Venturing Out of the Room

I carefully turned the doorknob, trying to see if it was locked without making too much noise. It wasn’t locked, so I opened the door and stepped outside my room. The hallway reminded me a little bit of the hospital in Awakenings. The walls were a pleasant shade of off-white, there was lots of light streaming in from the window at the hall’s end to my right, and the row of rooms across from mine was neat and evenly-spaced. There was even that black and white marble pattern on the floor. The only difference between this hallway and the one in Awakenings was that there were no people. Absolutely none. Supposedly, this was because they were all at lunch. I had not gotten the call because I lacked basic telepathic ability, but wasn’t there supposed to be an orderly or someone wandering the halls to take care of the others who were like I was? Weren’t we supposed to be supervised?

I pulled the door almost shut behind me. I didn’t want it to accidentally lock, in case it did that automatically. There wasn’t a keyhole in the door or knob anywhere, but I refused to take any chances. I ventured down the hall, not seeing anyone else in my predicament. Had they just forgotten about me? Had lunch been moved or cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances? I clearly hadn’t and wouldn’t have gotten the message. I considered going back to my room and waiting. But what if nobody still came? What if something dangerous had happened and we were all supposed to leave the hospital, but for whatever reason my room was forgotten in the sweep?

“Hey.”

I inhaled sharply, jerked my head toward the source of the noise and clutched my heart, in roughly that order. It had been at least a week since I’d heard a single word out loud that didn’t come from my own mouth. The person who’d talked to me looked a lot younger than I was, but that was my own height prejudice talking. He couldn’t have been more than four and a half feet tall and he looked to be on the chubbier side, but his t-shirt and cargo shorts hung very loosely off of him. He wasn’t wearing the pajama set. He had to be a visitor, I thought. Otherwise, he’s be stuck in the pajama set.

“Hey,” I answered.

“You’re late for lunch. Did you miss the call?”

I shrugged, still feeling uneasy. “Yeah, I guess I must have.”

“Yeah.” He looked me up and down. “Are you new?”

“Yeah…” I took a tentative step backward, gesturing to where I had come from. “Um…I’m sorry if I’m not supposed to come out of my-”

“The Hospital staff is supposed to come and get the patients that don’t have telepathic capabilities. It says so in the rules. My grandmother told me that. She said they’d take good care of me here until I could get the surgery and be like everyone else.” He continued to stare at me. “You didn’t know that?”

I frowned. All right. Not a visitor. I wondered if he had something special in his papers that allowed him to wear regular clothes.

“Uh, no,” I answered. “Like you said, I’m new here.”

“Oh, right.” He was silent for a minute. He looked down slightly, and part of his bangs fell into his eyes. His hair was almost the same color as his skin—a dark tan. Like he had started out as pale as me and then taken a trip to Jamaica and hired someone to flip him every ten minutes while he laid in the sun. He looked back up. His eyes, in contrast, were bright blue. “Are you from Earth?”

I blinked. “Yes.”

“That’s what I thought. My grandmother says I look like I’m from Earth. I try to tell her that we all kind of do, but ever since we saw that thing on the news about Earth and how they’re like us but they talk with their mouths, she says that I’m her little Earthling. Even though she knows I was born here.” He laughed a little.

I darted my eyes away so he wouldn’t see me staring at the lack of a human nose on his face. He was a Messi. A Messi who could talk. A Messi who, from the sound of it, did nothing but talk.