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It was twenty one hundred hours. The room glowing by the light of the half moon, filtering in through the netted curtains of the wide window. Shadows break the room in to little pockets of mystery which make her feel uneasy. The only sounds she could hear were the wind hugging the trees and the distant moans of pain of a young child echoing down the corridor.

Under white sheets, the teenager moves herself so she is comfortable, trying not to think about what is going to happen. It is only then that her freckled nose picks up the pungent smell of bleach that infects the white room. Like a child, she silently curls herself in to a ball, holding her legs against her chest, staring through her wide brown eyes at the time on her mobile phone. Only twenty minutes have past. It feels like a lifetime has crawled by since she last saw a human being.

Her gaze now sits on a framed picture of herself with a crowd of her friends including Eva, and her boyfriend Oscar. Smiles and red cheeks worn by all due to the day of tennis they had just played on a blistering hot summer's day. The moans have stopped. It's starting to rain. The clouds hide the lonely moon; the room plunged in to darkness. Underestimating the whole situation, she lulls herself to sleep thinking everything is going to be alright.

Unconscious, she thinks about how life would be like after the operation. There would be no more teasing;
'Hay, hunch back of Teddingtion!' shouted a girl in the year above, with a gang of leggie blondes behind her.
'Ignore her Bea; you're not even hunched' whispered Beatrice's best friend, Eva 'sod off Scarlett!' Eva shouted over her solider as she and Beatrice walked on. 'Anyway, where were we?'
'How I'm going to hospital next week,' Beatrice sighed 'It's going to be fine, it's an over night thing, I'll be home before you know it. Then I'll be fixed and I won't be teased anymore!' she smiled.
'What about research, about the operation, recovery, risks?' Eva asked in a worried tone, accompanied with a concerned look, her dark, shaped eyebrows meeting in the middle in a frown.
'Do you really think my parents would agree to it if they didn't know what was best for me? Besides, it's going to happen to me anyway, whether I do any research or not.'
'I suppose you're right; do you want to go watch the boys play rugby?' Eva asked in an off hand kind way. She slid it into the convocation, raising an eyebrow, as if she didn't want Beatrice to hear.
'Just so you can see Oscar, and maybe he'll see you,' Beatrice teased, 'let's go.'
The dream soon took a turn for the worse when Beatrice remembered a time in the girls changing rooms.
Beatrice had come late to school because of an x-ray at the hospital; the other girls had already changed, she found a space in the corner next to Eva. While Eva was making small talk, Beatrice speedily stripping off her school uniform and putting on white shorts and polo shirt, hating how it showed her skeletal frame. She turned around when all she could hear was Eva's smooth refined voice. Thirty girls were staring at her, whispering to one another, she could hear words like 'freak' and 'hunch backed' giggles could be heard from the back.
'Let's go Bea,' Eva led her out on to the tennis court where, Eva offered her a handkerchief to wipe tears of shame from Beatrice's round humiliated face while they waited for the tennis lesson to begin.

Zero six hundred hours. She feels her solider shaking.
'Beatrice'wake up honey. I need you to put this on.' Nurse Gilmore held a gown with a pair of rolled up opaque paper knickers. Beatrice put her hand behind her head, sighing as the nurse leaves. In a daze, she slips out of her polka dot pyjamas, and in to the blue gown which opened at the back. It was still dark outside the window she walked to her bed holding the back together even though she was alone. She was very proud, never showing anything of herself, shielding her pale lanky physique, even though there was no one else in the room. Beatrice thinks back about how she hated changing for P.E. in front of all the other girls, thinking her body was a hanger for her designer tennis whites.

Nurse Gilmore then came in after a few minutes, accompanied by a very attractive young porter. She smiled at him, and then sheepishly climbed back into bed. The three of them silently moved out of the white room, into the corridor. Nurse Gilmore walking in front, her blonde tightly curled hair bouncing in rhythm with her stride. Beatrice laid flat, her face looking up at the ceiling and the porter's face. He could have been no older then twenty. His freckles making him look younger then he was, messed up hair showing how early in the morning he woke up. Through double doors, another corridor, this was empty as the last but louder, the cry of pain and the scent of disinfectant, masking the smell of urine. Behind closed doors, nurses trying to tend to morphine drips, constantly cleaning cleaners and paralysed patients peeing themselves.
A sharp turn to the right, the last set of doors, opened. Beatrice saw her mother, and smiled.

'Nervous?' asked her mother, gripping her hand as the nurse grabbed her other.
'Why should I be? Oh! Could we go to Wimbledon tomorrow, did you book the tickets?' she asked her mother, the nurse seized the opportunity nods to the mother, Beatrice's mother nods back sharply, Gilmore punched Beatrice's skin with a needle, and a clear fluid entered her veins.
'Let's see how you're feeling.' Her mother leans down to kiss her daughter's forehead. Beatrice felt heavy, a cold feeling running through the veins of her left hand. Her eyes fluttered, her mother hugged her as she closed her eyes.

Beatrice's mother departed to meet her husband, Beatrice's father as their daughter was wheeled into a sterile room. She would not go to see the tennis that year, she would not walk again for four days, and she would not be able to dress herself for three months. She would be two inches taller in more ways then one. In the operating theatre, the surgeons are getting ready to slice her open. A scar would be left, the man who would perform this act said to his assistant,
'Scalpel.'