Mellina sat cross-legged on her new, unfamiliar bed. While she was pouting on this new bed of hers, the faded blue wall and the gross, sheet-less mattress took turns being stared at. The only light came through the open window, and one single thought stood out prominently from all the others buzzing around in her head.
Ow.
It had been quite a long day, figuratively speaking. The day was barely halfway over. However, the difference between the number of hours on Earth and the number of hours on Trae was significant, and most kids would be asleep before the pain killers arrived.
That morning, the nurses had given her two shots in both arms, to make sure she wouldn’t spread any Earthly diseases; two shots in both legs, to make sure she wouldn’t catch any foreign – i.e. Trasian – diseases; one last shot on her left bottom cheek, for protection against a new type of disease that everyone on Trae was required to get anyway, else an outbreak might cause a deadly plague.
No matter the position Mellina tried to be in, there just wasn’t a comfortable one. She knew. She had tested them all.
She understood and accepted, however, why all that pain was necessary. The nurses told her that numbing medicine would arrive at ten o’ clock that night, so she decided not to complain. Since the next time she would have to endure that pain again wouldn’t be for ten years, she thought about how close that was in comparison to, say, the fall of the Conservative mage country of Antova. Antova was like a puppy in need of being put down: it was in pain and pathetic and just needed to end. She knew that she would live to see that puppy die, as long as she lived through the pain of nine needles entering her body at least one more time.
Thinking like that just made her stomach do flips.
Juliet, Mellina’s soft-spoken roommate, opened the door and snuck into the room without bothering to close the door again. She turned on the light and the two girls stared at each other.
“You were sitting in the dark,” Juliet observed.
“Yes I was,” Mellina stated matter-of-factly.
“But you’re sitting.”
“Yep.” Mellina nodded and tried to blow the chocolate brown hair out of her face. It didn’t matter how much it annoyed her. She didn’t like pain more than she didn’t like the hair in her face, so she refused to lift her arm.
“Does it hurt?”
The girl sitting on the bed glanced at the ceiling – she noticed a mysterious coffee-like stain and furrowed her brow, wondering for a brief moment how it got there. Tapping her finger on her thigh, she replayed what happened after she left the school infirmary: the volunteer nurses fussed all over her, making sure she had enough bandages for her soon-to-be sore limbs. One of the nurses pushed her to her dorm room in a wheelchair obviously designed for this one day – it was a party for all the health care staff within a twenty mile radius – and finally, with bright pink and purple bandages on every limb, Mellina took an absurdly long time to get onto her dorm room bed. There was an excess of moaning; if you walked down the hallway of any freshman dorm on campus, you would hear nothing but groaning and whining, maybe a wail or a sob here or there.
Mellina remembered, vividly even, everything hurting at first. At some point between then and Juliet’s question, though, her butt and right leg had fallen asleep.
“Not as much as it did earlier,” was all she came up with.
Juliet felt sad for Mellina, and for all the other students who had to get these shots. The aftermath of them looked to her like the aftermath of a war battle. “But it hurt a lot before?”
Mellina’s mint green eyes widened and she let out a chuckle. “What do you think?”
Juliet figured it out herself. “Well, that’s not good. Are there any pain killers?”
After shaking her head to say no and simultaneously trying to get the hair out of her face, Mellina just gave up and said, “Not yet anyway. I wasn’t offered any temporaries. They said they would give me a total-body numbing right before I went to bed.”
“I could go find you some if you want. It would help with the pain you’re having right now.”
“No, that’s okay. I’m fine like this. They’ve stopped hurting from the inside and now they’re just throbbing.” Mellina tried to give her a joking smile but it felt forced, and therefore looked more like a disappointed, depressed smile. She attempted to move her arms like the nurses told her to, but she could only bring herself to move her shoulder muscles, which didn’t help at all.
“Well…” Juliet chewed her lip and scanned the room. “Don’t just sit there doing nothing! I feel like you should be doing something.”
“Yeah, well,” Mellina retorted, suddenly annoyed with Juliet’s upbeat attitude. “I feel like I just had a needle shoved up my ass. Oh, wait, I did. I’m fine doing nothing, thank you.”
Juliet was taken aback. Her face fell and she gazed at her flip-flops. If she said something like that within earshot of her parents, she would most definitely get grounded. By this point she was flustered, and she was thinking that the best thing to do was to make sure Mellina had something to occupy her time and then exit the room. “If I leave you with a book, will you be okay?”
“I’m okay with absolutely nothing. Can’t turn the pages, anyway.”
Obviously, Juliet’s visit had turned bittersweet. Her pin-straight sandy blonde hair did an excellent job concealing the dismal look on her face. Why is Mellina so angry at me?
At the same time, Mellina was thinking, Why can’t Maylin visit my room so we can groan together? I don’t have anyone to talk to, except this girl who didn’t even have to take these stupid shots.
“Will you please just leave me alone?” Mellina shouted, but not intending to. “It’s been a long day, and I’m sorry for yelling at you, but I really, really just want to sit here and do nothing. That’s what I’ve been doing, and I will continue to do that until something else disrupts my pattern, such as a fire, or a nice drug dealer coming in with some strong pain killers, or the sun setting, whenever that happens on this planet… or something.”
Finally understanding exactly what Mellina wanted, Juliet nodded and quickly left the room, her head down and feeling ashamed.
Aware that she had, in fact, hurt Juliet’s feelings, Mellina just sat there. Alone. Like she was before. Only this time, the door was open, and it was annoying her to shreds.
