5.
"Are you ready to leave?" asked my mother as she walked into my hospital room, a bright smile on her face.
I was standing beside the window, looking out at a strange city. Everything looked like I was back home, or at least in China, but yet, I knew I wasn't. I wouldn't be able to just jump on a plane and get back to Toronto.
But that was fine. This was my new reality, and I would have to make the best of it. There was no other choice.
Besides, at least in this universe, I still had my mom.
"I am," I nodded, finally answering her question. The doctors, both the prick and Chocolate and Peppermint, had come to see me in order to discharge me. They had gone through all of the tests, letting my mother know that I was in perfect health.
Weird eyes and 'lack of memory' aside.
I walked over to her and took the hand that she stretched out to me.
"Our flight leaves in an hour, and then it is nothing but a hop, skip, and a jump before we are home," she assured me as she led me out of the room. I turned around, taking one last look at the only familiar aspect of this world. The room I woke up in.
Nodding my head to let her know I had heard what she had said, I followed her to the elevators and down to the main floor.
I was a bit surprised that there was no nurse with a wheelchair waiting, but I guess that was not their standard practice. Instead, I left without fanfare, not a single person missing me.
The glass doors at the front of the hospital opened wide and spewed me out into a brand-new world.
-----
"Tian Mu," said the teacher as she crouched down in front of me. "It's not time for art."
I looked down at the diagram I had sketched in front of me. It was the diagram of a leg, a left one, to be precise. I had drawn each muscle, from the gluteus maximus to the soleus muscle, in red and pink, and then in yellow, I had added all of the nerves. Blood vessels were drawn in blue, and the bones were white.
I kept trying to figure out if there was some way I could have reattached the leg and had it be more than a lump of rotting flesh.
I knew we could place the femur in a cast and have it reconnect with the upper half that was still connected to the hip joint, but it would have been significantly shorter than the other leg because of what had been taken off.
The muscles would have required more work, and there was no way to guarantee that they would have been strong enough all the time to do what they needed to do. The blood vessels would have taken much more effort, but maybe we could have repaired them sufficiently to allow blood to circulate. But the nerves were another story. They were utterly severed, and I had no idea how to make them work properly again.
No, the more I thought about it and studied it, the more I knew that my original diagnosis was the correct one. It would have been a lot simpler for both the doctors and the patient to have removed the appendage entirely and have him get a prosthetic.
"That is a very pretty drawing, but we are currently working on grammar. Can you look at the board and tell me what is wrong with the sentence? You only need to find one thing," continued the teacher as she placed her hand on my right forearm, preventing me from continuing with the diagram.
I had been back to school for a week, and even I was impressed with my patience in dealing with being back in grade 1.
Looking up at the board, I snorted at the sentence. "Everything is wrong with it," I grumbled, putting down my crayon and turning my attention to the teacher.
The sentence was: 'their goin to market'
I could feel the other kids rolling their eyes at me, but I really didn't care. "First, the 't' needs to be capitalized since it is the start of the sentence. Two; it is the wrong use of their. As it is written, you are implying possession. It should read either 'they're' with an apostrophe or simply write it out as two separate words… they are. Third," I said, more than a little tired of this bullshit. "The word going is missing a 'g' at the end of it, and you need either a definite or indefinite article before the word market. The sentence should read: 'They're going to the market,' or 'They're going to a market.' Finally, you need a period at the end of the sentence."
The teacher looked at me for a moment before standing up. "I think you should go to the principal's office," she said softly, a look of disappointment evident on her face.
Too bad for her; I really didn't care.
Nodding my head, I stood up and left the room, leaving all of my stuff at my desk. I couldn't really be punished for giving her the correct answer.
-----
"Mr. and Mrs. Wang, thank you so much for coming," said the principal as he led my parents into his office, where I had been waiting for the past hour. Maybe I should have brought my stuff, just to deal with the boredom.
"Of course," replied my father, taking one look at me and breathing a sigh of relief. I gave him a half smile in return. I loved how much my parents cared about me, even if I wasn't their real daughter anymore.
"You said it was important," pushed Mom, taking a seat in front of the wooden desk as the principal walked around it to go sit on the other side. Dad chose to come over to the chairs against the wall and sit beside me, taking my hand.