K. Randis - Spilled Milk

“I don’t know why Coach makes you fly all the time. You’ve never even done this before. You can’t learn this stuff over night.” Jessie rolled her eyes and looked for confirmation from the other bases. “Right girls?”

The other base girl nodded her head in agreement but my back base snorted. “Lay off it Jessie, she’s a natural. If you can do it, anyone can.”

“All right ladies, laps! Then you’re done,” Coach said. “I want three laps from all of you. Go!”

As an avid runner anyway I cruised around the track for lap one. A cramp snuck up on me during lap two and I pinched my side.

“Told you not to drink so much water Brooke.” Kendra jogged next to me and wiped the sweat from her face. “Get’s me every time!”

A bolt of pain shot through my stomach as I struggled to push out lap three. I had fallen behind all the other girls and I knew if I stopped Coach would make me run more. Halfway around, I couldn’t breathe and stopped in the middle of the track.

“Move it, Nolan!” I could hear Coach’s megaphone across the field. “More laps for everyone if you don’t make it around.”

I eyed the finish line around turn three and crumbled as a blaze of pain ran up through my stomach and to my chest. “Aaah!” I yelled out and dropped to my knees clutching my side.

The varsity captain reached me before Coach did and I was embarrassed to see everyone standing around me.

“What’s wrong Nolan?” Coach brushed the girls aside and moved closer to me.

“I don’t know, my stomach feels like it’s falling out.”

The longer I sat there the more the pain subsided so I convinced Coach not to call an ambulance and to call my mom instead.

Mom and I sat in the doctor’s office as he pushed off my stomach muscles and I yelled out in pain.

“Well I know you had your appendix out, my guess would be it’s a hernia. It only hurts when you strain yourself, right? To run, or do other strenuous things?”

“Yea,” I replied. I thought they were just cramps from drinking too much water or not having enough stamina.

“Well I think we’d need to do exploratory surgery. See what’s going on in there. It’s a lot easier to tell when males have hernias because more often than not it will protrude through their stomachs with a bump. Girls it’s harder to see unless we check it out internally.”

Coach was not happy with my diagnosis because it meant I would be missing almost five weeks of practice. I wasn’t happy because it meant I was going to be vulnerable again after surgery.

Dad was happy.

Surgery was scheduled to take about an hour. The anesthesiologist came in and put an IV in my left hand. “I’m going to give you some really good drugs.” He moved some of the tubes around and when he was satisfied he looked at me. “Goodnight, Brooke.”

Four hours later I woke up with the same treacherous pain in my abdomen as when I had my appendix out. The clock on the wall of my hospital room read 6:23 P.M. Since I should have been in recovery before four o’clock I thought something went wrong during surgery.

“You actually had a hernia on both sides.” The doctor pointed to either side of my stomach. “Laparoscopic surgery is a beautiful thing, you have two scars the size of your pinky nail on each side, and the same size scar in your bellybutton where we had to go in through. I’m going to extend the time you have off from cheerleading to eight weeks since we had to repair both sides.” He took note of my face. “Oh, don’t worry sweetheart, resting at home is the best thing for you at this point.”

And it was. For the first three weeks.

Mom got tired of waiting on me and the only time Kat came into our bedroom was to sleep. I was alone most of the day while the summer sun blared through the windows. Sweltering heat or not, I covered myself head to foot with blankets as a shield as I lay in bed, waiting.

Dad came in a few days after I was able to walk around enough to shower. I thought if I forced my body to stay limp enough, he wouldn’t be able to move me and give up.

Blacking out was becoming a welcomed necessity of coping. I slipped past the reality of heavy breathing and pain and sought refuge in black space and dreamland.

My prescribed Vicodin kept me numb over the next few weeks. Mom told me when I was finished using them to give her the rest of the bottle for safe keeping. I nodded and watched her throw back her usual cocktail of pills. Maybe she stayed numb for a reason too.

“Dad is working the overnight shift, why don’t you come in and sleep with me tonight?” Mom suggested.

“Okay.”

“First come here, Brooke. I have to show you something.”

I followed her into her bathroom and she pulled out a white thermometer from her pocket and handed it to me.

No, not a thermometer.

“Mom, you’re pregnant?” A white stick glowed PREGNANT across a small screen. My hand pressed against my forehead. “How did you find out?”

“Remember when I fell last week when I was sleeping on the couch?”

Do I remember last week when you were so high on pills you passed out on the couch and got up hours later only to fall on your face? Yes, Mom, I remember.

“Yea, what about it?”

“I went to the Doctor, I broke my nose. But they couldn’t send me anywhere to operate because they did a blood test and I was pregnant. I haven’t told your father yet. I’m three months already.”

“Oh. Well, congratulations.”

She hugged me and shoved the pregnancy test back into her pocket. “I’m going to tell him tomorrow. I wanted you to be the first to know.”

We both crawled into her bed and she clicked the TV on. The news came on and after a few minutes Mom muted the TV and turned to me. “Brooke, I want to ask you something.”

I gulped. “Okay?”

“I saw something that I wanted to ask you about. I really need to know the honest truth.”

Oh God.

She put the remote down. “Do you know any kids at school that do Oxycontin’s?”

Wow, not where I thought this conversation was going.

I struggled to switch brain tracks. “Uh, yea, I mean I think so? I’m not sure. Why?”

“The news was saying that people are selling them for $25 a pill. I could really use the money. You know your father doesn’t give me much and I don’t know what else to do since I can’t work. Do you think you could find people to sell them to? They said a lot of high school kids are using them.”

“You want me to sell your Oxycontins? Don’t you need them?”

The news was covering a lot of this drug lately, I never thought about my mom using hers to make a profit though.

“They give me a lot of them. I have Vicodin and Percocet too so I could use them instead for my pain.”

“Could we ask Grandpa and Grandma for money?” The thought of becoming a drug dealer at fifteen was not something I wanted to add to my resume.

“Never mind Brooke. I’ll just have to beg your father for more money, nothing can ever be easy.” She picked up the remote.

“No, it’s okay.” I thought about Judd. He ran around with some shady people who I knew smoked weed. Maybe they did other drugs too. “I’ll do it.”

“Okay. We’ll keep it between me and you. I want to sell them for $30 a pill.”

As if we just spoke about a normal mother daughter topic she un-muted the TV. “So, are you excited to get back to cheerleading next week?”

Judd was more than happy to oblige to helping me pool together a clientele list for Oxycontin’s. “Me and you, we’re gonna run this town. I have lots of people looking for them. Where are you getting them from?”

“My mom.”

“What? Really?” Judd nodded his head. “Yeaaaa buddy. Well don’t get all red about it, it’s cool. Chalky’s mom smokes weed with him.”