Sunny Sweet Is So Not Sorry

by Jennifer Ann Mann

  “Forget it, Sunny. I’m not a gerbil. I’m, I’m Marsha Sweet,” I said, and I stomped up to the front desk.

  There was a small, older lady behind the desk in what looked like a flight attendant dress. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “Hi, I’m Marsha Sweet.”

  She looked at me for a second and then picked up the phone. “Security? Yes, it’s Thelma from Shapiro Main. I have Marsha Sweet here with me.”

  She listened for a second and then hung up. “Someone will be right down,” she said. Then she noticed Sunny, and she smiled brightly. “Would the little girl like a lollipop? I have eight different flavors.”

  Sunny jumped up and down in front of the desk as if she were just a sweet little kid who would love a lollipop. I wanted a lollipop too, but she didn’t ask me.

  Someone was right down. Before Sunny chose one of the eight flavored lollipops, my medical barber and a security guard came hurrying into the lobby.

  “Where have you been?” he asked. And then he stopped and stared at me, his mouth hanging open. “What happened?”

  “My little sister happened,” I said, pointing at Sunny. Sunny grinned at him from behind her lollipop. And then she began to skip around the lobby, sucking on her candy and humming and generally doing an excellent impression of an innocent six-year-old.

  “She broke your arm?” he asked.

  “Oh, never mind.” I groaned. “Did the lab find something to get these flowers out with?”

  “My gosh—and your eye?”

  “It was always like this. You probably didn’t notice before because you were really busy laughing at all the plastic flowers glued to my head!”

  I could see that he suddenly felt guilty. Sometimes adults were pretty easy to handle.

  “Anyway,” I said, trying to make him focus on what was really the problem here—my head. “Did the lab find something to get these off with?” My chest swelled with hope as the words left my mouth.

  “Jim, can you radio for an orderly?” my medical barber asked the security guard. “We need someone to take Marsha to pediatrics.”

  Jim spoke into his radio, and I waited for an answer.

  My medical barber avoided my eyes. “Let’s just get you to pediatrics so we can take care of things.”

  “Does taking care of things mean that I get to keep my hair?” Green or not, I still wanted it on my head.

  “I’m sorry, Marsha,” he said, finally looking at me.

  My eyes stung from held-back tears as I looked over at Sunny rolling around on a couch across the lobby, busily sucking her lollipop. Just then, an old, bent man in white walked into the lobby pushing a wheelchair.

  The orderly.

  Now there was nothing I could do to stop the tears from sliding down my cheeks, and not because I was right back where I was before I became a freakish monster, but because the orderly was totally and completely … bald!

  Rolling toward Freakdom

  “Why can’t I just walk?” I asked.

  “This here is the way we do things,” said the old bald guy, frowning. I settled into the chair.

  “Can I ride in it with you?” asked Sunny, skipping over.

  “No,” I said.

  “Is this the little florist?” asked my medical barber.

  “Very funny,” I said.

  “That was some glue you mixed up,” he said to Sunny. “The lab is examining it now.”

  “I blended cyanoacrylate with amorphous silica,” she said.

  “How did you deal with solubility?”

  “I heated it.” She smiled.

  My medical barber shook his head, clearly impressed with Sunny’s skills at ruining my life.

  “Come on,” he said to Sunny. “Let’s take a trip downstairs to the lab.” And then remembering that there was someone attached to the glue, he turned to me and said, “I’ll meet you in pediatrics in a few minutes.”

  He walked off, chattering to my little sister like her stinking best buddy. I opened my mouth to say something. Something like, “I am a person, not a science experiment,” but between the wheelchair I didn’t need, a black eye, orange cast, and green hair, I really was a science experiment.

  My medical barber turned back to me before leaving the lobby. “Don’t go running off again,” he called.

  I gave a vague nod. This lab rat was going to keep her options open.

  * * *

  The old bald guy wheeled me down a hundred hallways, and I swear we turned the same corner, like, ten times. We finally ended up at a long line of elevators where we sat for about an hour because he never pushed the button. I guess I could have told him, but it wasn’t like I was in any hurry to get anywhere. And it didn’t seem like he was either.

  The elevator doors finally opened, and we rolled inside. Just after the doors shut behind us, I heard the old bald guy sniff a couple of times.

  “It’s peanut butter,” I said. “We thought it would help get the flowers out.”

  “How’d they get in there?” he asked.

  “My sister glued them to my head while I was sleeping.”

  It’s funny how just saying those words could get my blood boiling just as much as they had when I first starting saying them. I glanced up at the old man with his bald head shining in the overhead lights of the elevator. That is what I will look like in less than an hour. I couldn’t take my eyes off the round smoothness of it.

  The old man noticed me looking at him. “See this here scar?” he asked, pointing to a two-inch scar along his chin. “My brother did this to me when we was kids. He was swinging a stick around like some kind of sword. He told me to pretend I was a dragon. Well, I barely breathed a lick of fire and whack, he hit me with the stick. It took sixteen stitches to close it up.”

  “They have to shave my head,” I said.

  “Tough one,” he said.

  Pediatrics was louder and more crowded than any of the other millions of hallways that the bald guy and I had been rolling around on.

  Peeking into the rooms as we passed, I saw kids of all ages in beds and wheelchairs. Some seemed to be held together by metal and others had gauze wrapped around their legs or arms, and all of them had the bubble bags like Mrs. Song’s attached to them on rolling sticks. It was as if I had just been wheeled into the X-Men mansion, only these were X-kids and I wondered what each of their superhero powers were.

  “Where do I put her?” the bald guy asked the nurse behind the front desk.

  “Hi, honey,” the nurse said to me with a sad smile. “You the one with those plastic flowers stuck to your head?” It’s a question that you can’t imagine anyone ever asking you.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Just set her here next to me, Al. We don’t have any open rooms right now.” And then, like I didn’t just hear her talk to Al, she glanced over at me and said, “You get to be special and sit right here by me and keep me company for a while. How does that sound?”

  “That sounds great,” I said, even though I could tell that she wasn’t really asking me the question. I was going to be keeping her company even though I didn’t want to. What I really wanted was my own room with a TV and crackers and orange juice, and to be withering away from Calvin’s disease. But you don’t get everything you want in life.

  The nurse went back to work, and I realized that “keeping her company” meant just sitting in this wheelchair next to her while she went about her business.

  At first I could feel the eyes of nurses and people looking at me as they passed by, but a girl in a wheelchair with a black eye and a broken arm wearing a funny hat doesn’t seem to be that interesting in a place like this. In the ten minutes that I had been sitting here, I had seen a kid wheeled by in his bed with his entire body inside a cast and another girl with a steel bolt going through one of her knees. Soon everything in the hall was business as usual and no one noticed me, and I got a little lonely. But then I felt someone still noticing.

  She was maybe about my age, a
nd was sitting in a wheelchair too, just like me. Although she wasn’t just like me in that she was hunched over a little, like her spine wasn’t able to hold her completely up, making her head and neck kind of smushed closer to her legs. She had one of those bubble bags attached to a rolling stick next to her.

  I didn’t want to keep looking at her, but she kept looking at me. So I looked back. Her hair was in a ponytail held by a blue hair tie. Her eyes were round and dark. I smiled. She didn’t smile back. I looked away.

  I wondered what made her hunched like that. I wondered if it hurt. I wondered if her legs worked. And then my medical barber showed up and reminded me why I was sitting in the hallway of a hospital.

  “Hi, Sue,” he said to the nurse at the desk. “Have you been watering my patient for me?”

  They laughed.

  I didn’t think it was that funny.

  “Have you gotten in touch with her mother?” he asked.

  She smiled over at me. “No. According to the chart from upstairs, her mother isn’t home and Marsha can’t remember the correct work or cell phone numbers.”

  “My name is Masha,” I said.

  They both smiled at me, but neither of them actually looked directly at me.

  “Where’s my little sister?” I asked.

  “She’s demonstrating her process to the lab,” he said.

  “But I thought there was no way to get it off me.”

  “There isn’t, but the guys in the lab were really interested in how she made the glue.”

  Great! I was stuck here in a wheelchair about to get my head shaved while Sunny was busy playing real, live evil scientist.

  “Anyway,” continued my medical barber, “the lab found traces of the chemical styrene in the glue, and we need to get those flowers removed as soon as possible.”

  “Wait!” I said. They both really looked at me this time. “You’re going to do this without my mother’s permission?”

  The nurse stood up. “Sweetheart,” she said, bending over me and staring me right in the eyes just the way Shawna had done, “we would really love to wait for your mother, and normally we would because …” I didn’t hear what she said next. Behind the nurse I could see the girl in the wheelchair with the blue hair tie watching me, and all of a sudden I felt ashamed. This girl obviously had some pretty serious trouble, much worse than a headful of plastic flowers. And it wasn’t just her; it was every kid on this floor, and Mrs. Song, and even poor Calvin. I’m not saying that getting your head shaved is no big deal. I mean, truthfully, I could barely keep myself from sliding to the floor screaming, but when you’re looking into the face of someone whose spine doesn’t seem to be working all that well, I don’t know, I guess it helps you buck up. Or maybe it makes you buck up.

  “That’s fine,” I said, “shave away,” and I waved my hand in the air like my medical barber and Nurse Sue had just asked if they could cut ahead of me in the lunch line on a Tuesday for Tuna Surprise (which is this square piece of fish that smells like cat food). Although I did gulp pretty hard after I finished saying it and hoped that Nurse Sue, my medical barber, and the girl in the wheelchair didn’t hear it.

  Embracing Your Freakdom

  “So where can I do this?” asked the medical barber, looking up and down the hall.

  Nurse Sue thought for a few seconds.

  “How about in the rec room?” suggested the girl in the wheelchair.

  “Good idea, Alice,” said Nurse Sue.

  The medical barber slipped behind me and took off the wheelchair brake. The jolt of the brake being removed made my heart jump.

  This is really happening. I am really having my head shaved.

  Both my hands grabbed my stomach to keep it from flipping. It flipped anyway. As the medical barber wheeled me by the girl in the wheelchair, she smiled.

  “Want to come watch?” I asked.

  I don’t know why I said it. Maybe I was scared to be alone and she looked alone, and together, at least we’d be … together.

  “Yeah!” she said, smiling so I could see every single round, white tooth in her mouth.

  “What’s going on, Alice?” asked a voice from the room we were sitting outside.

  “A girl is going to have her head shaved!” Alice yelled.

  “I want to see too!” said the voice.

  Someone else called from the room across the hall. “Me too!”

  “See what?” Another voice called out from somewhere. A bunch of heads peeked out from different doorways, making me feel as if I were in that scene from the movie The Wizard of Oz when Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, told the munchkins they could come out after Dorothy’s house killed the Wicked Witch of the East.

  The medical barber and I looked back at Nurse Sue behind the desk, and she frowned at us. “She said it, not me,” he said.

  “Pleeease!” a voice came from yet another room.

  Nurse Sue took a deep breath in through her nose. “Okay,” she said. And the hallway burst out in cheers. “Go set up Marsha while I get these guys in there.”

  “Masha,” said Alice. “Her name is Masha.”

  I looked back at Alice in surprise as my medical barber wheeled me away. And she winked.

  * * *

  When Nurse Sue got all the kids in the rec room there were enough bubble bags on sticks to fill about three complete aisles at Wal-Mart, if Wal-Mart sold bubble bags on sticks, which it probably does because it sells everything else. It also sounded like we were in an aisle at Wal-Mart. For a bunch of sick kids, they were pretty noisy. No one would stop talking even though Nurse Sue said, “Excuse me,” like, ten times. Finally, the medical barber put a finger and his thumb in his mouth and gave a loud whistle.

  “Attention, everyone! Nurse Sue will take you right back to your rooms if you don’t behave. This may not be surgery, but I need to be able to think,” he shouted.

  The threat of missing the event shut them up. Everyone settled into their wheelchairs, or onto the floor, or on top of the little tables stacked with coloring books.

  My medical barber waited until the room was completely silent, and then he removed Mrs. Song’s hat.

  There were gasps and squeals. I could feel my lips wiggling to keep from frowning and my cheeks being pulled toward the tile floor. There were about twenty-five pairs of eyes, and they were all staring at me.

  I looked over at Alice, and she gave me a thumbs-up.

  “I’d like everyone to meet Marsha,” announced Nurse Sue.

  Alice and I locked eyes again, and Alice rolled hers in response to Nurse Sue messing up my name for the millionth time. Her eye roll made a happy spark shoot through my chest. I was Masha Sweet, and I wasn’t the only one who knew it.

  “As you can see, she has a few flowers glued into her hair, and we’re going to get them out,” announced Nurse Sue.

  “Can I touch one first?” a kid’s voice called out from the crowd.

  “Sure,” I whispered.

  A small girl with a bandage over one eye like a pirate reached out her tiny fingers and touched a flower on my head. Her touch lit another happy spark. This one tingled right up my spine.

  Now everybody wanted to touch my head. A couple of them gave a tug or two (or three) at the daisies and laughed out loud when they didn’t budge. They started asking me questions: Did it hurt? Why was my hair green? Were daisies my favorite flower? Could they have one of them when it was over? What happened to my arm? What happened to my eye? (I ignored those last two.) They smiled and chatted at me and laughed. Who knew that your head becoming a dinner-table centerpiece could actually make you fit in!

  Everyone took their seats or wheelchairs.

  The nurse wrapped a sheet around my shoulders. My medical barber smeared some gel or cream onto my scalp. It felt cold, but it didn’t burn or anything.

  “The gel will help loosen the glue from your head. We can’t detach it from your actual hair, but the gel will help us get most of it off your scalp,” explained my medical
barber.

  I wasn’t totally sure what he meant, but I nodded.

  He worked the gel into my scalp. It felt exactly like I was getting my hair washed and cut at the Clip ’n’ Snip where Sunny and I always got our hair cut, except instead of a mirror there was a group of kids in front of me. Then there was the sound of the electric razor.

  The “zzzzz” made the hairs on my skin stand up, and I could actually feel the dust in the air landing on my one bare arm. My fingers squeezed the wheelchair to keep my body in a sitting position. Even my neck muscles seemed to react to the buzz of the razor, and they had trouble holding my head up straight, letting it wobble to the left and right.

  A small voice called out from the crowd, “Don’t worry, it will be over soon.”

  Tears filled my eyes, but I opened them wide and willed them to stay right where they were, sitting on my lashes. I was going to look brave even if I wasn’t actually brave. I mean, they had all obviously gone through a ton more than I was about to. But even with that thought glued to my head along with the flowers, my breath still seemed to get stuck halfway down my throat. Sunny Sweet is going to be sorry! Sunny Sweet is going to be sorry! Sunny Sweet is going to be sorry! I repeated it inside my head over and over and over again, even though, weirdly, I didn’t feel so mad anymore. I was just clinging to the saying of it, hoping that at least pretending to be mad would make me feel better.

  The razor touched down on my scalp and then made its way across again and again like a lawn mower neatly cutting grass—minus the nice, sweet smell of freshly cut grass, of course. I never let go of the arms of the wheelchair, and I never moved. I stared out at the gray-and-green tiles on the floor of the rec room, while my head became lighter and lighter. You can’t believe how heavy hair is until you don’t have it anymore.

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see light-green clumps of my hair mixed with daisies falling past. I sat still as a stone in the chair. I was too scared that if I moved, I’d lose it. After that one small voice, there were no others. Everyone seemed to be holding their breath along with me.