RE: Trailer Trash, 6 pt 3 (Patreon)

   “—There we go, think that did the trick,” a nonplussed voice from out of nowhere remarked.

   Tabitha jolted back to awareness with her sinuses screaming, and caught a blurry glimpse of a hand holding a white paper capsule covered with tiny black text. Her brain wasted no time connecting the overpowering ammonia inhalant in the air to the idea of smelling salts, and being roused back to consciousness in such a manner was a lot more unpleasant than she’d have ever imagined. There were three faces crowded around wherever she was lying, it was way too bright, and she felt completely exhausted, too tired to even dream about sitting up.

   “...Tabitha?” A woman asked.

   Tabitha tried to blink the bright blur into defined shapes and shift her position—her body felt stiff and heavily-laden, and her head felt strangely detached, seemingly anchored to reality only by a terrible aching pain that radiated out from the side of her temple. The woman spoke again, but Tabitha’s attention was bleary and wandering. All she could make out was that the voice was choked with emotion, and not someone she immediately recognized, which added to the strangeness of her situation.

   “Tabby?” Hannah asked in a meek voice. “Hello to Tabitha?”

   She knew that voice for sure, and it was coming from the smaller face, closer down to the horizon of muddled shapes that she was beginning to realize was her body on a hospital bed. I’m back. I’m BACK. Only knew Hannah in ONE lifetime, and it’s the life I wanted—the life I WANT, the one I was wishing for. Thank you, thank you thank you thank you...

   “Hannah...?” Tabitha managed out.

   Her own words came out as more of a breathless sigh than audible speech, and Tabitha wondered if anyone would be able to hear her. There simply wasn’t any strength in her diaphragm she could intone into her words to project them at any volume. The sheer effort of speaking was so impossibly taxing that it made her feel like she needed to black out and rest all over again.

   “She just said ‘Hannah,’” the woman exclaimed. “Hannah—that’s my daughter right here’s name! Tabitha recognized—”

   “Quiet please, quiet, let’s not overwhelm the girl,” the male voice admonished her. “Miss Tabitha, we’ve contacted your parents, and they’re on their way here right now. Would it be alright if I asked you a few questions?”

   “Hurts,” Tabitha croaked in her tiny voice. She wasn’t against answering questions, but her head was splitting and this seemed like a crucial thing to convey to them as quickly as she could.

   “Yes, I’d expect so,” the doctor murmured. “We took you off of—well, we’ll get some morphine in your IV in just a moment. You’re a very, very lucky girl—you’ve been legally dead for two days, now. You’ll have a very interesting certificate of death to show off. Can you describe your current pain for me on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the highest?”

   “Six,” Tabitha replied in a low murmur, fighting to keep her eyes open. “On it’s way to… seven.”

   “Six, on it’s way to seven,” the doctor repeated. “Good, good. We’ll get that taken care of for you. Do you know where you are?”

   In light of her recent—and confusing—experiences, that felt like a hell of a loaded question. Tabitha blinked with difficulty again, fighting to glare through the haze of exhaustion and eyeball her surroundings. She realized Hannah was holding her hand in a tight little grip, and it filled her with comfort. Tabitha tried to squeeze back, but there didn’t seem to be much strength in her right hand. Or anywhere.

   “...Springton General,” Tabitha finally answered.

   “That’s—yes, you’re in a hospital, Springton General Hospital,” The doctor nodded, seeming pleased with the measure of her faculties. “Can you tell me the last thing you remember?”

   Dangling in the darkness from Hannah’s voice. Smashing my head into the back of 2045’s MRI prototype in the University of Louisville Hospital. Escaping a series of memories and or nightmares via F-22, the Lockheed Martin single-seat, twin-engine, all-weather stealth tactical fighter aircraft of my dreams. Those awful girls, chasing me through the endless parking lot. I remember talking with Julie, and she felt so REAL. So real… There was—there was another timeline that started. Fuck, I think that WAS real, but my brain bleeding or some sort of damage… DISCONNECTED me? I timed out? Brain bleed. Brain bleed, because Erica Taylor—

   “Violence,” Tabitha mumbled, deciding to tactfully keep some things to herself. “Violence and pain.”

   “Violence and pain,” The doctor echoed, seeming a little taken aback. “If you could describe—”

   “Seven now,” Tabitha interrupted to report, squeezing her eyes shut and furrowing her brow. “...Eight, soon.”

   “Alrighty, everything else can certainly wait,” the doctor relented. “Giving you some morphine now. You’re going to feel very, very drowsy, but you shouldn’t be feeling any pain. Oh, and—welcome back.”

   He wasn’t kidding about the feeling—almost instantly, Tabitha felt like the sharp agony in her head was stifled beneath blanket after blanket of smothering cottony tiredness that completely buried her senses. Her waking thought processes slowed to a sluggish, exhausted crawl, sinking into a soporific muddle-headedness that made her surreal dreams from before seem to have been in vivid clarity by contrast. The following conversations occurring right by her bedside seemed to travel enormous distances to reach the semi-aware part of her mind in broken, disjointed sentences, and when the words arrived at all, they did so in a droning, nearly incomprehensible murmur.

   “————————————procedures for———”

   “———right to alert us as quickly as you———parents here by her side when she———— ither medical miracle, or misdiagnosis. We’re going to run another battery of tests to——”

   “———indication of—————?”

   “————————————”

   “——don’t want to———— ketchup and pickle only, please! Thank y———”

   “———————————————————recovery———”

   “———ssible that the instruments we have available here weren’t sensitive enough to detect brain activity below a certain threshold. There’s never been———ell them she was awake and alert, she managed to say a few words. Yes, yes, we———can’t tell anything else until———

   “————visitors, until there’s———”

   “——————?”

   “—stop that. Hannah Honey, give her some space. She needs to rest—”

   “————————————”

   “———know what else we can say. Up until this case, this was unprecedented, there was no———”

   “——bitha?!—————hear me?”

   “——Tabitha baby? Tabby, can you hear me? We’re all———”

*     *     *

   Mrs. Moore wrung the handrail spanning the side of Tabitha’s hospital bed in a death grip. Her eyes were still red-rimmed, her lips were pressed into a thin line, and her figure was noticeably thinner than it had been just the week before. Emotionally, mentally, and physically, she felt about as hollowed out as any one person could be. She’d had no appetite since it happened, and she’d spent several insensate days sobbing and screaming herself to the point of weakness and dehydration. Her husband hadn’t fared much better, seeming to age several decades in those several days and speaking only in clipped, terse sentences.

   Hearing that Tabitha had inexplicably woken up—woken up from being legally brain dead, was more than she could comprehend right now, and she was still terrified to believe there was any hope, that it might actually be true. Mrs. Moore was empty of everything else and still reeling—she wanted them to force Tabitha awake again just so that she could confirm it with her own eyes, and she also couldn’t bear to. She felt her heart breaking at the pain and suffering her daughter was going through.

   “Are you gonna be okay?” Mrs. Macintire asked, giving her a look of concern.

   “Soon as I can hear her speak again,” Mrs. Moore nodded quickly, tears erupting out of nowhere to stream down her face again. “As soon as I can see her awake again, alive again. Then I’ll be great. Perfect. Everything will be...”

   “I know exactly what you mean,” Mrs. Macintire patted her hand. “This whole thing terrifies me. I was sitting right there in the chair and didn’t realize a thing. If Hannah hadn’t happened to notice something was wrong, that Tabitha was having a nightmare—hell, if this brain activity deal was all a misdiagnosis, some sort of goddamned malpractice fucking fuckup...”

   “I don’t care,” Mrs. Moore blurted out, sniffling and trying to stop her breath from hitching up. “If I can see her again—if we can get her back, I don’t care about anything else. I’ll care later. I’ll be, I’ll be furious later. Right now I just, I just—”

   “She is back,” Mrs. Macintire reassured her with a comforting hug. “They diagnosed her as brain dead and instead she wakes up and starts talking! Everything’s going to be fine, with a little bit of time. Someone up there’s still looking out for Tabitha, and He’ll make sure she pulls through this.”

   “You’re right—you’re, you’re right,” Mrs. Moore nodded, wiping distractedly at her tears.

   With Sandra’s husband Officer Macintire transferred to Springton General for his recovery and Tabitha admitted to the adjacent wing, Mrs. Macintire and her seven-year-old daughter had been spending almost all of their free time here visiting in the rooms of either one or the other patients. The harmful what-ifs thinking about what would have happened if Tabitha had stirred near consciousness and no one had been there to see... were horrifying to consider. They’d taken her off life support because there’d supposedly been absolutely no chance of recovery. Mrs. Moore wasn’t feeling the rage and anger about it yet, but it was certainly weighing more on her mind each passing moment.

   Alan Moore stood off to the side, simply staring with a vacant expression. He’d been bottling up all of the pain of losing Tabitha internally and had been pushed well past the point of shutting down—Mrs. Moore felt ashamed that she’d been in no position to help him through it. They’d both just been completely struck dumb and absolutely lost—how do any parents anywhere cope with loss of this magnitude? They’d missed the Monday expulsion hearing, which came and went with little fanfare—only Chris Thompson was expelled, with the other girls each being released from their suspensions to return to school for a period of ‘academic probation.’

   Mrs. Moore couldn’t really bring herself to care about any of the bastards.

   High school bullying had passed well under the local news station’s radar, but assault and battery at a Halloween party that left a pretty teenage girl in a vegatative state did not, and when Channel Seven began connecting the dots they quickly seemed to realize there was quite a story to run. Tabitha’s involvement in the Springton South Main Shooting allowed them to dredge up old footage again, and several of the district schools pulled their entire student bodies out of class for a lecture on teen violence and the implementation of new zero-tolerance anti-bullying measures in the student code of conduct.

   Democratic Kentucky Governor Paul E. Patton released a statement expressing his regret and condolences, touting Bill Clinton’s recent First Annual Report on School Safety—a study commissioned between the US Department of Justice and the US Department of Education—as well as reiterating last year’s talking points regarding the school shooting in West Paducah, Kentucky. Between the political expediency of using the incident as another topic in support of Clinton’s School Safety Report and Tabitha Moore’s favored hometown hero status with the Springton Police… Channel Seven had the local communities at large worked up into a frothing rage at what had happened to Tabitha.

   Erica Taylor herself wasn’t expelled—the teen was instead transferred, to a Juvenile Detention Center all the way over in Breathitt County—unanimously expedited away from the increasingly hostile Springton crowd to await her court date. People were angry, and a deluge of supportive phone calls and letters arrived at the Moore household, each fielded and dealt with by Grandma Laurie, who provisionally crowded both herself and the boys into the small trailer day by day to keep an eye on her son and daughter-in-law.

   Elena’s father, representing the offices of Seelbaugh and Straub, offered his counsel and insisted that with the current circumstances, any and all charges they decided to press were guaranteed to stick. Mrs. Moore had been trying not to think about it—her thoughts wandered into dangerous ideas of murderous revenge whenever she didn’t clamp down on them tightly enough. She knew she should appreciate the assistance and attention of so many well-wishing strangers, but she felt nothing, nothing but loss and grief and disbelief.

   Tabitha CAN’T ever leave us. She—she can’t. SHE CAN’T, Mrs. Moore thought, squeezing the hospital bed’s handrail until she was clutching the bar in a white-knuckled grip.

   Her lovely daughter’s head was still wrapped in bandages, and the only indication that she’d ever returned to them at all was that she would now shift slightly in her sleep, gently cant her head to one side as much as the neck brace allowed. Tabitha looked small and frail, a tiny waif of a girl that barely filled out the hospital gown. They’d cut away the broken cast on her left hand without bothering to replace or splint it, leaving the ugly old yellowing bruises on full display. Though supposedly not brain dead now, Mrs. Moore stood solemn vigil, watching her with wet eyes. She wouldn’t sit down or relax until she’d seen her wake up for herself.

   You’re not even fourteen yet, Mrs. Moore began to cry again. Your birthday’s next month—you were about to miss your birthday, Tabby. You can’t miss your birthday. Fourteen years—there’s so much lost time, and I haven’t even started making it all up to you properly. 

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/// Going to consider this section a provisional one, I may keep, and I may scrap again and rewrite. This was originally going to start off with scenes showing the expulsion hearing, but after several days of researching procedures and sitting through videos of actual expulsion hearings... it's not viable to put into the story, at all. Not without completely divorcing the hearing from any semblance of reality.

   School district expulsion hearings may not be the most tedious and dull things ever, but they're definitely within the top ten most tedious and dull things ever. Firmly within the top ten. Trust me on this. The post's a day late, my first and second version of this were way too info-dumpy... and even this third go isn't much better. I need to still convey a lot of the information regarding the circumstances around the hearing and the media / public reaction, but I absolutely can't write out the hearing itself.

   I have a bit of the next RE:TT and a bit of the next 18 and Up written out, not sure which'll finish first. Going to clean up the teasers again and organize them into chapters at the start of March, just to give a heads-up.