Lulu

A Dark Comedy About Mistaken Identity

Chapter 6 - Cream of Broccoli

by Lulu Martine

 
The nurse came and gave me a shot for the pain and helped me take some tiny little pills. I went to sleep and didn’t wake up until they brought in the evening meal tray. I wasn’t hungry.

Alice was back in the big padded chair next to my hospital bed. She smiled at me. “Everything is going to be okay, honey,” she said. She helped me put sugar in my tea and butter a small piece of bread. My throat still hurt and I didn’t want to eat that much.

Alice said, “I talked to Prince and he’s going to make sure that you’re you’re all right, first. He knows how to do things, you know?”

I didn’t know, of course. Who was Prince? I looked for the keyboard and laptop but I didn’t see them. I made typing motions but Alice didn’t seem to notice.

I mouthed, “Who’s Prince?” But Alice just smiled. It looked like the friendly smiles she had given me before but it didn’t feel like it.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “He’s still gonna make you his princess. Do you want this soup? Cream of broccoli, I think.”

I shook my head. “I’m not a girl,” I mouthed at her.

She shrugged, not getting it. “For hospital food,” she said, tasting the soup, “this isn’t bad.”

“Fuck the soup!” I mouthed. “I’m not Lulu! I’m not a girl.” I hissed and gasped, unable to make intelligible noises.

But if I really understood what had happened, I was a girl. Or as physically much a girl as surgery could make me. The thought of what had been done to me made me sick at my stomach. I could sometimes feel something up inside me, in a place that didn’t seem as if it should be where it was.

I glanced at my chest and the swellings under the sheet. I had breasts. I touched my face, I couldn’t imagine what they might have done there, narrow my nose perhaps, reshape my brows and cheeks and chin?

I had bandages on my ass. I thought I had read somewhere about butt implants, like breast implants. How much had they done there?

My voice – they had changed my voice and I couldn’t use it until it healed. But I didn’t have a deep voice anyway, it had hardly begun to change.

“I’m only sixteen,” I mouthed at Alice. “You can’t do this to a kid.”

She shook her head. “Stop trying to talk, honey, you’re going to hurt yourself. It’s going to be all right. Prince will fix everything, you’ll see, sweetie. You’re going to have the most amazing life.”

“I’m not Lulu,” I mouthed at her.

She got that. “Oh, yes, you are. You’re Lulu, now. You have to be Lulu, for all of us.” And she began to cry.

I didn’t know why she was crying but I cried, too, and it hurt my throat. It’s hard to cry without making any noise at all.

“Don’t you see?” she whispered through her tears. “You have to be Lulu now or she’s just dead. And all she ever wanted was to be beautiful. You can be beautiful for her, can’t you?”

I didn’t think so and Alice’s little ramble freaked me out a bit.

Another pain distracted me. I mouthed another question. “What did you do to my feet?” I repeated part of it. “Feet?” I said and I pointed at mine, under the hospital sheet.

She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “You can have pretty feet, too.”