Sunny Sweet Is So Not Sorry (10 page)

“Masha,” said Alice. “Her name is Masha.”

I looked back at Alice in surprise as my medical barber wheeled me away. And she winked.

* * *

When Nurse Sue got all the kids in the rec room there were enough bubble bags on sticks to fill about three complete aisles at Wal-Mart, if Wal-Mart sold bubble bags on sticks, which it probably does because it sells everything else. It also sounded like we were in an aisle at Wal-Mart. For a bunch of sick kids, they were pretty noisy. No one would stop talking even though Nurse Sue said, “Excuse me,” like, ten times.
Finally, the medical barber put a finger and his thumb in his mouth and gave a loud whistle.

“Attention, everyone! Nurse Sue will take you right back to your rooms if you don't behave. This may not be surgery, but I need to be able to think,” he shouted.

The threat of missing the event shut them up. Everyone settled into their wheelchairs, or onto the floor, or on top of the little tables stacked with coloring books.

My medical barber waited until the room was completely silent, and then he removed Mrs. Song's hat.

There were gasps and squeals. I could feel my lips wiggling to keep from frowning and my cheeks being pulled toward the tile floor. There were about twenty-five pairs of eyes, and they were all staring at me.

I looked over at Alice, and she gave me a thumbs-up.

“I'd like everyone to meet Marsha,” announced Nurse Sue.

Alice and I locked eyes again, and Alice rolled hers in response to Nurse Sue messing up my name for the
millionth time. Her eye roll made a happy spark shoot through my chest. I was Masha Sweet, and I wasn't the only one who knew it.

“As you can see, she has a few flowers glued into her hair, and we're going to get them out,” announced Nurse Sue.

“Can I touch one first?” a kid's voice called out from the crowd.

“Sure,” I whispered.

A small girl with a bandage over one eye like a pirate reached out her tiny fingers and touched a flower on my head. Her touch lit another happy spark. This one tingled right up my spine.

Now everybody wanted to touch my head. A couple of them gave a tug or two (or three) at the daisies and laughed out loud when they didn't budge. They started asking me questions: Did it hurt? Why was my hair green? Were daisies my favorite flower? Could they have one of them when it was over? What happened to my arm? What happened to my eye? (I ignored those last two.) They smiled and chatted at me and laughed. Who knew that your head becoming
a dinner-table centerpiece could actually make you fit in!

Everyone took their seats or wheelchairs.

The nurse wrapped a sheet around my shoulders. My medical barber smeared some gel or cream onto my scalp. It felt cold, but it didn't burn or anything.

“The gel will help loosen the glue from your head. We can't detach it from your actual hair, but the gel will help us get most of it off your scalp,” explained my medical barber.

I wasn't totally sure what he meant, but I nodded.

He worked the gel into my scalp. It felt exactly like I was getting my hair washed and cut at the Clip 'n' Snip where Sunny and I always got our hair cut, except instead of a mirror there was a group of kids in front of me. Then there was the sound of the electric razor.

The “
zzzzz
” made the hairs on my skin stand up, and I could actually feel the dust in the air landing on my one bare arm. My fingers squeezed the wheelchair to keep my body in a sitting position. Even my neck
muscles seemed to react to the buzz of the razor, and they had trouble holding my head up straight, letting it wobble to the left and right.

A small voice called out from the crowd, “Don't worry, it will be over soon.”

Tears filled my eyes, but I opened them wide and willed them to stay right where they were, sitting on
my lashes. I was going to look brave even if I wasn't actually brave. I mean, they had all obviously gone through a ton more than I was about to. But even with that thought glued to my head along with the flowers, my breath still seemed to get stuck halfway down my throat.
Sunny Sweet is going to be sorry! Sunny Sweet is going to be sorry! Sunny Sweet is going to be sorry!
I repeated it inside my head over and over and over again, even though, weirdly, I didn't feel so mad anymore. I was just clinging to the saying of it, hoping that at least pretending to be mad would make me feel better.

The razor touched down on my scalp and then made its way across again and again like a lawn mower neatly cutting grass—minus the nice, sweet smell of freshly cut grass, of course. I never let go of the arms of the wheelchair, and I never moved. I stared out at the gray-and-green tiles on the floor of the rec room, while my head became lighter and lighter. You can't believe how heavy hair is until you don't have it anymore.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see light-green
clumps of my hair mixed with daisies falling past. I sat still as a stone in the chair. I was too scared that if I moved, I'd lose it. After that one small voice, there were no others. Everyone seemed to be holding their breath along with me.

Then it was done.

The room stayed silent. The medical barber handed me a mirror. I looked into it. And then I looked up because I couldn't look into it anymore.

And in that moment I forgot all about being brave. I couldn't imagine a good thing ever happening in the world again. It felt as if ice cream, kittens, and roller coasters had all been wiped off the face of the earth in one big, horrible wave.

Then Alice started clapping. And then they all started clapping. The sound of their applause snapped
the ice-cream-less world right in two, and my chest flooded with a happy warmness … which overflowed right out of my eyes. But because I had held my tears in so long, they didn't roll down my cheeks like they should have. They burst from my eyes and landed on my lap.

“She needs her mommy,” said that same little voice that had asked to touch a flower.

“We called her mommy, Simone,” answered Nurse Sue. “But she isn't home, and Marsha can't remember her mommy's phone number at work.”

“Why don't you call her school? They'll probably have it,” said a boy's voice.

I wiped the tears out of my eyes with the palm of my hand and looked at the kid with the big idea. He was a boy sitting on one of the little tables with his head wrapped in a hard white shell. But even with an egg on his head, I could tell that he was cute.

All of a sudden my own head felt really, really cold.

I was allowed out of the wheelchair now that I wasn't a real patient anymore, and I helped Nurse Sue get everyone back to their rooms while the medical barber cleaned up the mess that had been attached to my head for the last few hours. I liked helping the nurse. Plus it kept me from racing down to the bathroom and staring at myself in the mirror.

You had to be really careful with the rolling bubble sticks, which I found out were filled with medicine, not water, and it wasn't easy to steer wheelchairs and get broken legs through doorways without rebreaking
them, especially with one arm in a cast! Probably if my arm were really broken, I wouldn't have been able to do it. Luckily, no one noticed that I was able to make pretty good use of a “bad” arm.

I made sure to wheel Alice back last. I wanted to say thanks, but I didn't exactly know what to thank her for, so all I did was take off her brake the way Nurse Sue showed me, wheel her out of the rec room, and ask, “Which way?” when we got out to the hall.

“Right,” she said. “And it's the third door on the right.”

When I got her into her room, I wheeled her into the corner by the window and turned her in a circle so she was facing the door.

Her side of the room was kind of messy, with textbooks and crumpled paper mixed up with headphones and chip wrappers and stepped-on blankets. The mess was moving in a bigish mass over to the other side of the room, where it looked like the bed was empty and there was no patient. The window was covered in greeting cards, all taped up at an angle, and there were
a bunch of those silvery balloons hovering a little too close to the top of the table next to her hospital bed. I wanted to stay, to talk to her, but I couldn't think of anything to say, so I just said, “See ya, Alice.”

“See ya, Masha,” she said.

I turned to smile at her.

“Masha,” she said. “How did you get to the hospital if your mom didn't bring you?”

“That's a good question,” I told her.

“Sit,” she said.

I looked around and chose the empty bed, just so I didn't disturb all the stuff teetering in a tall pile on the chair next to her bed.

“I came with my neighbor, Mrs. Song. She had an accident this morning on her bike.”

“What kind of accident?” Alice asked.

“She crashed into our garbage cans. I don't even know why she was riding a bike. I'd never seen her ride one before.”

“Maybe that's why she crashed … because she didn't know how to ride one,” Alice said.

“No, she fainted—at least that's what the guys in the ambulance said.”

“You called the ambulance?”

“Yeah, it was my first time calling 911. It was so weird that it actually works, you know?”

“Yeah?” she said. “I've never called 911. So did she die?” she asked.

“Mrs. Song? No! She didn't die. She's fine. She's still down in the ER.”

Alice turned in her wheelchair so she was completely facing me. “So when does the part of the story happen where you get those flowers stuck in your green hair, you get a black eye, and you break your arm?” she asked.

Alice's eyes were so dark that they seemed to be looking at me harder than normal eyes, as if I were a test that she was determined to do well on. And her mouth fell into an extracurvy smile. She was waiting for my story, and I wanted to tell it. Not only did I want to tell her the story of what happened today, but I wanted to tell her the whole story.

“That story starts back in Pennsylvania.”

“I'm not going anywhere soon,” she said, nodding her head at her messy side of the room. And then she folded her hands together and put them under her chin, signaling to me that she was ready.

I told her about living in Pennsylvania and my old house. I told her about how my dad was the principal of my school and how I used to get to go in on Saturdays and play in the gym with all the millions of basketballs and volleyballs from the gym closet. I told her about how my mom had announced that she and my dad were getting a divorce and that we were moving to New Jersey, where she had grown up. Then I told her about Nicole and Alex and being the new kid at school and how I didn't have that many good friends. And finally I told her about how Sunny had gotten up in the middle of the night, crept into my room, and glued plastic flowers on to my head while I was sleeping so the girls at school would notice me.

Alice gave a scream at that part. It made my heart jump, but not in an “I am stupid” kind of way, in a “how cool to make people scream by just telling them a story” kind of way. It made us both break down
laughing, which sounded more like snorting because we were both laughing so hard.

“Did you and your sister get into a fistfight and she punched you in the eye and broke your arm?” Alice squealed.

It was my turn to scream. “No! Sunny didn't do the other stuff. I did that to myself.”

And then I told Alice the rest of the story … about the freezer and the peanut butter, about the cast and the mean nurse, and about Sunny taking me to the basement. And just because Alice loved the stories, I got into telling a few more about Sunny. I told her about poor Eddie the gerbil, and then I told her about the time that Sunny put a video of me snoring on YouTube. “She said she was doing a study on adolescent deviated septums. You know, when there's something wrong inside your nose. It turned out that nothing was wrong with my nose and that I just snored. It got, like, ten thousand hits.”