Anastasia at Your Service by Lois Lowry

Author:Lois Lowry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

6

No, they told her, but she didn't believe them. Sam is not going to die, her father told her, but she didn't believe him, even though he had never lied to her, not ever.

She cried and cried, and she didn't care that her face was red and her hair was messy and her glasses were falling off because tears made them slippery.

Then a nurse said it too, that Sam wasn't going to die, but she didn't believe the nurse, because nurses always said stuff like penicillin shots don't hurt, which was one of the most blatant lies in the whole world.

She cried because they had called her at Daphne Bellingham's, and Daphne hadn't answered the phone. She cried because she had called him old dumb Sam, and it wasn't true: he was smart, and he was young, and he was the only brother she had, and she loved him more than anything, and now she was sure they were all lying and he was going to die.

Once—more than once: often —she had hidden his blanky just to make him mad, just to tease him. She cried because she kept remembering that.

They all kept saying it to her, and she kept not believing them. But finally a doctor came through a doorway, wearing the same kind of operating room clothes that doctors on soap operas wear, and he said it, too, that Sam wasn't going to die, and when he said it, her parents began to smile. And then she believed it, because of the smiles.

Then she was able to stop crying, at last. The nurse gave her a little gray cardboard box of hospital tissues, and Anastasia blew her nose about a thousand times, and cleaned her glasses, and then she was able to listen to what the doctor was saying, because the inside of her head had stopped making crying noises.

"Your boy had a depressed skull fracture," the doctor said to Anastasia's parents, and he pointed to his own head to show them exactly where it was on Sam's, "and that's why we had to take him to surgery. But he's going to be just fine. At his age he'll heal in no time. You'll have him back home, oh, probably in a week or less."

"Can we see him?" asked her mother.

"Well, he'll be sound asleep for a good while. You folks may as well all go home and get some sleep yourselves. But if you want to wait twenty more minutes or so, you can peek at him while they wheel him to the recovery room. They'll be bringing him right along through here."

"Can we give him this?" asked Anastasia's father, and he held up Sam's ragged yellow blanky.

The doctor looked startled. "What is it?" he asked.

"His security blanket."

The doctor grinned. "Sure. Put it on the stretcher with him when they bring him out. Then he'll have it when he wakes up."

The doctor turned to leave. "Sometimes," he said, "I could use one of those myself," and he

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