Allison Rosa
Visiting Hours
Excerpt
There’s a pair of legs in the bed that are so thin I think they can’t belong to my friend. He’s mentioned in his messages that he has a roommate and I think it must be a kid who has cancer, with legs like that. Pediatric cancer is a whole different ward but I wouldn’t know. The ankles look knobby like wrists except they’re wearing socks at the end.
When I met him I thought he had the most perfect face I’d ever seen, his teeth square and white like Chiclets. My mom said he looked like he could be on Disney Channel, the way his face was. I knew she was teasing me because of how much I was talking about him. I was embarrassed and after that I made sure I didn’t talk about him to my mom anymore, except to tell her when I wanted her to drive me to his house.
When we met he didn’t know anyone else in art class and I didn’t either, the new girl, so we partnered up with each other to make plaster masks, smearing our faces with petroleum jelly to layer on the chalky strips. Don’t laugh, he said as the plaster began to harden, which made it hard not to laugh. He was laughing too, then panic-laughing, you’ll crack it! I didn’t want to crack it, the mask molded on my face. He would paint it and maybe he would even keep it if it turned out OK. I pinched my thigh between my fingers until I didn’t feel like I would laugh anymore.
There’s a mural on the wall that stretches the whole length of the hallway. There aren’t any people in it but I think the bright colors and shapes are supposed to make me feel happy. I run my hand over the shiny paint, tracing the stars and rainbows. My mom looks back at me like pick up the pace please. Her sneakers are squeaking loudly on the tile floors which would make me feel embarrassed if I wasn’t so nervous. In a horror movie there wouldn’t be a mural on the wall and one of the fluorescent lights would be flickering on and off in a nausea-inducing way. It’s nicer than I was picturing but in a way like it’s trying to pretend it isn’t a hospital where my friend lives now.
He wrote down his AIM username in the neatest handwriting I’d ever seen from a boy and said his brother had the computer right after school and in the evenings but his computer hours were from four until dinner if I wanted to talk then. It was one of the few times I felt glad I didn’t have a brother or sister, when I sat down in front of the computer and knew I wouldn’t be interrupted until my mom got home. My fingernails tapped loudly, clack clack clack, against the desk until quarter past four when his away status switched off. The first message he sent me was “hi” with a cool-guy smiley wearing sunglasses. He usually used the sunglasses smiley or the big grin or the foot-in-mouth smiley because he thought it was funny, but once he sent me the one making a kissy face with the red lips. I told myself it was just a joke and not flirty because we hadn’t been talking about anything flirty before he sent it but I still printed out the message and taped it in my diary so I could read it later.
We watched a Canadian horror movie in his basement the first Halloween I was too old to go trick-or-treating. I wouldn’t have gone anyway because I didn’t know any of the houses in the new neighborhood, and maybe my mom was feeling bad about that when she bought extra candy for me to bring over to my friend’s house. I could tell she was excited when she dropped me off by how she said have fun and I’ll be back to pick you up at ten. My friend said he hadn’t been trick-or-treating in two years so I said me neither. He jumped and then laughed when I poured nerds into my hand during the scariest part, when the cheerleader’s teeth were falling out, and the noise they made rattling out of the box was like hailstones on a metal rooftop. He was sitting on the opposite end of the couch and I thought about what it would be like to have him scooch closer to me during the scary scenes.
My mom hangs back in the hallway talking to his mom, whose eyes dart around in her face like she doesn’t know where to look. She tells me to go ahead in, he’ll be so excited to see me. She emphasizes the word so and knocks on the wall next to the open doorway without looking inside. I try not to look grossed out when I realize those are my friend’s legs. His roommate isn’t there right now so I sit on the bed opposite my friend’s and look at his face instead of his ankles. I pull the books he asked me to bring out of my backpack and he calls me a lifesaver, says I wouldn’t believe how boring it gets in here.
Most of the basement was filled with his brother’s exercise equipment, hulking machines and pyramids of weights that I tried to lift. I could tell his brother was sporty and popular in the same way I knew I wasn’t those things. I wasn’t afraid to look at him sometimes because I knew I was beneath his notice. He was three years older than my friend and in high school. He was nice to look at but I liked my friend’s face more, the gray eyes with the feathery lashes, the straight thin nose. He was so beautiful I still sometimes wondered why he wanted to be friends with me. He told me he wasn’t very close with his brother, whose framed varsity certificates decorated the mantle in their living room. I stood on the fireplace bricks to read the inscriptions up close, the name printed repeatedly under the words football and hockey. My friend’s art projects were the best in class and I wondered where they kept those, if his parents had framed the watercolor I liked so much.
My friend surprised me with a cake two days after my rabbit died. I imagined him balancing it in his lap the entire bus ride to school, making sure the saran wrap propped up on toothpicks didn’t stick to the frosting. He had decorated the edges with Lucky Charms marshmallows because that was my rabbit’s name. I imagined him carefully picking the marshmallows out from the cereal, arranging them in the order of balloon, rainbow, heart, horseshoe, moon, shooting star until they went all the way around. They had soaked up some of the moisture in the frosting so they were soggy instead of crunchy and the colors were bleeding into the white. I carried the heavy plate through my classes in the morning and classmates surrounded our table at lunch to see if I was willing to share. I sliced into the cake with the plastic cafeteria knife placed in my hand and gave out uneven wedges. My friend mashed his slice around his plate with a fork and smiled, said he was sugared-out after eating all the leftover marshmallows last night but he was glad I liked it.
He asks if I want to go for a walk and I hesitate because he needs me to push him in the wheelchair. It’s empty by the door and I didn’t realize it was for him until now. He isn’t allowed to walk around except to the bathroom or shorter distances that don’t burn too much energy. It’s really annoying, he says and rolls his eyes so I don’t feel awkward about it anymore. To make him laugh I push the wheelchair at a sprint, the mural a blur of color as we race past. Our moms catch up at the elevator and his mom hits the button for the ground floor. The garden is like being outside without being outside, surrounded by blank hospital windows looking down all around. The noise of the street is a low hum, car honks coming from I’m not sure which direction and filtering down into the trees. It’s humid and I’m sweating now that we’re out of the icy hospital air-conditioning. I park the wheelchair by a bench in the shade so I can sit down before it soaks through my T-shirt. My friend is telling me about art class and how it’s really art therapy. Most everyone in the group is nice, he says. There’s this one girl who reminds him of me and I say that makes me happy which it does but it also makes me a little jealous. I wonder which of us he likes better. There’s one weirdo in the group, he tells me. He’s someone who throws up but that’s not why he’s weird. I’m surprised to hear there’s another boy in the group and he says there’s four boys including him. Before I knew about my friend, before my mom hung up the phone with his mom and knocked on my door and told me he was in the hospital, I didn’t think it was something that boys could have. We’ve still never said the word between us, me or my friend. I’m waiting for him to say it before I know it’s OK.
About the Author
Allison Rosa is a writer and MFA candidate in Fiction at Columbia University. Originally from Massachusetts, she holds a bachelor’s degree in English and history from Boston College. She is working on a novel set in New England and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.