I carefully place her on the bed, and the nurse starts working on her immediately, taking her vitals and firing off questions at me.
“Do you know what happened to her? How long has she been unconscious? Is she allergic to anything? Any family history of diseases? How long has she had a fever?”
“Lady, I don’t fucking know. I don’t know any of this.”
“Okay.” She continues working on her, and then a machine starts beeping. “Fuck!”
“What?”
“Her temperature. It’s 107.1. We need to get her fever down before we do anything else. If she’s been like this for a while, she is in serious trouble. You need to get some wet towels. Over there, in the cabinet. Get all the towels, get them wet and bring it here,” she orders while prepping Aspen’s arm for an IV.
I spring into action and walk over to the cabinet. Opening it, I grab as much as I can, and dump them in the sink to get them back, before bringing them to the bed Aspen is in.
“Just drape them over her.”
When I return with the wet towels, I start spreading them over Aspen’s body while the nurse draws blood from her other arm.
“She’s dehydrated. I can barely find a vein.”
“No offense, but shouldn’t we call a doctor?”
“I am the doctor,” she states without so much as glancing at me. I stare at her a little bit longer. She looks way too young to be a doctor. As a matter of fact, she looks too young to be a nurse.
“Is there anything else I can do?”
“No, not right now. Just stand back a little bit and let me work.”
I take one tiny step back, but I can’t bring myself to put more distance between Aspen and me. Silently, I watch the doctor work, hooking Aspen up to machines, taking samples, and running back and forth to her desk.
I hate hospitals. The smell, the bright lights, the machines. I hate it all because it reminds me of Adela. Of her time at the hospital, a time when we still had hope that she would recover, that she was gonna be okay. The doctors gave us hope, but we lost her anyway.
“Her oxygen is normal, but her iron is extremely low. High fever, dehydration…” The doc keeps mumbling to herself, some stuff I can barely make sense of. “All right, her fever is starting to come down a bit. Let me make some calls.”
She walks back over to her desk and picks up the phone. I’m not paying much attention until I hear her voice booming through the room. “I need you to come to the medical bay right now… No, I’m not joking… I said right now, and no, it cannot wait until morning. I said right now!” she yells into the phone before slamming it down on the receiver, and I wonder who the hell she just called.
For the next thirty minutes, I just stand back and watch as the doctor keeps running all kinds of tests. Aspen never even moves, remaining immobile and in complete silence. The only sounds around us are the low beeping of the heart monitor and other machines.
Suddenly, the front door opens, and a very angry, still sleepy-looking Lucas Diavolo walks in.
“This better be good,” he grumbles, and then his eyes fall on Aspen lying in the bed, dead to the world. “What’s wrong with her?”
“He found her like this earlier and brought her here. She’s extremely dehydrated, has a high fever, and is malnourished,” the doctor explains.
Lucas looks at me, raising his eyebrow in question, but luckily, he doesn’t ask where I found her and why I brought her here. Instead, he directs his attention back to the doctor. “So give her some medicine.”
“I have, but her fever was over 107 when she got here, and I don’t know how long she was like that. You need to call her parents and get them here.”
At the mention of her parents, a bad taste forms in my mouth. I know her father is in prison, so he won’t be coming, but I know her mother played a role in the betrayal as well, and if she comes here, I don’t know that I’ll be able to maintain my cool.
“We don’t have parents come because their kids are sick. What kind of place do you think this is?”
“I don’t think you understand how serious the situation is.”
“I get it. She’s sick. So give her some meds and send her back to the dorm. I’ll excuse her from class for a few days.” Lucas waves her off, trying to step past her and back to where he came from, but the doctor stops him with a hand to his chest.
“Lucas,” the doctor scolds him, and I’m surprised that she calls him by his first name, “let me make this really clear, so you understand… I don’t know if she’s going to make it through the night.”
Lucas stiffens, standing up a little straighter, and so do I. His eyes go wide, all the sleep in them gone.