Ella laid spread out, wearing nothing but a Disney princess themed pull up on the top of the comforter. The stifling heat and stuffy air made the idea of getting under the covers sound about as unappealing as another round of chemo. She was vaguely aware she was running a fever, but all she could do was keep flipping and rotating her pillow in search of a cool spot to rest her burning face.

She wished she could push a button and have someone bring her a fan like she could in the hospital. Even for someone to come open the window would do. The thought of doing it herself crossed her mind, but the idea of getting up and dragging herself across the room seemed a monumental task in her current state. Rose would have had a cow if she caught her out of bed sick.

Ella remembered the last time she had been running a fever. Santa had come early that year and had left all the good little boys and girls of floor three, Influenza type A. The nurses had also given them an early Christmas present two weeks prior. Flu shots. For type B. The call buttons had been chiming like Christmas bells ringing in the holidays.

Ella had knocked a crayon off her tray and it had rolled off the bed and onto the floor five feet away. She thought nothing of it until her picture required a certain shade of blue, and only that shade of blue would do. The sea and the sky were not the same color after all. She pressed the call button and waited. And waited. And waited. No one came.

She looked across the room willing the crayon to roll back, but as it turned out, the trade off for radiation treatments was not super powers. Unless projectile vomiting on school bullies counted, Batman (who was really just Pedro from janitorial in a cheap batman costume) was wrong. She wasn’t a hero. What kind of hero couldn’t even get a crayon to roll back to them?

Her frustration level rose with every passing second. She had had a terrible few days. She was coughing up hail sized chunks of phlegm the same color of the christmas tree in Kids Korner.

Her chest ached and rattled with every cough, and as for her throat… it wouldn’t have surprised her to learn that her lung butter was the same hue as the pine needles from the christmas tree in Kids Korner because she was coughing up the pine needles from the christmas tree in Kids Korner.

Rose had told her to distract herself from how miserable she felt and snuck her a fist full of crayons. It was as if Rose had handed her a fist full of gold. Sure, Ella could get a hold of the basic eight staple colors, but in this handful was magenta, silver, blood orange, three different shades of green and two of blue. The excitement had given her just enough energy to sit up and color.

She wondered how Rose had gotten her hands on this? Word in Kid’s Korner was Steve Mason, the 13-year-old with the trach tube, could get you anything you wanted within reason. For a price. He had a fairly successful black market going on for a bit before he got moved to a different floor. Ella had even got up the nerve to slip him a note once asking for a few markers and colored pencils. She was ecstatic when he had slipped her a reply back underneath the table…that was until she read his demands. A number 10 from Mcdonalds with a large coke.