Page 28 of Brain Damage

Everyone in the entire restaurant is staring at us. Even that awful waitress is looking our way and her jaw is dropped open in disbelief.

“Yes,” I say quickly. I glance around at the audience we’ve acquired. “Now get up. Please.”

Clark gets to his feet, but he pulls me up with him. He kisses me passionately in front of the entire restaurant, and the room breaks into thunderous applause.

This might be the most romantic thing that’s ever happened to me. Honestly, I’ve even forgotten about the scabies—I probably don’t have it. Clark and I are going to get married and live happily ever after together.

Nothing can ruin this.

19

AFTER

Well, I am now a Hallway Parker.

That’s what everybody says about me. Like, constantly. When I got up in the morning, my nurse told the aide working with her that I was a Hallway Parker. When my therapist Valerie got done working with me today, she told the next therapist that I was a Hallway Parker. They should just write it on my helmet.

Basically, what it means is that when I’m in my wheelchair, I have to be in the hallway. That’s so everybody can watch me and make sure I don’t get up and fall on my face, because I’ve done it before. I tried to go to the bathroom on two separate occasions and ended up on the floor.

Right now, it’s lunchtime, and because my mother isn’t here to watch me, I get to sit out in the hallway with my food with the other handful of Hallway Parkers. Technically, it’s not really the hallway though—it’s actually the intersection of two endlessly long hallways, both coated in sterile white paint that’s so bright, it hurts my eyes.

The “hallway” is more interesting than my room, at least. I’m just next to the nurses’ station, so I get to watch the nurses going about their work, and sometimes gossiping about patients because they think we can’t hear them even though we’re only about five feet away. I get to watch visitors coming and going with their big families and toddling children. And when it’s quiet, they roll out a television for us and use the finicky VCR to put on a movie. The movies are all really old movies that I haven’t seen in many years, like National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation or Grease.

Recently, Amy started letting me have food that wasn’t completely mush. It’s very exciting. I can have sandwiches, for example, but they can only have cheese or tuna salad in them—nothing really hard or difficult to chew or swallow like chicken or beef. If I do want meat, it has to be mushy, unfortunately. Maybe I’ll become a vegetarian.

The really, really exciting thing though is that I get to have water. I really missed being able to drink water. I felt like my mouth was always dry and yucky before.

I feel like I could just drink water all day. I could drink the ocean. And not just a small ocean, like the Arctic Ocean. I could drink the Pacific.

A lot of the people in the hallway right now are old. Most of them have thinning hair, and what little hair they have is white or gray. They are all wrinkly, and have bleary, watery eyes. Plus they are all really hard of hearing, so when they try to talk to me, they usually don’t hear what I say back. It’s sort of depressing.

Maybe I should tell them to readjust my position so that all the old people are on my left, so I don’t have to see them.

Directly to my right is one guy who seems a little younger. He is maybe in his thirties. His brown hair is shaved short like mine, which I guess has something to do with the staples punched into the left side of his skull. But unlike me, he still has his skull. Otherwise, he’d be wearing a helmet like I am.

The guy is eating some cut-up pieces of meat, and I can’t help but watch. He’s really not doing very well at feeding himself. He’s actually horrible at it. He’s able to spear the meat with his fork, but after that, his hand seems to go all over the place, when it’s obvious that he’d like it to go to his mouth. He does eventually get the food in there, but it takes a while. I feel bad for him because it looks really frustrating.

As he’s chewing, the guy realizes that I’m watching him. He turns to me, blinking his brown eyes. He isn’t super handsome in the same way that my husband is, but he’s very cute, and I like the way he looks. He looks like he’d be a nice person, like he’d have a friendly smile.

“What are you looking at, Helmet Girl?” the guy growls at me.

Okay, maybe he’s not so nice.

I look away, back down at my own sandwich. I know that I’m not supposed to be staring at someone else. But I don’t want to look at the depressing old people, and there really isn’t all that much else to look at in the hallway, so almost right away, my eyes get drawn back to the guy with shaky hands. Now he’s trying to get open what looks like a container of cream cheese. It takes him a minute, but then he’s got the cover off. I watch as he digs his fingers into the soft, white cheese.

I thought for sure he was going to eat the cream cheese, especially considering it’s obvious he hasn’t eaten much yet for lunch. But instead, he starts smearing it on his cheeks like warpaint. He’s actually much better at doing this than he is at feeding himself.

He’s emptied almost the entire container of cream cheese onto his face before a nurse whose ID badge reads Betty notices what he’s been up to.

“Jamie!” Betty exclaims. “What did you do to yourself?”

His name must be Jamie. He blinks innocently. There’s cream cheese in his eyelashes. “What do you mean?”

“There’s cream cheese all over your face,” Betty says accusingly.

Jamie glances in my direction. “Helmet Girl did it.”

Before I can have a chance to protest my innocence, Betty studies me and shakes her head. “Nice try, Jamie,” she says. She holds out her open palm to him. “Give me the cream cheese container.”