“Kids,” she muttered.
She walked into the room and checked his vital signs.
“Well, you’re doing better,” she said. She looked at the charts from last night and compared them with the new signs. Her eyes went wide with shock.
“Oh! Way better!” She stepped out of the room for a moment. “Dr. Marx! Come take a look at this!”
A few hours later, Nurse Riley stripped the bandages off Mike as Cathy and both their parents stood and watched.
“...I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything like this,” Dr. Marx attempted to explain, stuttering once. “He’s almost made a complete recovery. I’m recommending him off the wheelchair and onto crutches immediately.”
Marx was a stocky little man that looked like a cartoon mole, his lab coat hanging lopsided over a growing hunch on his back. Large rimmed glasses perched precariously on the edge of his nose and he adjusted them nervously as he spoke.
“That’s great,” Mike’s father said, smiling at his son. He placed a hand on Mike’s shoulder, as if to take his son’s strength as a compliment to his own. “But how did this happen?”
“We’re... uncertain, but we think that... actually, we have no idea what to think... but something, very strange, is going on here... ... yes,” he said, looking over the reports as if to give validity to his response.
Cathy raised an eyebrow toward the older man. “Are all those technical terms why they pay you the big bucks?” she asked sarcastically, cuddling up close to Mike for the first time in days without fear of harming him.
“Yes... well...” Dr. Marx stammered again, attempting to explain again and then deciding it best not to even attempt to do so.
“Besides, who cares?” Cathy said, leaning over and kissing her boyfriend. “He’s back with us, isn’t that what matters?”
Mike smiled at her, touching her hair and pushing it back behind her ear.
She did have a way of putting things into perspective.
When Sara got up that morning, she threw the covers off herself playfully. She hopped out of bed with her nighty on (which was actually an oversized tee-shirt that had once belonged to Xander, featuring the Transformers symbol) then stepped into her walk-in closet to change into some clothes she didn’t mind the world seeing.
She came out wearing a sleeveless shirt that read 0% Angel across the chest and some slightly worn jeans that rode low in the front. She brushed a hand through her hair and made a small, disgusted grunt at how tangled it had become, then walked over to her dresser to get some socks, stopping to smile at the panda bear Xander had won for her at a fair. She gave it a little kiss, then walked over to the window to let the sun in.
Squish.
She looked down.
“Fuck,” she said to herself, rising up her foot.
On the floor was a large muddy footprint. Xander must have left it there when he came over last night. I’d better clean it up, or mom and dad might think I had a boy over.
She laughed at her own little joke, then walked into the bathroom and grabbed a handful of paper towels. Getting down on her hands and knees, she began cleaning up the glob of foot-shaped mud. She brushed her hair back as she looked out the window over at Xander’s bedroom.
She saw a little light go on, meaning his computer’s alarm clock had just gone off. She smiled as she imagined him getting up and going through a similar ritual as she just had, wondering just how alike it actually was.
She finished cleaning the last of the mud and went to put the towels into the toilet for easy disposal. She dropped them in and was about to flush when she caught something out of the corner of her eye. She looked at the towels floating there for the first time since she had started cleaning. They were... red. She inhaled through her nose, and was immediately filled with the undeniable scent of copper.
The footprint had been made in blood.
She let out a little yelp as she realized what that implied.
“Sara?” her mother called out from downstairs. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine, Mom!” she lied, running her hands over her head again and again, unsure of what to do.
“Come down for breakfast soon.”
“Uh-huh!”
She stared at the red liquid on the paper towel for a moment. The blood was already seeping off of the paper into swirly rings around the top of the water, spinning around and making the entire bowl look dark red.
She quickly flushed the paper towel down the toilet, then walked silently back into her room. She looked out her window again and saw Xander at the computer. Suddenly, there was a loud -BEEP- behind her. She went over to check her instant message.
~CapTainaMeriCa~.
That was Xander. She couldn’t talk to him right now. She clicked ignore, and began to think of other ways that Xander could have gotten blood on his shoe as she walked down the stairs to get breakfast.
The list was short.
“Ignore?” Xander read to himself as the little caption appeared on his screen. “Why would she ignore my message?”
He took a monster bite of the sausage that he was having for breakfast, then dipped the remaining morsel into a bit of mustard and popped it into his mouth, giving the screen a frustrated glare before closing it out.
He brought the mouse up to the left-hand corner of the screen and clicked on his bookmarks,
