Chapter 2

I rolled over; the illuminating red numbers on my alarm clock read 1:03 AM. Swimmer’s ear had plagued the last precious days of my summer vacation. It was Friday night, or rather, Saturday morning, and school started Monday. The pain in my right ear was growing worse by the minute, and I was not sure how much longer I could bare the throbbing ache that kept me up that night. I sighed and bit my lip, trying to concentrate on anything but the pain. I began to count backwards from one thousand in Spanish, a task that usually helped me sleep, but tonight, it failed miserably. Reluctantly, but with no other option as the pain steadily increased, I climbed out of bed. I felt my way helplessly through the darkness upstairs to my dad’s room. I felt along the walls, gliding my left hand along their smooth surface, while keeping my right hand over my ear, as though I thought it would ease the pain. "Dad," I whispered, close to tears now because of how much worse my ear felt than it had only minutes before. "I can’t sleep. My ear really, really hurts. I already took pain reliever, but its not helping."
"What time is it?" was his groggy response.
"About one in the morning," I said, wondering if he had any idea what kind of pain this was.
"Can’t you wait till eight when urgent care opens?" he said, pleadingly.
"But daddy," I said using my little girl voice, "it really hurts. I mean, it really hurts, really bad. Please do something," I pleaded with him. He climbed out of bed and followed me back downstairs, through the darkness, and into my bedroom.
By this time, I was whimpering helplessly, as though I thought that the sound would make the pain cease. Surprise, surprise, it did not! After ten agonizing minutes of my father trying to calm me down, and me trying to convince him of how much it hurt, he gave up and said, "Do you need to go to the emergency room? I hate to take you because I think you can wait until eight, but if you really need to go, we can. Just remember that we’ll probably have to wait for a few hours after we get there because an ear ache certainly isn’t at the top of the priority list in a hospital." I nodded, and we woke my sister up. We dressed, and put on jackets because even though it was August, the night air was crisp.
Four hours (and a dose of morpheme) later, I was back in bed, and on my way to being asleep. The emergency room doctor had put a "wick," which is a sponge-type material, into my ear, to hold open the canal. That way, the eardrops would definitely reach the infection. I needed sleep. I was starting high school on Monday, and now, I would be starting a new school with a piece of white sponge sticking out of my right ear!
Earlier that day, I had been taken off the waiting list and offered a spot at a small school. I was originally supposed to attend a big magnet school, with a student population of nearly three thousand.
The opportunity to attend a school with fewer than five hundred students was well received on my end. There was just one problem. All my friends were going to the big school, except for one friend. , she was accepted also and after about two hours of deliberation, weighing and re-weighing the pros and cons, we both decided that this school would be a good place for us to spend our high school years.
Now, as I dozed off, dreaming of my first year of high school, all my worries and fears of high school and of being away from my circle of friends slowly disappeared with the approach of sleep. It was Saturday; I was going to be at a much smaller school for the next four years; my ear was feeling better, and I was finally able to get some rest.
The sun slowly crept through the blinds that hung on my windows. I rolled over, trying to get in a position where my ability to snooze for a while was not dictated by the rising sun. I groaned and squirmed impatiently in my bed. Why couldn’t the sun wait for me to be ready to wake up? Why did it have to get up so early? I put my pillow over my face, trying desperately to hold it in a position where it covered my eyes so I could rest, but not my nose and mouth, so I could still breathe.
Suddenly, something leapt onto my stomach. "Ow!" I screamed in pain. As if an ear infection was not enough, and a trip to the emergency room early this morning, but now some massive blob was jumping onto my stomach. I took the pillow away from my face and slammed it down on the head of the culprit— my little sister. "Goodness, Anna, can’t you let me sleep?"
"No," she giggled. I wondered what was so funny about the pain I was in and how tired I was. "You can’t stay in bed all day," she said whining, pleading with me to drag myself out of bed and play Polly Pockets with her.
"It’s not all day," I protested. "It’s," I rolled over and looked at my digital clock so I could be sure I had the precise time, "seven fifty four in the morning. It is also my second to last day of summer. And in case you forgot, we all spent the night in the emergency room!"
"Because of you," she said coldly. "You really should get up and play with me, you know, or I’ll. . ."
"Or you’ll what?" I said, unafraid of anything my thirteen-year-old sister would threaten.
"Or . . . I won’t ever speak to you again," she responded defiantly.
"Oh and how long will that last? Just until you need to borrow money or something?"
"I hate you," she told me.
"Don’t hate me," I told her. "You shouldn’t hate anybody," I told her in my ‘sister-knows-best’ voice. She rolled her eyes, and looked at me again. "It’s true," I said simply.
"Whatever," she responded, shrugging my words off.
"But, since I am already wide awake," I told her in my best imitation of an adult, "and since I love you so much—”
She cut me off, "Yeah right," she said sarcastically.
"It’s true," I protested, "and if you’d let me finish, I was going to say that I am going to get up and play with you now."
"HOORAY!" She screamed, and began marching around my room, shouting and waving her hands around. I groaned and rolled out of bed, ready for a fun-filled day of entertaining thirteen-year-old Anna.
I rolled my eyes and watched her march out of my room. I closed the door behind her and smiled to myself. As annoying as she can be, I thought, I love her to death, and life would be so boring without her. I snatched a pair of nylon shorts and a long t-shirt, my typical middle-school-tom-boyish attire, and carried them to the bathroom I shared with Anna. I closed the bathroom door and began brushing my teeth before I took my shower.
Suddenly, the door swung open and hit the adjoining wall with a tremendous thud. Anna stood there, grinning, leaning against the doorway, with a hand on her hip. Rolling her eyes, she said to me, "This had better not be one of you long showers," placing great emphasis on the word long, drawing it out into three syllables. With the toothbrush in my mouth, I managed to grunt out, "Give me enough privacy to take the shower, please." She grinned and stepped out of the doorway, grabbing the doorknob and closing it quietly behind her.
After my shower, my sister and I played Monopoly and Clue, and then lay on my bed, listening to music. My ear began to ache as the morpheme the hospital prescribed wore off. I put eardrops in my ear, and lay on my side on the couch reading while the drops soaked in.
The shrill ring of the phone brought me out of the world created by my book. My sister ran to answer it. "Hello," she said into the receiver. "Oh hi, mommy.. . . . . . . Yes, we are fine. We went to the emergency room last night. Maria’s ear canal collapsed!" I could hear the sound of my mother’s muffled voice on the other end of the phone. "No, she’s fine . . . No, she can’t talk to you . . . . . . . . . . Why? Because she is lying down on the couch letting the ear drops soak in." There was a long pause, and then my sister said, "You’re coming at ten thirty tomorrow to pick us up?. . . .Yes, I will tell Maria to call you. . . . . . . Okay, Mom. . . .Uh-huh.. . . . Okay. I love you too. Bye."
My sister stood over me, and she reached down, and knocked on my head as though it was a door. "Can you hear me, sister dear?" I rolled my eyes and laughed.
"Yes," I said a bit too loudly, mostly because I could not hear my own voice well enough to judge its volume.
"Mom wants you to call her, okay?" Without waiting for an answer, she raced upstairs to find our father. Within seventy seconds she returned, and said, "Dad wants to know when you will be ready to go out to lunch."
"Soon. Tell him soon," I said. "I think the drops are almost completely soaked in. But I want to make sure so my ear doesn’t get more infected."
"Okay. Well, I am going to go finish getting ready. Need anything?"
"No thanks," I told her, smiling to myself. My sister, however wild and crazy, has a good heart and cares for other people a lot. I sighed, wishing the drops would hurry up. My legs were starting to cramp. My thoughts turned then to high school. In fewer than forty-eight hours, I would be entering the "four best years of your life" as countless adults had told me. As many of them had also reminded me, these were also "the four most important years" of my life.
So much of me could not wait to start, and yet a part of me hung back, unsure of how prepared I was for this. Would I be smart enough for the teachers not to hate me? Would I be cool enough for my peers to like me?
High school was a huge step, something I had really looked forward to, and yet something that I had also dreaded. Now, it was right around the corner. Another step and I would be totally immersed in the life of a student whose every move was watched by colleges . . . . . . . A huge question lingered. Was I ready?