“Thank you,” he said again. It wasn’t so difficult this time. “I’ve got a sore throat.”
“You’ve got strep,” Jimmy said. “You had an IV full of antibiotics when I came in, but it’s gone now.”
“Bathroom,” Mark said again. He threw his legs off the side of the bed and almost fell over. The woman in white offered her arm and Jimmy offered his. Mark took both of them and allowed himself to be steered into what he saw with relief was a bath private to this room. The bed thatshould have belonged to his roommate was empty. He shook off his helpers at the bathroom door—he really wasn’t ready to have his own stepfather wipe his behind for him—and went in on his own. The bathroom was like the room it served. There was too much in the way of tile.
Mark did what he needed to do and then, deliberately, spent a long time at the sink washing up. He washed both his face and his neck. He washed his hands twice. He was in a hospital gown and a pair of boxers, which didn’t bother him, since he tended to hang around the dorm in boxers and a T-shirt. That was something else that got him into trouble with Sheldon and the Dean of Student Life, who was a fat, pompous giant of a man whose social development seemed to have been arrested at the age of twelve. Washing his face felt good. He did it again. He looked at himself in the mirror and decided that he looked dead. The odd thing was, he didn’t feel dead. He felt creaky. He felt ridiculously tired. His muscles ached. His head itched. Even so, he felt better than he had even when he’d been talking to Gregor Demarkian yesterday, and that was the best he’d felt in—
Gregor Demarkian, Mark thought. Michael Feyre. The body hanging from the sprinkler system pipe in the middle of his dorm room, swinging slightly in the breeze Mark had made when he’d opened the door.
Mark opened the bathroom door and went back into the hospital room proper. Jimmy and the woman in white were still standing more or less where he’d left them.
“I’m in Windsor,” he said. “I couldn’t remember where I was.”
“You’re in the hospital,” Jimmy said.
“Why?”
“You don’t remember?” the woman in white asked.
Mark wished he could figure out if the woman in white was a nurse or a nurse’s aide or what. He hated not knowing, even though he wasn’t sure it would do him any good if he knew. He walked back over to the bed and sat down on the side of it. He didn’t want to lie down. He would have usedthe chair if it hadn’t meant that Jimmy would have no place to sit himself.
“I’m starving to death,” he said. “Can I have some breakfast? Can I have some coffee?”
“No,” the woman in white said.
“What?” Mark said.
“He could have a milkshake, I’ll bet,” Jimmy said. “Mark’s always liked milkshakes.”
“Of course he could have a milkshake,” the woman in white said.
“Great,” Mark said. “A chocolate milkshake. That would be—”
“No,” the woman in white said.
“Is this a joke?” Mark said. “Because my throat hurts, and I ache, and I don’t know how I got here, and I’m in no mood.”
“Get him a vanilla milkshake,” Jimmy said. “He liked those the last time I talked to him.”
“One vanilla milkshake,” the woman in white said. “And I’ll page Dr. Holloway and let him know Mark is up.”
The woman in white left the room, still clutching the small square piece of paper Jimmy had been signing for her when Mark first opened his eyes. Mark watched her go with relief. He had the feeling that she was more of a hindrance than a help to his finding out what was going on.
“So,” he said, “I’m in the hospital for strep throat? Is that usual?”
“To tell you the truth,” Jimmy said, “you probably could be here for strep throat. According to what the doctor told your mother last night, you’ve had it for weeks, untreated. Didn’t you feel sick? How could you walk around for weeks with your throat looking, to quote your mother, like raw hamburger, and not get some help for yourself?”
“I went to the infirmary just last Tuesday,” Mark said. “They checked me out. They didn’t find anything.”
“Did they look in your throat?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Did they do one of those throat tests where they use the huge Q-tip and stick it down behind your tongue?”
“No, they didn’t do that,” Mark said. “That I’d remember. They took my temperature, though. I remember that. If I’m not in the hospital for strep throat, what am I in the hospital for?”