Jeff/Annie: Traces
Part One
It wasn’t until the painkillers wore off and the sun started streaming through the window, making the headspace behind his eyes feel hot and red, that Jeff realized he wasn’t in his own bed. He turned his head slowly, wincing as the movement made stars appear in his eyes.
“Shhhhh!” he heard someone hiss from behind him. He opened one eyelid little by little, breathing heavily as sharp pain shot through his head at the invasion of light.
“Whaaaa-?” was all he could utter. When had words ever failed him? He was beginning to realize that something was seriously wrong.
Gradually, his senses began to come back to him. Jeff could smell the somewhat familiar odor of sickness being covered up by cleanliness. His mouth tasted sticky and old, as if it had been days since he last brushed his teeth. He could hear a steady beeping from the corner of the room, and now that one eye was nearly fully open, he could blurrily make out shades of mauve and taupe. Under his left hand, he felt a scratchy and starchy sheet, and on his right wrist he felt tape and something sticking into the vein on top of his hand. All signs pointed to Greendale General Hospital.
“How are you feeling, Jeffrey?” came the tiny, cloying, Miss Piggy-like voice of Shirley. But where was she?
“Unnnhhh…” he attempted words again, but his tongue felt stuck to the roof of his mouth. What had happened to him?
“Looks like he’s still pretty out of it,” Britta’s frank, almost bored-sounding reply. “I’ll go get the nurse.”
“Not the one who-“
“I know, not the one who keeps trying to give him a sponge bath. God, she’s awful,” Britta said drolly.
“It’s OK Britta, I know you meant ‘gosh,’” Shirley said primly. “And yes, she’s a real road who-“
“Shirley!” Britta exclaimed, barely containing a giggle. “Be right back.”
Jeff was trying desperately to join in the conversation, but his head was throbbing and it felt as if a bullet train of pain was shooting from his right light to his brain and back.
Guys, what’s going on? He tried to say, but it came out as “Guuuuuhhhh?”
“Shhh, sweetie, don’t strain yourself. The nurse is going to come in and give you some more pain medicine and you can go right back to sleep.”
Sleep - sweet, precious, dark, solitary sleep. Jeff zealously hoped for its quick arrival. He was not disappointed; he heard the quick, determined footsteps of a nurse in squeaky, comfortable shoes, followed by Britta’s more lackadaisical track behind her.
A bag near his head was fiddled with and adjusted, his wrist was lifted, and he opened his eyes briefly enough to give a cloudy, pleading glance to the big beefy mustachioed woman with the stethoscope around her neck.
“His vitals look fine, but he’s only been out for a few hours, so we’ll give him some more morphine until the pain starts to wear off,” she said in a deep(ly disturbing) voice. “Has he had a spongebath yet?”
“YES,” Shirley and Britta answered together. The nurse nodded and left, and Jeff glanced at the two women at his bedside, sitting on uncomfortable-looking plastic-covered chairs and each clutching an old issue of People magazine. He tried to open his mouth to thank them, but hoped the look on his face was thanks enough. Giving into the sweet relief of the morphine drip, he closed his eyes again, took a deep breath, and abandoned himself to the wonders of opiates.
---
“…if postcards are amazing and hubcaps are amazing, and mini Reese’s cups are amazing, what to you say about Star Wars and the miracle of birth? Hyperbole is ruining the English language,” Abed finally took a break from his rant about the many words that had lost their meaning because of incessant exaggeration. “Everything can’t be amazing and wonderful and incredible.”
“Abed,” Jeff began, but Abed lifted a finger and shook his head from side to side.
“All I’m saying is Jeff, if you think both Annie’s boobs and orange popsicles are amazing, either you’re underselling one thing or you’re completely exaggerating the other,” Abed concluded.
“Maybe I was being iron-“
“And don’t say you were being ironic, Jeff. Because the definition of irony-“
Jeff zoned out the rest of Abed’s lecture on irony versus coincidence versus sarcasm versus… Jeff didn’t really care what else. He hadn’t been left alone for more than five waking minutes in the last ten days, and it was starting to grate on him. Ever since Duncan had run him down in the parking lot after school two Tuesdays ago, he’d traded unconsciousness and painkillers (sweet, sweet painkillers) for visits from friends trying to entertain and take care of him. If he took a step back and looked at it objectively, it was sweet, what they were trying to do.
But he couldn’t take a step back and look at it, because he couldn’t take a step back at all. Or step forward, for that matter. In fact, he was told he wouldn’t be walking on his own for at least another week. His left leg was broken in three places from where the windshield of Duncan’s SmartCar had made friends with his body; his right elbow was shattered from its impact with the concrete curb; and the right side of his face had road rash from where he’d faceplanted in the gravel parking lot.
Ironically (perhaps not according to Abed, but Jeff was allowing himself liberal use of any word he chose for as long as he was in traction), Duncan hadn’t been intoxicated at the time of the incident. But Jeff had good reason to believe he was intoxicated at the present moment, if the several mistyped text message apologies were any indication.
Abed had no trouble ignoring the phone buzzing and beeping as he continued on his one-man discussion of the intricacies of word definition and common usage. It was a bit of a departure for the film student, who had recently begun a screenwriting class at Greendale and was now not only obsessed with the character arcs and plot points of various television shows and movies, but the screenplays and scripts that were their genesis.
Jeff waited for a lull in Abed’s speech, then spoke.
“Abed, what time is it?” he asked pointedly, knowing full wall it was 9:06 p.m., exactly six minutes past the end of visitor’s hours at GGH, and Gunilla the head nurse was a strict enforcer of the rules.
“It’s six minutes past nine p.m.,” Abed replied, then his eyes widened. “Oh. I’d better leave before Gunilla sees me.” He grabbed his track jacket and several issues of “X-Men” from Jeff’s rolling tray table, which had turned into the catch-all for the study group’s stuff; Britta’s knitting needles and yarn, Shirley’s prayer book and People magazines, Troy’s action figures and Solitaire player. Abed was the only one who took his things with him with he left. A GGH water mug with a plastic bendy straw, some silverware he hadn’t used for his last meal of mashed potatoes and green beans, and a stack of textbooks and homework assignments rounded out the random assortment of junk on the table - the only personal effects in the room, aside from the clothes he had been brought in wearing, laying dirtied, torn, but folded on the radiator near the window.
“Shirley’s going to be in tomorrow morning before her accounting class, and then Britta’s coming in the afternoon after Political Philosophy,” Abed informed him.
“Thanks Abed,” Jeff sighed. He didn’t know why he kept wishing to hear her name on the “schedule,” but he couldn’t help the sharp prickle of disappointment every time she didn’t come.
“Annie’s taking notes for you in our class,” Abed said at the door. “She says she’ll come visit with Troy on Sunday.”
Jeff smiled a little at his best friend and lifted his left hand to wave goodbye. As soon as Abed left, he sighed and sunk into the pillow, wishing he hadn’t been weaned off the pain meds so quickly so that he could slip into a foggy sleep. Perhaps that was why the nurses had taken him off of them so rapidly - he was probably overusing the self-serve morphine.
It was hard to explain why; at first he thought it was because of the perfect slumber that the painkiller provided. But after day four, he began to realize that it was the moments right before he slipped under, the moments when his mind wandered willy-nilly, and he saw the things his waking brain was apparently trying to keep from him.
Because every time he slipped into that chemically-enduced shut-eye, he saw the tiny SmartCar barreling toward him in the parking lot, with Duncan at the wheel. And right next to him - holding his hand? - he swore he could hear Annie screaming.