Chapter 6 (post four)

Pre-note: Here's the next part of chapter six. This section is pretty long, so here it is:

Chapter six, section four:

The Sunday morning before I was meant to move into the residence of West End Secondary School, I snuck out of my hospital room. The nurses’ station was just down the hall, a semi-circle desk with a row of locked doors behind it.  There was only one nurse at the station, working steadily at a laptop computer on the rounded desk.

I moved quietly, with bare feet going numb on the cold tiled floor. When I got close, I bent down and looked for a hiding place that would give me a view of the computer. I spotted a little desk tucked in the corner, with a chair draped with a coat. Quiet as a mouse, I slid onto my hands and knees and crawled to my hiding place. I moved the chair slowly so it wouldn’t make noise and give me away, and tucked myself underneath the desk. The coat hung just long enough so that even if the nurse turned around, she wouldn’t see me.

I could see the computer screen, but the print was too small on the document to see what she was typing. It didn’t matter, though, as all I needed was to see the keyboard, which, thanks to the curve of the desk, I could.

I made myself comfortable in the small space, knowing the wait would be awhile.

The past few days had gone by so fast it was mostly a blur, but as I sat in a ball on the floor, I tried to recall it. The day I’d brought back all that stuff, I had been so excited. I still can’t recall the number of times I tried on my clothes and paraded down the hall for Jake and the nurses. One outfit I remember in particular was a dress, short, fitted at the top with a flirty skirt, which I paired with a pair of clunky heels in neutral tones. Although I’d paraded down the hall as usual, with the nurses commenting and Jake smiling, I saw Jake’s eyes scan me over, linger in all the wrong places and then dart away. I caught him checking me out, which I was sure the nurses wouldn’t approve of, but I smiled right at him anyways. He returned it, but in the same professional manner as before. Some of the other patients in the hospital had peaked their heads out of their rooms, too. They were mostly older people, with the only person even close to my age ten years younger than me. After I spotted the little boy, I’d asked Jake if all these people were New Wings like me, and he told me they were, but not to talk to them. This threw me aback, and when I asked why, he said they didn’t remember their past lives the way I did, so it was best to keep to small talk in case I said something wrong. I didn’t know how to respond, so I kept quiet.

I hardly had time to think about what Jake had said or what had happened that day before I was out cold. The next day I woke up late, after noon, to a note from Jake saying he wouldn’t be seeing me until Monday, and that he was sorry but something had come up. The nurses were really polite, providing me with company when they could. My favourite was Maggie, the nurse with the Australian accent. She talked my ear off, but she talked about fashion, so I loved it all. I learned that this world loves fashion, although it’s often very expensive. The mayor’s daughter was often on the edge of every trend, thanks to the power and influence of her father. Everyone wore what she wore, everyone changed when she changed. The second day passed quickly with Maggie, and I went to bed early again.

My third day she brought the Sunrise catalogue for the month, showing me what was “in.” I never thought of myself as much of a trend-setter or -follower back on earth, but I got caught up in the ripped jeans and ballet flats.  

Maggie had weekends off, so I was bored the day before my sneaking around nurses’ stations. To distract myself, I had tried to get internet on my laptop, but it was password-protected and the nurses wouldn’t give the password to me. I’d tried to guess the password all Saturday, but with no success. That Sunday I put into action the plan I’d come up with to see with my own eyes the password, for fun more than anything, as hospital room I’d been stuck in seemed to be growing smaller every minute.

Finally, the nurse got up from the station, carrying a folder to one of the locked doors. When she disappeared inside, I snuck to the laptop and logged off the internet connection. I’d just made it back under the desk in the corner when the nurse returned to the computer with a thicker folder. A few seconds later, when the internet browser informed her that she was logged off, she typed the password, which I caught easily. Happy with my successful sneaking, I decided to return to my white hospital room, but just as I placed my hand out of the cover of the coat, papers flew across the floor. I drew my hand back into cover as the nurse kneeled over and began to pick up the papers from the folder she’d knocked over. “Damn,” I heard her mumble, but I was silently thankful as the papers had all stayed over by her chair. However, what I saw next nearly caused me to cry out. Labelled clearly on the folder the nurse was now filling was “McCalden, Annika.”

Now I watched the papers she was placing in it, catching words such as “favourites,” “personal” and “family.”

The nurse organized it neatly, and then returned to the computer. I watch her in shock and curiosity until a few minutes later, when she picked the folder up and carried it into one of the locked rooms. I slipped out of my hiding place, noting the number of the door the nurse was filing my folder behind and the key she’d used to open it, before jogging back to the safety of my room.

I now had full access to the internet, but my mind was jumping all over the place so much I could already concentrate. When I finally did manage to focus and log onto the internet, I was disappointed to discover that the usual websites I’d checked when I was alive; Facebook, Hotmail, Blogger, Twitter; weren’t available here. Then again, as I thought about it, if I could update my Facebook status to, “Heaven’s interesting, I’m learning lots,” or send an email to my mom saying that I loved her and was fine, that I would freak them out and it wouldn’t make much sense. They would probably think it was some cruel joke, anyways, and not reply.

The only website that did work was the one that I found on the papers Jake had handed me a couple days ago. West End Secondary School’s website was bright, modern and all different shades of blue.  I learned about the clubs offered, the school population (1000), some of the favourite teachers and the typical school day. When I entered my student number, I found information on the uniforms that Jake had ordered and my timetable, but it was all the same information that I had printed out on the sheets of paper.

No matter what I read, though, my mind kept jumping back to that folder. What was in it? Is that how they seemed to know so much about me? Had Jake read it?

I knew I had to find out.