Page 228 of The Locker Room
hours later, and tried to tell Xander to go home with Penny and Mandy,
but Xander wouldn"t.
“He"ll need me,” he said groggily. He was stretched out on the
couch with two chairs lined up in front of him to take the length of his
legs. Leo had gotten him a franchise sweatshirt—Denver Nuggets, of all
things—but he was still wearing his grody jeans. He"d been awake for
nearly thirty-six hours, but no amount of begging would make him go
back to sleep, to eat, to bathe.
“He"ll need me.”
It kept Xander in the hospital for four days. Sixteen hours for Chris
to get out of surgery, eight hours for him to semi-recover, then another
ten hours under the knife.
When that was over, it took him two days to wake up, and by then?
Xander felt like a fixture there, like some sort of outsized ghost, who had
been haunting the waiting room, marking the passage of other people,
worried, terrified people, praying for their loved ones too. Most had
happy endings, but two didn"t, and Xander watched complete strangers,
with whom he shared nothing but the waiting, disintegrate under the hard
news of life without.
The first time, he was alone. They didn"t leave him alone much,
even when (especially when) he was sleeping. He dozed fitfully on
occasion, in that stretched-out position on the couch with the two chairs,
but more than once he came awake with a clatter, knocking furniture
over and muffling screams in his arms.
There wasalwayssomeone: Penny, Mandy, Jed, Leo, Andi…
someonewatching over him to make sure he didn"t take out some poor
complete stranger with the violence of his hidden pain. The third time he
did it, a nurse offered (none too politely) to give him a sedative, and he"d
looked at her with haunted eyes.
“Nothing works,” he whispered. “Nothing but Chris.”
