Lucille Chapter One

This chapter introduces Lucille (Lucy), and begins the dialogue between herself and Glen.

            She woke up in the backseat of a strange car; her face pressed against the cool leather seats (her father’s truck didn’t even have a backseat, much less leather ones) with what felt like a winter jacket propped under her head. She opened her eyes and through the mess of hair in her face she saw that she was laying in the backseat of a compact luxury car with her own jacket draped over her like a too-small blanket.

            “Wuurhameye” she mumbled, dazed and slurring. She sat up in the backseat behind the driver’s side and began to fiddle with the seat-belt. Everything seemed to be too bright, too loud, and too intense. She pressed her aching head to her palms and fought back the urge to pass out again. She felt a light tap on her knee and opened her eyes to see a cigarette lying on it, innocent as can be,

            “The school prohibits smoking on campus, and as an adult I can’t give them to you, but I personally don’t mind if people smoke in my car” the driver stated, staring ahead at the road while hitting a button to crack the window she was sitting next to, “there should be a lighter in that coat pocket you were drooling on.”

            The car rolled to a stop at a red light and then to her surprise she saw Mr. Fitch turn over his shoulder to look at her; his emerald green eyes looking from her face, the cigarette, to the jacket, and then back to her face. Concern lurked behind those eyes, and Lucy found her face growing hot from being under that gaze. She looked down and picked up the cigarette on her knee, and fished the lighter out of the fluffy black coat she’d been resting her head upon.

            After searching for a few moments while purposely trying not to look at Mr. Fitch she located a heavy bulk deep in the jacket pocket, and withdrew an old golden Zippo lighter. She flipped the top hinge back (oh such a satisfying click, she mused to herself), and struck the spark wheel with an audible pop. She lit her cigarette slowly, savoring the flavor of the kerosene lighter. After clicking it closed she put it back in the pocket she found it in.

            The light changed, and Mr. Fitch turned back around to drive. Lucy sat in the backseat in silence for about thirty seconds, mentally going over her memory piece by piece. She remembered talking to the head of the newspaper for an editorial that she had wanted to submit to the next issue, when suddenly it felt as though every single nerve in her body was firing wildly. It had happened so quickly that she barely remembered any details other than feeling like she was going to tear apart at the proverbial seams.

            “You had a seizure, Lucille.” Mr. Fitch said, while taking a left turn across an expansive intersection. His voice was hesitant and unsure sounding, as though the words felt unfamiliar in his mouth. She watched as he pulled a cigarette of his own from a pack sitting in the center console and put it in his mouth. She reached back into the jacket and pulled the gold Zippo from it and tapped it on his shoulder.

            “It’s Lucy, please” she said, passing him the lighter over his right shoulder, “That can’t be right… Are we going to the hospital?”

The thought filled her with dread; to say that she had a phobia of needles would have been an under-statement. Lucy reflected back the memories of the immunizations she had to get before entering high school; her father sitting next to her, hands held tightly with her’s as she cried tears of panic, the way that the doctor’s office had smelled (a lot like a cheap and run-down free clinic), and the particularly unpleasant stabbing pain, not of the needle going into her arm, but rather the needle breaking off there. She looked down at the cigarette and was unsurprised to find the lit tip shaking nervously.

            Mr. Fitch grunted an affirmation and switched lanes, his eyes never leaving the road. A moment passed between them and Lucy slumped back into the seat, heaving an exasperated sigh; she blew a puff of air into the mop of listless hair that hung in her face. A feeling of despair settled uncomfortably in her gut like a boulder of anxiety, and this time she tried to fight back nervous tears.

            “Mr. Fitch, I really” she paused to sniffle, “really don’t want to go to the hospital; I’m feeling much better and I’d like to go b-back to c-class please.” She tried to make herself sound confident and assured in her words and how she said them; it was to her extreme dismay that her body took that particular moment in time to betray her, and less than two seconds after finishing her sentence she burst into tears.

            She hid her face in her hands while she wept, tried her stifle her sobs. The weight of what had happened came crashing down on her like an avalanche of “Oh s**t”. She felt the world beyond the darkness of her hands spin madly, and she managed to blurt out a request to stop the car between hitched breaths. She felt the car pull off into a lot and stop, and she flung the door open to purge her stomach contents onto the snowy ground below.

            Lucy pulled her hair entirely out of her face and vomited again, eyes closed to try and ignore the world outside and its insistence to whirl in front of her. She heaved twice more and spat, trying not to acknowledge the steam rising from her gut-puddle. Slumping back into the seat she pulled the door closed, her breathing heavy but less forced and conscious; she coughed a couple of times and took a very shaky drag off of her cigarette.

            “You can call me Glen…” he answered after a few moments of silence, and with a sigh he turned the car off. He turned back to face her and gestured out the windshield, “and if you hadn’t slept most of the way you probably would have had a better chance at that.”

            The hospital grounds stood imposingly against the horizon, a large an ugly building that screamed disease and death. Lucy felt that boulder in her stomach start to rise up again, and she frantically fumbled for the door handle; the panic in her grew to another crescendo and the lit cigarette butt fell onto the seat in between her legs. She immediately began to try and fish it out before it could burn a hole in the leather. After scrambling for a moment and suffering a rather unpleasant burn on her fingertips, Lucy managed to grab the offending fire-butt and toss it out of the cracked window. She felt herself begin to shake once more and desperately tried to think of something (anything) other than the impending day filled with needles and loud machines and nurses that won’t look you in the eye when you tell them that your father doesn’t have health insurance and neither do you.

            “Lucy, just keep breathing and everything else will work itself out” Mr. Fitch said to her in a very matter-of-fact voice that cut straight through her despair, and when she looked up she saw that he was again fixing his unblinking gaze on her. Lucy studied his face for a moment, taking in how fragile-looking he really was under that bushy beard he had grown. His eyes were young, but showed a tiredness that seemed beyond his years; a small scar trailed up from the corner of his left eyebrow and vanished into the messy curls of brown hair obscuring his brow. He was wearing his paper-boy cap (something that he told all of his students had to be kept a secret because hats weren’t allowed on campus) and had a look that suggested that he wasn’t entirely sure what to say in this situation.

            “Everything, huh?” she retorted back, trying to hide the smile that threatened to creep on her face. She felt the wave of anxiety that had threatened to consume her ebb away, and to her surprise found herself slowly becoming at ease. She looked out at the hospital again and wondered how she could have let a simple building bother her as much as it had.

            “Keep me company until my dad gets here, and I won’t fight you on going in there” she said, pulling her own jacket back on (a tattered looking black zip-up hoodie, complete with holes and the smell of years-old cigarette smoke). To her surprise she found herself slightly taken aback by the confidence in her own voice. She hit the button to roll up her window and unbuckled her seatbelt, determined to get out of the vehicle before she could change her mind.

            With careful, almost dainty concentration she avoided the puddle of crystallizing puke, both with her boots and with her eyes; her cheeks burned with embarrassment as she stepped past the closed driver’s door. She stuffed her hands into the front pocket of her jacket and balled them into fists, trying to work blood flow through her knuckles to ward away the freezing temperature as it nipped at her joints.

She heard the car door open behind her as Mr. Fitch stepped out into the cold, his boots crunching the asphalt and snow below them. She desperately wanted to turn back to look at him, but found herself too nervous to muster the courage to do anything other than stare straight forward. Instead she pulled her hand-me-down cell phone from her pocket and began to scroll through her contacts, locating her father’s work number and hitting dial.

She turned back to Mr. Fitch, who seemed to be finishing his cigarette, and pointed at the phone she held against her head, mouthing the word “Dad” while the other line rang. The other line rang once, twice, and on the third ring she heard the deep and husky voice of her father.

“Hello?”

“Hey Dad” Lucy said after a moment, running through the various ways this conversation could work out in her mind, “…I had an accident at school and they want to take me to the hospital.”

She heard the audible intake of breath on the other line, followed by the sound of her father telling other (much louder) people in the background to “shut the ‘ell up”. When he came back on the line his breathing was heavy, with an audible hesitation in his voice. He coughed, and then cleared his throat.

“Honey, what happened?”

“They say I had a seizure, Dad” she responded, after a moment that seemed to stretch a lifetime. She turned away from Mr. Fitch and put her hand up to the other side of her mouth to try and stifle how far her voice would carry, “I’m really scared”.

“Where are you right now?” he asked, his voice somber, barely above a whisper.

Lucy scanned the area for the hospital entrance sign, eyes landing on the large cross hanging from the side overlooking the underground parking garage, the letters SFMC emblazoned above it.

“Saint Francis Medical Center, I’m with my English teacher, Mr Fitch” she said, hesitatling slighty. When her father ddn’t respond with outrage at his daughter being with an older man (much to her surprise), she continued, “We just pulled up a few minutes ago”.

Her father didn’t respond, and to her chagrin Lucy discovered that the call had dropped several seconds prior. She sighed and tugged at a lock of her hair, both terrified of leaving her father hanging in the wind after hearing that his only flesh and blood ws in need of hospitalization, and of the unpleasant acknowledgement that as soon as she called him back it would make the situation somehow more “real”.

A gale of wind slammed into her petite frame; Lucy recoiled as though slapped and barely had the time to stifle the unscious yelp that had threatened to squeak out in between heavily chapped lips.A light squeak rose from her pursed lips and was carried away in yet another rough blast of arctic breeze. She snapped her phone shut and stuffed it back into her pocket; her eyes squinted almost shut to protect from the elements (and the fact that they felt as though they were about to ice over).

Past the whistle of the wind in her ears, Lucy heard the approaching sounds of Mr. Fitch. She cracked her eyes open and saw him walking towards her with his face similarly shielded from the freezing snow being picked up from the ground and thrown directly into his direction. He stopped net to her (how massive he was, she noticed, standing so very tall over her). With a surge of courage she reached out and took his gloved hand into her’s. He gave her a quizzical look, and opened his mouth as if to object.

“Look the last time I was around anything medical they snapped a needle off in my arm” She explained, staring the English teacher in the eye while tightening her grip on his hand, “It took the doctor and three nurses over two hours to get it out.”

“So if you want me in there and my dad isn’t here with me I’m holding your hand.”

Lucy stared at him as intensely as she could, practically willing him to see things her way and to let her have this small victory. A moment passed and Mr. Fitch looked down at her hand, tightly clenching his; Lucy loosened her grip and moved to back away, dejected. He leaned forward and took her hand back into his, and a small but polite smile concealed under his beard.

“Fair enough” he said, nodding thoughtfully, “Lead the way.”

A not entirely unpleasant heat radiated from her chest, and Lucy turned away before he could see the rush of red that was bound to be invading her face. She murmered over her shoulder and jutted her head towards the entrance marked C-4, the closest set of doors to them, roughy 100 yards away.

The walk was uneventful, albeit unfortunate, and by the time she had stepped through that threshold a terrible chill had taken into her bones. She shivered as she pulled her phone back out of her pocket and flipped it open. The fog of her breath hung in the air in front of her as she located her father’s contact information through the and highlighted it.

“I gotta try my dad again” she said to no-one in particular .

Lucille “Lucy” Beldworth pressed the call button the same moment her entire world flared to white; the pavement below catching her as she crumbled, violently convulsing and gnashing at her own lips..

Author's Note

This chapter was honestly a little rushed, and I'm not exactly a teenage girl so if anybody has any pointers as far as encapsulating the mindset of one, I'd be more than happy to take constructive crit/pointers