lines ripping over her arms in a shimmered, fairy magic version of her skin, the older ones almost glow in the bad lighting. Prehaps she isn’t as invincible as I thought she was.
Much to the doctors annoyance I start walking around. There’s one more friend I haven’t seen and I intend on finding him.
Mitch, I've known for as long as I can remember. I know everything about him. I know he loves musk sticks and twenty cent chewing gum. I know he watches Dancing With the Stars on Sundays and his favourite movie is Mighty Ducks. I know him. He retook his twelfth grade exams to get into engineering and decided to go into business instead. I know he collects old books and watches footy religiously. I know he has old toys under his bed and wants nothing more than to settle down and have kids. I know Mitch Wilson like the back of my hand.
But this, this barely breathing creature with a face of patchwork red and white gauze is not Mitch.
Mitch is a fighter, a jokester, an adult, a child, a responsible driver, a Guitar Hero champion, a Led Zeppelin fanatic and an animal lover.
He isn’t an unmoving hunk of meat in a hospital bed. Perhaps someone should tell him that.
Cora has now curled herself up in the chair by the heart monitor, spare vomit bag in hand. Has she told him he’ll be a father. That would wake him up for sure.
Maybe that’s what would have happened if I hadn’t asked them to pick me up. If I had met them like I said I would. A few scrapes. A couple of broken bones. Extreme headaches. Battered but living. Kit wouldn’t have been able to cover Mitch’s eyes from the seat behind, it wouldn’t have been as bad.
Not as bad as this because it is the smells that stick. The burnt rubber. The smoke. The blood. The charred flesh.
Curiosity of course gets the better of everyone and they all slow down to where my friends, the people I considered family lie dead. They huddle together too, like moving whispering herds that have to know the details behind the yellow tape.
There are cars that honk and scream at the deaths. Cars that are calmed into a silent rage by the red soaked white sheet that the wind refuses to let lie still.
And the rubble casts shadows so long, you can store grief in them. Can climb into them and hide away forever and I really wish I could.
Red and blue dance across the scene but they don’t give light or comfort. The red leather peeking out of a half zipped bag took that by itself. The fully zipped one beside it adding to my loss.
The other car is its own mess, its owners coughing and bleeding in a separate ambulance.
The real carnage of my world is clear in what’s left of the car I knew so well.
The car that Ben’s terrier peed in the first day he brought him over. That Kit lost her virginity in. That we pushed to the gas station in a poorly financed road trip. That Cora and I drove around when we couldn’t sleep and the one Vanessa slept in when she could. The assignment buster. The fuel guzzler. The love den. The pet haven. The fun mobile.
All that’s left is a twisted silver frame. Charred hands still laced across the burnt out console.