A kid and his grandma shuffled into the emergency room at 1:30am. The kid was told to sit and wait while she struggled to pick her insurance card from her wallet at the front desk.
He lingered in the threshold for a second. Several old people crowded one half of the room, cluttered with their various mobility aids and oxygen tanks and other mysterious tubed devices. Most of them looked just about on death’s door, like he could watch their splotchy wrinkled skin, gray under the patchy fluorescent lights, melt like wax in real time.
On the other side of the room were two younger guys, a few chairs apart, one clutching a barf bag on his chest. As he watched, the other one, who had curled his whole body up on the fat people chair, woke up and produced his own barf bag from under his coat. He retched a few teaspoons of saliva and bile into the clear plastic and tucked it under his arm and fell asleep again.
The kid squeezed his way between the old people and settled himself among them in the chair next to the vending machine. He cradled his hands palm-up on his lap and stared at the blisters bubbling up on the burning red skin. He stared and imagined feeling the blisters, the damage, brushing them with his fingers, imagining because he couldn’t move his hands at all or else it would hurt too much.
An old man patted his melting wife on the shoulder and hobbled to the vending machine. He managed to pull a dollar from his wallet and the paper flapped around like a bird as it traveled with his shaking hand to the slot. In it went.
A nurse called his wife’s name and the old man turned around in several wobbly steps. The nurse came over and grabbed his wife’s wheelchair and he followed her out with his feet dragging.
The kid eyed the vending machine. He knew everything in there was a dollar fifty but he didn’t have any money. He wanted to get that dollar that was in there. He thought about it. He couldn’t buy anything with a dollar but it would be one more dollar than he had.
He looked down at his hands again. The red wrapped half his fingertips. There was no way he could press those buttons.
A nurse called his name. When he looked up, the nurse, his grandma, and a sheriff were staring back at him. He stood up, palms up.
-
An hour later he was sitting in triage, palms up, staring at them. He had to sit outside of the rooms with the sheriff watching him. He wanted to put his head in his hands so he didn’t have to see the sheriff, but he had to settle for hunching over, letting his overgrown bowl cut curtain his eyes.
The sheriff was watching. The kid needed to pee and was curling and uncurling his toes inside his shoes but he thought if he tried to go to the bathroom the sheriff might have to go in with him so he had to wait.
More shuffling footsteps crossed in front of him. He glanced up just for a second to see one of the barfing guys, admitted a few minutes earlier, stumbling into the bathroom, heavy coat still on. The kid watched his blisters and imagined popping them like bubble wrap. His hands had begun to shake.
The barfing guy stepped out after quite a while. He had managed to stick the barf bag upright in his pocket and the yellow waterline was just visible . The kid looked up at him fully and found him staring back.
The kid thought he looked homeless. His sweats had holes in them and were starting to shred apart at the ends and his overgrown hair looked like it ought to be blond but had turned dull and dark, unwashed.
The guy kept staring and the sheriff eyed him, arms crossed, leaning against the far wall.
“That’s my cousin,” said the guy, feebly, in the general direction of the sheriff, who then looked at the kid.
“Yeah,” lied the kid. He didn’t know why he said that.
The sheriff said nothing. The guy sat down by the kid with one seat between them. The kid had thought no one was allowed to talk to him. Maybe that was still true, and the sheriff was giving him a break. But he wanted to talk to someone, who wasn’t a nurse or his grandma or definitely not the sheriff.
“How’d you do that?” said the guy in a low voice, pointing his chin at the blisters. Up close his face was chalk white and looked like it was melting, too, like the circles under his eyes were dripping down his cheeks.
“Why are you puking?” countered the kid. He didn’t really care or want to know and it came out weak. The guy attempted to lick his shriveled lips but only produced a sandpaper rasp.
“Noro, probably,” he said. “It’s going around. I don’t need to be here, you know, but my Chinese roommate called me an ambulance.”
“Chinese?”
“Yeah, he’s Chinese.” He pointed towards the blisters again and prepared his barf bag.
“It was an accident,” said the kid. He paused as the guy heaved up a little more bile and saliva. The guy wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and nodded at the kid. It took him a few tries to speak again, the first words coming out in aborted gasps.
“Psych,” he said finally. “Sitting out here.” He flicked his eyes towards the sheriff.
“It was an accident,” said the kid. “I was just messing around. My grandma put me here cuz she thinks I’m crazy.”
“What’d you do?”
“Why are you talking to me?”
“I’m bored.” The guy flashed a grin. He had perfect teeth.
“Whatever,” mumbled the kid. He shook his head and hunched over again. “I was messing with a doorknob. With a lighter. And then I grabbed it.”
“You grabbed it? With both hands?”
“You don’t get it,” he murmured. The guy looked at him for a bit, then stood up.
“Nope,” he said. He smiled again for a second before his stomach spasmed again. He walked a few steps and retched again in the middle of the hallway, then wandered off into the hospital.
-
They had him put on a weird green gown sort of thing. He pulled it on in the triage bathroom, trying to avoid any of the surfaces the barfing guy might have touched. When he got out the sheriff put his hand on his shoulder and told him they’d be heading to the psych ward.
He thought they were parading him around like a freak, like an animal. They went down the triage hall, down another one lined with old people in their beds, and around a set of cubicles sprinkled with gawking sallow-faced nurses whose eyes stuck to him as they circled around. .
Near the elevator the barfing guy was finally in his own bed with an IV running in his arm. He was asleep, curled around the barf bag and a cup of ice water he’d managed to keep upright.
He woke as they passed, offering a glassy stare, and then drifted off again. He was shivering. The kid was shivering too. It had been cold before, cold in the whole stupid hospital, but in the flimsy gown he could feel all his hair standing on end.
He stepped into the elevator.