Chapter Sixteen

December 25th, 2006

I am liquid. I feel my body flow in and out of consciousness. I am awake, and then I am not awake. I am asleep, and then I am not asleep. I do not exist in the world, and then, for only moments, I do so intensely, that I wish I was asleep again.

Icah, is my comfort.

When I am asleep, he speaks in my dream. When I am awake, he forces himself to wake also, and we comfort one another, through heavy silence. We are too tired to speak, but I know him being here with me, it is all that I need.

I don't know if my leg is healing well or not. I barely feel it because my exhaustion takes all of my focus. It is not until I wake up with a long scar down the side of my face, that I stop caring all together. 

I run my hand down the bandage that expands from the left side of my skull down to my cheek, down to my neck. I feel a sticky solution between my skin and the bandage, I'm not sure if it is medicine, or blood, and I do not care enough to tell.

My head lays on my pillow and Icah is beside me, his body a form of cold flesh from all lack of energy, and I want him to come nearer to me to get warm, all whilst I want him away from me, because we are suffering due to the fact that we are together.

In a mere second, his touch vanishes, and I open my eyes, wondering where he went. Just at the moment, the lights of the room flick on for the morning. It is the first time I've been awake as the lights go on in days, maybe weeks. I do not know how long I have been trapped in this bed.

I wait for a voice, or a figure to come through the door. I think perhaps it is time to eat. A time where I try to consume any sort of food only to wish I hadn't. I expect to see Jay, coming in with a tray of food, but instead it is Dr. Singh himself. He is carrying a tray with brightly colored cookies, and a large cup of some sort of drink with whipped cream on top. 

He sees me awake, and smiles, "Merry Christmas, Rosie."

Is it Christmas? I had no idea.

I force myself to sit up. It isn't as hard as it normally, is but I still have to urge every muscle in my body to operate. Dr. Singh sets the tray of food in front of me, and then sits on the end of the bed as if he wanted to watch me eat. 

I don't take the food, but instead, I look at him. "Is my mom coming?"

His face does not falter like it normally does when I ask about my parents. Instead he blinks twice, and says, "We have noticed a decline in your motivation to get better. So yes, today, being that it is such a special day, I have contacted your parents, and they have agreed to visit."

This sends the first spark of hope through my body since the experiments began. I have not felt this alive in weeks.

"Now?" 

"Eat first."

"I can't."

"You can."

I grab a cookie, and take a bite. It is grainy, and hard, and it tastes nothing like a cookie. As if it were packed full of a sort of vitamin mixture, a health food in the façade of a desert. I choke it down anyways.

The liquid, masked as hot chocolate was nothing more than a lie. The texture was powdery, almost as if I were drinking chalk in the form of soup. Were it any other day, I wouldn't be able to stomach it. Today is not like any other day. 

It is not the food that I care about, and I clear the tray in moments.

Dr. Singh is obviously pleased at my effort to finish everything off the plate, and when I finally do, Jay, who was standing near the door, walked over, and took the tray from me.

"You parents have arrived almost an hour ago. I told them you needed to rest."

My parents have been here for a whole hour and I didn't even know? 

"My mom is here." I feel a burst of energy grow in my chest, my body wants to move, and all I can think about is mom. I want to see her and even dad, and I want them to take me home.

Icah is awake within me, I know because a small part of my conscience is being tugged, like he is trying to warn me of something, or perhaps to calm myself down, but I do not listen, I block him out completely. 

I pull myself out of the blankets, and for the first time in many, many days, I attempt to stand up on my own. Normally Jay carries me to and from the bed, but I do not want him to touch, me, because I know he will not let me run away with my parents, which is why I have to do the running myself.

I grab Jeffery, my stuffed rabbit, and nothing else, he's all I care about because I don't want Dr. Singh to know that I do not plan on coming back to this room. My parents will definitely make sure of that once they see what these doctors have done to me.

Dr. Singh helps me slip my arms into a bright blue sweater, and he puts special socks on my feet that had rubber bottoms so the floor isn't as slippery. I search around for my shoes and I even ask for them, but Dr. Singh says they are unnecessary. I pretend to agree with him because I know he doesn't know that I'm going to leave.

The pain in my leg is strong, but not as strong as it was before. I'm able to stand, and even walk even though I'm walking slow, as long as I'm able to move without Jay's hands on my body, I'm satisfied.

Dr. Singh leads me out of the room, and I'm back into the familiar white hallway with bright lights reflecting on the shiny floor tiles. The floor is so clean that I can see a blurred reflection of myself on them, and I do not like what I see, so I do not look at them.

I'm guided to a darker room, it looks like a room that police would interrogate criminals in my mom's crime shows. There is a lonely table, and some chairs around it. On the wall is a large window of black, just like in the tv shows where the police can look in but the criminals can't look out. I take a seat in one of the chairs as Dr. Singh directs me to, and then I'm told to wait. He leaves the room, and it is just me and my thoughts, which are actually our thoughts because Icah knows what I'm thinking, and I know what he's thinking sometimes.

"Rosie." His quiet voice sifts through my mind like soft breeze, but I hear it so clearly as if he is sitting right beside me.

"Yes?" I answer him, as I glance around the room, impatiently waiting for my parents to come in.

"Do you trust this?"

"I want to see my parents."

"Are they here?"

I frown, "They have been waiting for me."

His silence is heavy, and then, after several seconds of feeling and hearing nothing from him, he answers a final few words, "You are not this irrational."

I don't get to respond, nor do I get to ask him what the word 'irrational' means because Dr. Singh speaks through a hidden speaker, that I don't really know where it is not matter how many times I search around the room.

"Rosie, can you look straight ahead for me?"

"Where is my mom and dad?" I ask out loud, wondering why he's not bringing them in.

"Please look straight ahead."

I do, and suddenly there are voices in the microphone. Very familiar voices. "Hi Rosie!" My heart flutters, and I feel Icah recoil in my chest. Why is he acting so cruel towards my mother's voice?

"Mom!" I'm smiling so wide. "Why aren't you coming in?"

"I miss you so much." She says with a hint of delight in her tone, "I can't wait to see you."

"Why can't you see me?" I ask her through the speaker -wherever it was. 

"Your dad is here too, he's doing fine."

"Hey Rosie." He greets me with his very familiar non-interested tone. But I don't take offense to it, because even when he's excited he sounds bored. He never sounds happy. I smile even wider, and I feel like crying which is weird. I'm clutching Jeffery my rabbit tightly against my chest.

"Aren't you guys going to come in?" I want to see them, I want to hug them.

"Have you been eating?" My mom asks, and I quickly respond.

"The food here all tastes like medicine, and my body always hurts and I want to come home." 

"Make sure you eat what is given to you, you know you need to gain weight."

"I try." It was a lie. I do not try. "Can you guys come in now? Why aren't you coming in?"

I stand up, and Dr. Singh's voice is suddenly loud in the speaker, "Sit down, Rosie."

I sit down.

My father's voice fills the room, "If you don't eat, or if you cause any trouble, you know what'll happen." I do know what'll happen. Grounding.

Compared to everything that has happened here, being grounded to my bedroom doesn't sound so bad. As long as I am back home, I will be happy.

"We have to go now," My mother's sweet voice engulfs my chest, "We love you so much."

"I love you too." I respond, and as I'm about to ask them why they are leaving so soon, she cuts me off by saying;

"And don't forget your report card should be mailed out soon. Don't think I haven't forgotten."

What?

Confused, I stare at the dark window, "What report card?"

"And Shirley, make sure she doesn't get the report card first. She has a habit of hiding them from us."

Shirley? That was the name of our neighbor who would often babysit me when my parents went away. Why were they mentioning her?

"We'll be back home after the funeral. Two days at the most. Love you again Rosie, bye baby, be good!" And then the sound of a phone hanging up rings through the tiny room, that now feels like a prison cell.

My heart drops. The funeral. Shirley. That was a voice recording from when my parents went to my great uncle's funeral in Wisconsin. 

A voice recording. 

My parents were never here. Like the flip of a switch, I understood they will never be here. I will never see them again. Dr. Singh is a liar, and my parents do not care about me.

This time I do not cry at this realization. My heart feels like a stone in my chest, and not only do I hate Dr. Singh with a passionate fury, I hate my parents for making me stay here. I hate everyone who is not the alien in my body, and I hate them so much that I can't bring myself to cry about it.

I am only angry. 

I feel a strength in my body that I haven't felt since before I arrived here. I feel my veins burning with a grand flow of power that is not ordinary. Icah is awake in my body and feeding my rage. I scream so loud that I am not my own anymore. I pick up the chair that I was sitting on and throw it as hard as I can to the window. When I conclude that is not enough, I pick up the table as if it is a weightless nothing, and cast it again towards the window, and this time it cracks but only barely. 

The veins in my arms are a pure black, and my reflection in the glass window is a hideous portrait of myself. My body is pale, a sickly greyish color, and my eyes are a pure black from Icah's possession. I am a morphing monster, and I am not scared of it like I was before. I drown in it, and it helps me breathe.

Dr. Singh is shouting in the microphone for me to calm down, but I don't. It only makes me more angry. When I run out of  things to throw at the window, I begging to pound my fists against the glass. Screaming my hatred towards everyone who is listening. I will never trust another human being again.

The glass breaks a fraction more with each contact it makes with my fist, and when I believe only a few more hits will break it, I feel the prick of a needle in my arm, and I know what is about to come, but I persist for as long as I can, screaming my promises to leave this place, and never come back.

I don't know how they got me with the needle, nobody is in the room with me, and it must have come from somewhere hidden in the wall, but I don't take enough time to process it because it doesn't matter. 

I now understand what the word 'irrational' means, and before I close my eyes, I promise Icah I will never be irrational again.