Sunny Sweet Is So Not Sorry (4 page)

Ugh.

“Dan, we really gotta go home,” I repeated.

Neither Sunny nor Dan was listening to me. Sunny had her ears plugged up with Dan's stethoscope, and Dan was busy packaging up Mrs. Song as if he were going to be sending her through UPS. He tucked in her blanket. He wound up the tubes he had inserted into her arm. He tightened the straps across her chest and legs.

The back doors flung open. We were at the emergency room. A breeze blew into the truck, rustling the plastic petals in my hair. I was about to enter the outside world looking like spring had just exploded on top of my head. A moan slipped out from between my lips and I glared at my little sister.

She grinned back at me. “This is great!” she said, like we were about to be dropped off outside the gates of Disney World and not a hospital.

My stomach cramped up, and my head felt wobbly.
Mrs. Song squeezed my hand. She didn't look so good either, and she didn't even have anything stuck to her head!

That's when I remembered Mrs. Song's hat. I quickly picked it up and put it on. It was the wide-brimmed straw hat that she always wore. I pulled the thick red ribbons down under my chin and tied them tight. I could feel the flowers poking into the hat, just as they were poking into my scalp, but at least you couldn't see them. Plus, maybe this would help cut down on the Skippy smell.

I held Mrs. Song's hand all the way into the ER—even while they moved her from the stretcher to the bed. Dan let Sunny carry a plastic bag filled with water attached to the tubing in Mrs. Song's other arm. She held it out in front of her like it was a king's crown on a pillow.

There were a ton of people in the emergency room. Half of them were in blue scrubs, with most of the other half looking like they needed an extra-long bubble bath. This one guy in the bed next to Mrs. Song had a full cast on his leg, from above his knee down to his foot. I've always wanted a cast. At school, if you have a cast you get an elevator key and everyone wants to carry your books. I was right in the middle of having this great daydream of hobbling into Seward Elementary with a cast on my leg and crutches under my arms when Dan said, “See ya, Sunny, Marsha,” and swooshed the curtains shut.

“Masha,” I whispered.

The happy warmth of the daydream vanished, and I looked down at Mrs. Song. She blinked back at me. She blinked a lot, Mrs. Song, but you got used to it.

“You okay?” she asked. She never spoke Chinese with me in front of Sunny. Somehow she understood it was my secret. Mrs. Song just got stuff like that.

“Yeah, are you okay?”

She squeezed my hand. “Hat looks good on you,” she said.

“I like the flowers better,” said Sunny, climbing on the chair next to the bed and switching on the little TV-like thing hooked to the wall.

“Don't touch that,” I told her. “Get down.”

“It's a heart monitor,” she said. “I'm going to check Mrs. Song's oxygen level.”

“Your oxygen level is going to be zero after I strangle you if you don't turn it off and get down from the chair.”

The curtain swooshed open.

“Hello,” said a nurse with a doctor behind him.

“What do we have here?” he asked, looking at Sunny.

“I was just about to check her oxygen level,” Sunny said.

“How about we take over from here, okay, sweetie?” he said, smiling at Sunny like she was the cutest little thing ever. If only they could all see her crispy little black heart like I could, no one would be smiling.

“I've been studying a lot about anatomy and physiology,” Sunny said. “So I can help.”

The nurse and doctor chuckled. People were always chuckling at Sunny.

“I'm sure you have,” said the doctor as he picked up Mrs. Song's chart, even though I could tell that he was sure she hadn't. Neither of them even looked twice at my giant hat or my panda pajamas.

“Are you three related?” the nurse asked.

“Uh, no, she's our neighbor,” I said, moving a little closer to Mrs. Song. “My sister, Sunny, and I came in the ambulance with her.”

“Name?” he asked.

“Mrs. Song,” I said.

The nurse looked up at me. His eyes looked tired. “
Your
name,” he said.

“Oh, uh, Masha,” I told him.

“Well, Marsha,” he said.

“Masha,” I corrected.

“All right, honey,” he said, reaching for Sunny's hand. “Why don't you and your sister sit out in the waiting room while we take a good look at your neighbor? And then we'll call you back in, okay?”

“No,” whined Sunny, “I want to stay here and help.”

“Let us get a quick look,” said the doctor. “And then we'll call you right back in. It's only fair since you got a head start on her diagnosis in the ambulance. We need time to catch up.”

“Okay,” Sunny said. “But don't do any of the good stuff, like the EKG, without me.” Sunny turned to me. “An EKG is a test that shows the electrical signals in the heart.”

“I know what an EKG is,” I said, even though I didn't.

I looked down at Mrs. Song and squeezed her hand. She patted my arm and blinked, letting me know that it was okay, she understood. It's funny how she had held on to my hand for the last half hour, and now I wanted to turn around and hold on to hers. But even though the nurse had made his plan for us to wait outside sound like a question, I knew it wasn't a question. I bent down low and whispered a quick “
zai jian
” in Mrs. Song's ear and let the nurse lead us out to the waiting room.

“Now I want you two to sit right here and don't
move,” he said, pointing down at two chairs. We sat. “You understand, right, Marsha?”

“Yes,” I said, not bothering to correct him.

We watched him walk over to a security guard by the automatic sliding doors that we'd come through with the stretcher. He pointed at Sunny and me and
said something to the guard. Then the nurse looked back over at us, motioned at the chairs we were sitting in, and said, “Don't move,” again from across the room.

I nodded my head.

“Nodding your head is moving,” Sunny said.

I jabbed her with my elbow.

“That's moving too,” she said.

I turned and glared down at her.

“That too,” she squeaked up at me.

I growled.

“Technically, your vocal chords …”

“Sunny!” I yelled.

“Okay, Marsha,” she said.

An ER waiting room is such a weird place. All the people are quiet, as if they're in a library, but they aren't working or reading, they're just slumped in chairs. It's like some kind of misery library. There were a bunch of TVs squished into each of the corners of the room, up by the ceiling like big black spiders. All four of the TVs were playing different shows. The loud chatter made my head hurt.

“Maybe we should call Mom,” I whispered.

“No,” Sunny said. “She'll take me back to school.”

“Yes, because that's where you should be. They're probably looking all over for you right now.”

“No they're not. I never even went into the classroom. I just walked down past the gym and out the back door. No one even saw me.”

“Sunny, you could get in big trouble.”

Her giggles made my head feel like it would pop right off my body. Even Sunny knew that she never got in trouble. It didn't matter what she did. Last Christmas Sunny got a rocket set, and the first thing she did was send Eddie, my gerbil, into space. (And by the way, he didn't make it … to space or otherwise.) And did she get in trouble? No! She committed gerbil murder and all she had to say was that she had designed a special helmet for him so she thought he would be safe and everyone was like “Oh, Sunny, how thoughtful,” and “We'll get you another rocket.” No one even cared about poor Eddie. My mom just said, “I'm sure he didn't feel a thing.” How does she know what a gerbil feels?

“Anyway, you don't want to bother Mommy at work,” Sunny said. She knew that would get me. I didn't want to bother my mother at work. Sunny and I both knew how important Mom's job was to her. Plus, whenever she missed a day of work she always looked way more tired than if she had actually gone and worked all day.

“Well then, just sit there and be quiet,” I snapped at her.

She quickly sat back in her chair and stopped talking.

I picked the TV with the Disney Channel playing and started watching.

After about four minutes, Sunny popped up from her seat.

“Don't,” I whispered.

“I'm just going to …”

“No, you're not just going to do anything,” I said. “Let me tell you what is going to happen. We are going to stay right in these chairs until the nurse comes back for us. And then we are going to get Mrs. Song, and Dan and that other guy are going to drive us home.
Okay? So just sit there until the nurse comes back for us.”

She frowned and slid back into her chair.

The humming of four different television shows lulled me half asleep. Even in this sleepy state, I saw the boy walk in. He wore a hospital gown and was barefoot, and he stood in the room like he knew he wasn't supposed to be there. He looked like a teenager, but I could tell right away that his mind wasn't that old. Peeking behind himself a couple of times, he looked like a little kid that was just about to steal cookies from the cupboard when he'd been told not to a hundred times. I looked over at security to see if he noticed him too. But the guard's stool was empty.

The boy saw us and gave a little wave. Sunny waved back.

“Don't wave,” I said.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because. We're supposed to be just sitting here.”

Sunny twisted away from me in her chair and started to recite the alphabet backward. She always
repeated the alphabet backward when she got bored. It was annoying.

After a minute or two, the boy in the hospital gown seemed to forget about not being allowed to be there. He checked out each of the TVs and then unstacked the magazines, but he lost interest in both things pretty quickly. He swung around and scanned the room for something else to do, and his eyes stopped on me.

“I love red!”

My heart jumped and my face got hot as he made his way across the room to us.

“Is red your favorite color?” he asked, pointing at the ribbons of Mrs. Song's straw hat. He stood so close that his knees were almost touching mine. His hospital gown had tiny cowboys riding all over them.

“Her favorite color is orange,” Sunny said.

“No, it's not,” I said.

“Yes, it is,” Sunny insisted. “You wrote in that book you keep under your bed that your favorite color is orange because Daddy's favorite color is orange.”

“You read my journal?”

“I wanted to read every book in the house, and that was a book in the house.” She shrugged.

I hated when she did that—answered a question that I didn't mean for her to answer.