Big Haired Bitches - 8. While You Were Sleeping

I opened my eyes slowly. In a glowing, heavenly haze, I saw Steven standing right there. He shouted something as soon as my eyes opened, and a second later, everything went black again.

I opened my eyes again what felt like a second later, only this time, I did so quickly and with a start. I sat up, and a pain shot from my left shoulder, down my spine and throughout my entire body. I screamed out. A second later, an eerie calm came over me. Someone dressed in blue scrubs gently leaned me back and I instantly fell back asleep.

The third time I woke up, I didn’t open my eyes and I didn’t shoot up to sit. Instead, I listened. I smelled. I tried to get a bearing of where I was. Every sound was hushed and muted, and the place smelled clean with a lingering hint of bleach, saline solution, and piss.

“He’s fine, Renee,” I heard my father’s voice boom into the telephone. “He’s responsive to all stimuli. They have his arm relocated. He’s looking at a couple weeks in sling, and then he’ll make a full recovery… no, Renee, you do not need to fly down here for a dislocated shoulder… okay. Yes, I will let him call you when he’s awake. Okay… yes darling. Go back to painting, he’s fine.”

I knew my mom and dad talked precisely once a year and that was usually around the holidays. It was September. For my dad to call his ex-wife meant the situation was more serious than he’d let on.

“Dad,” I tried to say. My mouth was extremely dry and the word came out as more of a Courtney Love croak than an actual English word.

“Logan,” he said, springing across the room to my bed. When I finally opened my eyes, I realized I had a private room at Houston General. Leave it to my dad to spring for the upgrade with curtains and a cot. I wondered how many days I’d been in there.

“Can I get a nurse in here please!” my dad shouted. As soon as his voice boomed down the hall, my door flung open and a very tired looking Steven came in, holding his jacket and a flower. I inched forward, afraid of the blinding pain again, but this time I felt nothing. My arm was in a sling, but it didn’t hurt.

“There’s a nurse on the way,” Steven announced. “How are you, Loges?”

He looked genuinely concerned. And incredibly sexy. I willed myself not to think about how sexy he looked. There was no way my paper napkin thin gown was going to hide anything. Grandmothers. Grandmothers and unicorns, I thought.

I tried to say that I was fine, but my throat was actually sandpapered shut. I motioned for something to drink and my dad handed me a half drank apple juice box. I waived it away and instead took the complimentary hospital bubba keg of water that Steven reached out to me.

“Thanks,” I gulped after a long and hearty sip. “I’m fine.” I smiled at them both weakly and waited for the nurse to come and check me out.

      **

It took an hour of uncomfortable probing to get my diagnosis. I had a total of twenty-seven stitches peppered around my body. I had a first degree burn on my hand where I had made impact with the airbag. Luckily, the new Rovers had auto-deflating bags or else I would have had third degree burns on my hands and severe scaring on my face.

I was severely bruised, and they were monitoring me with daily checks for internal bleeding. My left shoulder had been dislocated and then relocated and then in the course of waking up two days before, dislocated again. It would be fine in a few weeks, because the pain was apparently enough to score me a free pass at the Vicodin fountain until I was out of the sling.

Other than that, I was fine. And luckily for me, my face was spared any damage.

“You really are lucky,” the extra attractive Indian doctor said to me in a crystal clear Valley accent. PhD from UCLA, maybe? For a guy who had just poked and prodded regions of my body that had never received male attention, he could have at least taken me out for a steak dinner first.

But the highlight of waking up in the hospital was for sure seeing Steven’s beautifully masculine face. The concern written all over it made me a little sad, but at the end of the day, him being there was more than enough to make me feel as good as six or seven hits of morphine.

“Dad, can I talk to Steve for a second?” I asked when all was said and done. My dad was in the corner flipping away on his tablet. “I think the light in the lobby is better for that, anyway.”

“Funny, son,” he said, standing. “I’m glad you pulled through.”

Pulled through? Did it look like I wouldn’t there for a while?

“So when you said you were in trouble, I didn’t think you meant anything this serious,” Steven said when the coast was clear.

“Me either,” I replied honestly. Never in my wildest dreams did I think Tori would ram me off the road. And to do so from her sedan? Jesus, I thought. This bitch means business.

Steven sat down on my bed and cupped my cheek in his big hand. If Nicholas Sparks had seen the pose, he would have vomited sheer cheese.

“I want you to tell me everything that happened,” Steven said. I couldn’t deny him. He’d been there. In my romantic mind, he’d been there the entire time, skipping school and sleeping in an uncomfortable lobby chair. Better yet, in my Nicholas Sparks inspired fantasy, he had waited for the night nurse to do her rounds and then crawled into my bed and spooned me, stepping over my dad and his cot to get to me. That would have been the most romantic way to spend a semi-coma.

I told him. I told him the whole story, leaving out only the part about mine and Eric’s strategy session after his photos were leaked. I didn’t mind Steven thinking I was a douche filled social climber. I didn’t want him thinking I was a cheater.

“So you took photos of your boyfriend…”

“We weren’t dating yet…”

“…used them to blackmail his sister…”

“…who had totaled my car…”

“…and then you went ahead and released them anyway, letting everyone, including Eric, believe Tori had done it.”

“Yeah, I did that.”

“And then you showed the entire school her fat photos so that she wouldn’t make the Homecoming court.”

At that point, I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. The truth was out, and it felt good to tell it to someone. But I knew for a fact that Steven wasn’t ready to handle this. He wasn’t the kind to get mixed up in high school scheming. To him, this whole thing was retarded and I was a fool for participating in the tug of war that was Tori’s and my relationship.

“Logan, you almost got yourself killed over what?”

“I’m gonna stop you right there, Steven,” I said, laying back down. His hand was still on my face and I knew if he was going anywhere, he would have left already. “There is nothing you can say that I haven’t already thought about myself. Trust me, I feel like a total idiot letting it get this far.”

“At least you’re aware.”

“But I have to get her back somehow.”

“Logan…”

“No, you listen. She will continue to try and ruin my life until the day she succeeds, mark my words. I can’t just pack up and fold, Steven. I’ve come too far. She can take my car and my left fucking arm, but she will not take my pride. She’s not going to win this.”

“Logan, Tori is in a coma,” he said. I sat up, this time moving too quickly and triggering that pain again. “She hasn’t woken up since last Thursday.”

“And what day is it today?” I asked.

“It’s Thursday.”

I lay back down. A week. She hadn’t woken up for a week. I’d watched enough Tori Spelling made for TV movies to know that a week in a coma wasn’t a good sign. But then again, I’d been in and out of consciousness for a week and I felt fine.

“Are they sure?”

“Are they sure what?”

“Are they sure she’s actually in a coma?” I asked, aware of how crazy I sounded.

“Logan, she hasn’t woken up in a week. I’m sure Dr. Patel would have noticed if she was faking it.” The name sounded familiar. Patel. That was my doctor. If her doctor was my doctor, that meant…

“She’s here,” I whispered as if she could hear me. “She’s in the hospital.”

“Relax,” Steven said. “You’re gonna get worked up.”

“Umm… she tried to kill me with her car,” I said, pointing ever single word like a sharp pencil. “Excuse me for being just a tad bit nervous that she’s right across the hall with full access to hypodermic needles!”

“Okay, okay. Good news is, you’re awake and out of here in a couple days while she’s stuck in a coma.”

I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was faking it. I didn’t know how one would go about faking a coma, but if it were possible, Tori would know how and that would be what she was doing. She was probably waiting for me have my guard at my very lowest and then she’d miraculously snap out of her coma and come back to get me.

Still, with Steven sitting right next to me, I knew I needed to tone it down. He wasn’t ready to deal with my craziness and I wasn’t ready to push him away. I let him hover over me and imagined it was his way of protecting me.

“Look, Loges, this whole thing is just really bizarre. I don’t want to see you get hurt,” he said with genuine concern in his eyes. He leaned down and kissed me softly on the forehead, followed by a longer, slower kiss on the lips. That was followed by a much more passionate, tongue-filled make out session for God knows how long until I heard the distinct sound of my dad clearing his throat.

I had heard that sound twice before in my life. The first time, a friend of mine and I were nine years old and we thought it would be a lot of fun to jump on my parent’s water bed. The throat clearing came, followed by me plopping down on the bed and puncturing it somehow.

The second time I heard the throat clear, a guy I was seeing and I thought it would be fun to hot box our garage. It was right around the time my parents were splitting up, so I didn’t get in as much trouble as you would have imagined. Still, the throat clearing scared me, and I pushed Steven away with a start as soon as I heard it.

“Sorry, Mr. Chancer,” Steven said standing and facing my dad as if he was the star of a Go Navy commercial. Stand down, captain, I wanted to say to both Steven and my penis.

“Steve, son, I appreciate you being here, but I really need to talk to Logan now that he’s awake,” my dad said sternly. I swallowed hard and contemplated pulling my out IV to get a nurse’s attention. I would have rather had my catheter yanked out than have to sit through the conversation I knew was coming.

Steven said goodbye, promised to stop over before school the next day, grabbed his letter jacket and left.

“Is there any chance in the world we don’t do this now?” I asked. My dad smirked.

“Funny,” he said, sitting at the edge of my bed and looking down on me. He didn’t have an ounce of humor on his face. I used the remote control on the right side of the bed to sit myself up without having to move.

“Now, I want to hear what happened from the very beginning,” my dad said.

“What do you mean?”

“You were T-Boned, son,” he said. “First the construction accident and now this. What’s going on with you?”

I took in a deep breath. For a split second, I thought he knew about the feud with Tori and he was asking me to explain. There was no way to tell the story without coming out looking like a chump, and so I breathed a sigh of relief when it sounded like he wasn’t there to investigate the fight.

Part of me thought about telling him everything. It was on purpose, Dad. I thought about saying. It would have ended it right then and there. Tori would have been charged with vehicular assault or some such Law & Order crime. I would most likely return to SoHo in shame, able to live how I’d lived for as long as I could remember, wondering about what could have been.

I can end this now, I thought.

“Dad,” I started. And then I hesitated. This whole hot mess was something that I had bought into early on, and it didn’t feel right bringing actual authorities to the fray. What if Tori went to jail? What if I got in trouble for all of the things I had done? What if this scandal were handed over to the authorities and Eric’s name popped up? What if his photos were leaked to the press?

Worse yet, what if I told and she didn’t go to jail? What if her parent’s money and connections got her out of it?

If I told my dad, I’d be ending a fight, but I’d be opening Pandora’s Box and I had no clue what was inside.

“Dad, I’ve just… I dunno. The move and school, and trying to figure out how to navigate this side of town, it just stressed me out. I was crossing the road and I guess I didn’t pay close attention,” I said.

“Son, this whole thing troubles me,” he replied. “This girl that hit you, she goes to your school?”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “I don’t know her that well.”

My dad shook his head.

“I don’t know what kind of pressure and stress they have you kids under these days, but come on. The witness on the police report said the girl gunned it towards you,” my dad said. He was fishing, I knew. It was what he did. It was his natural lawyer instinct. Take one nugget of truth and fish for the whole story.

“Yeah, I guess she might have,” I replied noncommittally. “I don’t know why she’d do something like that though. Dad, it’s not that big of a deal. I’m sure it was an accident.”

It was a blatant lie, but then again, I wasn’t one hundred percent innocent either. I didn’t have someone’s blood on my hands, but I wasn’t in the mood to explain why I thought embarrassing Tori in front of the entire junior and senior classes was a good idea.

“I just wish I could understand what could have possibly happened for you to end up in this situation,” my dad said. “But her parents are adamant about keeping insurance and the police out of the picture, so unless there’s anything else I need to know, they’re prepared to fix your car at cost.”

My dad continued to fish around for more answers, but I gave him none. It was my second out, and I felt in my gut like I should have taken it. You can end this right now.

I finally told him I was desperate to go back to sleep and he left me alone.

I sat through another physical exam by an over eager young nurse who resembled a pre-haircut Felicity. Even though Dr. Patel was cute, I wondered where the other Grey’s Anatomy caliber medical staff were hiding out. I made a mental note to check out the on-call room at some point before I was discharged.

Another dose of pain medications and another check of my discharge bag and I dozed off seamlessly. At first my dream was what you’d expect from a young oversexed teenager on loopy pills. Finn and Puck from Glee were just about to start kissing when Steven’s face appeared at the end of a long hallway.

I found myself gliding towards him, and as I got closer and closer, his face started to morph. Not into Finn or Puck, but instead, his features started taking on Eric’s facial features, one by one. First his nose, then his hairline, until finally, he was three inches shorter with darker features and a sinister smile.

For whatever reason, I kept running towards the new face, only now I was running faster. I reached out an arm as I got closer to Eric’s apparition and when I reached out for him, he disappeared. I stopped running and looked around, confused. No Eric. No Steven. No Finn or Puck. The hallway was empty.

And then I heard the laugh. It started out soft and low, and then grew louder and louder the more confused I got. I circled around, wondering where the sound was coming from. Surely if it was in the hallway, I would have seen a face.

“Hello poodle,” her voice said, underscored by the laughter. “Hello poodle.”

She got louder and louder, calling me poodle in the way that she did.

“No,” I said, quietly at first. “Where are you?”

“I’m right here, poodle,” she said. I turned around and the hallway was empty.

“Behind you, poodle,” she said. Again, the hallway was empty.

“Leave me alone!” I shouted. I could feel myself writhing in my hospital bed, but there was nothing I could about it. “What do you want from me?!”

“Nothing!” The voice said, turning more and more evil. She sounded like the evil witch from the Little Mermaid. “Nothing, poodle.”

Lies, I thought in my sleep. This bitch wanted my soul.

And then I saw her. When I thought I was stuck in dream purgatory and I’d never see the face that spat out the words, I noticed a thread of gold in the dark hallway.

Her hair. I took a step towards it and the color became more vibrant, more defined.

“Poodle,” she whispered. Her back was to me as I approached. I walked towards her slowly at first and then with more confidence. I was a moth drawn to a golden weave of flame. I couldn’t resist it. I couldn’t resist her.

“Come here poodle,” she whispered, barely audible.

“Tori,” I called. I was drawn to her, terrified and mesmerized at the same time. I could feel her power pulling me closer and closer.

When I finally reached her, I stopped. I was too afraid to touch her. I knew if I reached out, she’d disappear like Steven had. She stood there so seductively for someone with their back to me. All I could see was the hair. And all I could hear was…

“Poodle,” she said. I opened my eyes with a start. Ignoring the wires coming out of me, I shuffled up and inched backwards.

Tori sat at the foot of my bed in a wheelchair, her medical stand rolled haphazardly behind her. It took everything I had not to let out a scream.

“Don’t be scared, Logan,” she said to me with a smirk.

“You tried to kill me,” I whispered. My mouth was dry and the words hurt as they came out. I wanted to cough, but I didn’t want to make an unnecessary sound.

“Don’t be silly. Why would I try to kill you? You’re my best friend,” she said. “Don’t you remember sitting with me at lunch all those weeks? Dating my brother? Being seen with me downtown? Going to the spa and the mall together? We were inseparable for weeks, Logan. I didn’t want to kill you. I loved you like a brother.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“They’re sending me away, Logan,” she said in a straight voice that sent chills down my spine. “To recover. You see when you smash your face on a steering wheel, it leaves marks. Bad marks. I need those fixed before anyone at Summit sees me.”

“What are you doing in my room?” I asked. I was sweating at that point. I inched my finger closer and closer to the call button, but I couldn’t find it. If she stayed there a few more minutes, I had no doubt in my mind that she would have killed me.

“Don’t be scared, Logan,” she said, feigning concern. I was petrified and she knew it. “I’m just here to warn you. You’re my best friend and with me gone… well… good luck, poodle.”

I opened my eyes again, and this time the room looked normal. There was no crazy patient at the foot of my bed. There was no hallway. No one was screaming poodle into my ear, sounding both inside my head and a million miles away.

As I got over my Girl, Interrupted episode, I sat up and wondered what my dream meant.

I’m just here to warn you, poodle.

Warn me about what? Warn me how? In the back of my mind, I think I knew the answer, but lying there in bed… I had no clue.

      **

I felt a million times better the next day, and not simply because my catheter was removed and I desperately wanted to escape the prison that was Houston General and get as far away from Tori as possible. I truly did feel better.

“Well, your vitals are looking good,” Dr. Patel said. “And you’re urine output levels are just were we want them to be, although between me and you, I’d lay off the Smirnoff Ice until you’re a little older.”

I swallowed in embarrassment. How’d he even know that based on my urine output?

“So… your boyfriend tells me that today is Homecoming for you all at school,” Patel said.

As soon as he said Homecoming, my ears perked up and my mind shot forward. Screw what he’d been talking about before. Urine output could wait. I had forgotten that Homecoming was this weekend and I was stuck in a hospital bed during it.

“I was talking to the charge nurse and your father and we all agree that you’re recovering well, all things considered,” he said slowly. Yes…? I thought. “And so we’re going to let you go to the game and the ceremony. But no dance. You’ll come back here for another night of observations.”

My heart jumped just a little. To have gone to forgetting Homecoming to thinking there was no way I could go to getting the green light was the definition of an emotional rollercoaster.

“So I can go?”

“You can go,” Patel said. And then my heart dipped again. Sure I could go. But who the hell would I go with? Patel watched the happiness melt off my face, and like a mind reader, he told me the second part of the plan. “And your boyfriend should be here any minute to get you all ready.” Patel patted me on the leg and said: “Have a good time tonight. Take it easy and for the love of God, stay out of trouble.”

He stood up and started to walk away.

“Um, doctor,” I called after him. He turned around. “The girl that was in the accident too. Is she still here?”

The doctor gave me a quizzical look. “Funny you should ask. She was transferred this morning to a rehabilitation center in Dallas. She’ll be fine, but she has a long recovery ahead.”

“So she came out of her coma, then?” I asked. I didn’t want to acknowledge that I had been shaking in my boots at her hands earlier. I needed to confirm that seeing her in my room had been a bad dream.

I’m just here to warn you, poodle.

“She did,” the doctor said, his hand on the door. “She came out overnight and they transferred her this morning.”

My heart skipped a beat. There was no way she’d been in here. There was no way she’d delivered her warning herself. There was no way her voice had produced those blood curdling ‘poodles’. It was a dream, I told myself. It was just a dream.

I pushed the thoughts out of my mind almost immediately when Steven showed up looking like a Calvin Klein model and carrying a suit bag.

“Your dad said this was yours,” he said, handing me the garment bag. I was blown away that he had managed to charm my dad somehow over the course of a week. With those eyes, however, I wasn’t too surprised. I crawled out of bed, took my get-up and got dressed in my private restroom with the help of my too-good-to-be-true for me boyfriend.

Forty-five minutes later, I was dressed in my tailored black suit and a striped shirt. Homecoming wasn’t a time to skimp on presentation, and Steven and I were dressed to kill.

      **

I noticed the stares as if they were daggers. I felt like a bald Britney Spears in a sea of paparazzo. What made it even worse was that the stares weren’t only coming from the students, but from parents and faculty as well.

If I thought they would stop once the game began, I was mistaken. Our boys were a good football team with two state appearances in as many years. But not even the dynamic duo of Ethan Pepper and Jason Walker could keep the eyes off of me.

And like any classical pairing, the stares came with whispers.

“I heard she tried to kill him because of those fat photos.”

“Duh, wouldn’t you?”

“It’s not his fault she was a beached whale in junior high.”

“And now she’s doing rehab in Hawaii.”

“I heard he put up a restraining order on her.”

“She’s crazy.”

And they just kept coming. I felt worse for Steven than anyone, but he was a perfect gentleman all night, staying close to me, with an arm around my waist, as if he was protecting me.

I couldn’t help but wonder if Eric would have been this supportive. All things being equal, if he’d been in Steven’s shoes, and it wasn’t his sister I was battling, would he have protected me? Or would he have bailed? I had my money on the latter, and as soon as I thought it, I squeezed Steven’s hand and said a silent ‘thank you’ that he was there.

The halftime ceremony was another sideshow to the main event that was Logan’s Return, a one night HBO special. Check your local listings. Hardly anyone cared that the junior representatives were Alexandria Pekov and Ethan Pepper. No one even noticed that she refused to stand close to him in his grass stained uniform. Not a single person, I was convinced, took notice when a senior with especially large ringlet curls that night, took the crown of Homecoming Queen and paraded her pageant wave to a dead crowd. They should have been talking about her eating disorder, but instead, they were talking about me.

“I want to get out of here,” I whispered to Steven once the crowning took place and the band took over the field.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Yes. Let’s go, please,” I said. I had had enough. They would talk and I knew it, but I wouldn’t fuel it. Plus, my shoulder was in pain and I had an IV of Tylenol laced with Codeine that had my name on it.

Without any further hesitation, Steven and I stood up and made a brisk exit to the left of the bleachers. As we rounded a corner, a very sexily clad Taylor stood on the other side, his arm outstretched against a wall, blocking our path.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” he asked me. To the hospital, I wanted to say. Where your friend put me? With her car?

I didn’t want to deal with him. I didn’t want to deal with anyone. I wanted to be far away from high school, especially Summit Hill. I almost wished I’d never been there.

“Taylor, I can’t—“

“Can’t what? Listen, bitch, you don’t dethrone the Queen Bee in a manner like that and expect to get away with it.”

My jitters had taken over. I knew she was far away, but I felt her there, standing in front of me, reimaged as a svelte New Yorker in Prada boots.

“He said he didn’t want to deal with this right now,” Steven jumped in.

“Who are you?” Taylor asked rudely. “Who is he?”

“He’s my boyfriend,” I said, dropping the B-word in front of him for the first time. He held me closer when I said it, indicating he didn’t mind at all. “And you’re in my way.”

“Logan, it’s just… well everyone in there is wondering where you’re planning on going after the game to party,” Taylor said, his attitude melting into a sly smirk. “You did it.”

At first I didn’t get it. Houston Gen, I thought to say. That was the only after party I would be hitting up, and unless the students in there had a hankering for IV narcotics, it was shaping up to a party of one.

And then I read the subtext in Taylor’s face. They were whispering about me, sure, but they were also intrigued. They wanted to be where I would be. They wanted to see what my next move would be. By standing up and challenging Tori, I had become the next best topic of gossip.

“What are you asking me, Taylor?” I said, getting it, but needing confirmation.

“Bitch, I will never say this to you again. Tori is gone. You have successfully rid Summit Hill of the Wicked Witch of the North,” he said with more theatrics in his eyebrows than a Patty LuPone tribute concert at the Kennedy Center. “Welcome to the top.”

I looked at Steven who gave me a shrug. This was the very thing he’d worried about, I was sure. But standing there, right in front of me, asking me where I was going to after party, was proof that I’d won. I’d taken her down, and it was time to bask.

“We can go to a party for one song,” I said to Steven, craning my neck. Ten minutes ago, I had wanted to click my heels together and disappear. Now, I was more than certain I would never be able to.

“Dr. Patel was very specific about what you were allowed and not allowed to do,” Steven warned. He was right. And because I liked him, I took his opinion into consideration. It would have been great to make my debut at the top that night at one of the several house parties sure to be going on around Summit proper. But there was no need to rush anything. None at all.

Still, I knew that all eyes were on me, and these early moves were incredibly important. Even if I wasn’t ready, I had to strap in and play the part. I turned to Taylor, and in a clear and direct voice, I gave him his instructions.

“Tell everyone that matters that I’m going to Whit’s house after the game,” I said with a smirk.

“Whit’s not having a party,” Taylor said, squinting at me.

“I know,” I replied with a smile. “But she is now.”

In an hour and half, the entire junior class would show up at Whit’s hoping to get a glimpse of me post trauma. They’d show up expecting punch and music and decorations. If Whit was up to snuff, she’d shift her loyalty and throw the party. If not, she’d be embarrassed when a throng of juniors showed up to her house and found there was no punch, music, or decorations.

I allowed Steven to pull me towards the exit. I stopped short and turned around to face Taylor.

“Oh, and poodle,” I said, channeling my own inner big haired bitch. “I’ll see you at lunch on Monday.”