My muscles uncoil and relax again, but I’m struggling to catch my breath, almost wheezing.
Something pinches my arm, and a steady warmth begins to spread through my body. Heaviness sets in. Hands let go of me, and I can’t hold myself up anymore. I slump down but fight to keep my eyes open. I wonder where Alex went.
Only I must say that out loud, because then he’s standing over me. “Just relax. You had a seizure, but you’re fine.”
“Alex.” I try to grab his arm, but my hand just flops around.
Because he speaks my language, he says, “Jared’s fine. I took him to polo and called your dad.”
And then he leans down so I can whisper in his ear. “At Torrey, the Jeep . . .”
“What happened to your car?” Nick asks, his face hovering above me.
Thankfully Alex hushes him and pushes him away as I close my eyes. “I’ll take care of it, don’t worry.”
There was something I wanted to tell him. Something important.
“Wait,” I whisper before he goes away. “Alex . . . I died.”
“Shh,” he whispers back, and I picture him shaking his head. “You’re going to be fine, Janelle. You’re going to be fine.”
The worst thing about coming back to life isn’t, believe it or not, how physically painful it is. Don’t get me wrong—even though all my bones seem to be working just fine, they feel like they were broken into tiny pieces. My body is stiff, it aches with a steady, throbbing consistency, and I’m having a hard time making it obey me the way it should.
But worse is the hollowness.
It makes sense, really. I just looked into the great expanse of nothingness, had a moment—no matter how quickly it passed—to think about what my seventeen years add up to, and the dominant emotion staring back at me now is regret.
It’s not that I haven’t accomplished things. It’s not that the people I leave behind won’t remember me. It’s not even that I’m young and there was so much more I wanted to experience—so much more I wanted to do.
It’s the realization that I was practically dead already.
It’s that for the past I don’t know how many years, I’ve moved through life stuffed with straw, hollow and unfeeling. Day after day passed, and I went through the motions and focused on the mundane because the significant was too hard. I had conversations about schoolwork, weather, laundry, groceries, even sports, because things like quitting swimming, losing my best friend, getting drugged at a party, watching my mother’s mood swings slowly kill her, watching my father give up on her—on us—all threatened to unleash a floodgate.
I go out with a guy who, when he’s being serious, is interesting and funny and sort of sweet. We get along well enough, too, but if I’m really honest with myself, I don’t see a future with him. I can’t even see us together when school starts, let alone see myself trying to date him long-distance or go visit him when he’s in college. And I know we just started dating, but isn’t that what I should be imagining if I was really into him—isn’t that part of the reason why people start dating? Yet I choose to date him rather than hold out for someone I could love. Why? Because his ex-girlfriend’s a bitch? Because he’s pretty? Because it feels good to be liked? Because I don’t want to date someone I really care about since it will hurt more when it ends? Since I’d have to try?
How can I ever dare to meet my own eyes again? I can’t. Not even in dreams.
That night, in a drug-induced sedation, I dream my brother is crying, and instead of my dad teasing Jared to “man up” like he always does, I hear his voice, even and soothing. I can’t quite catch what he’s saying at first. Then Jared sniffs, and my father says, Your sister’s so tough, it’s frightening. That girl will outlive us all.
I dream about Ben Michaels hovering over me, somehow bringing me back from the dead.
And I dream about a doctor and two nurses looking at my X-rays. They stand right near my bed, the X-rays up in the light box. One of the nurses leaves as the doctor points to something on the image.
The doctor and remaining nurse whisper to each other.
The nurse comes back, and she’s brought another doctor with her. The four of them gesture to the X-ray, their voices floating through the room.
It looks like her backbone and spinal cord were completely severed and fused back together.
An old injury, maybe?
Maybe she had surgery?
Nothing in her medical history.
They sigh.
It doesn’t . . . it doesn’t look like an old injury . . . and even if it was . . . I’m not sure how anyone would be able to walk after an injury like that.
She’s lucky she isn’t paralyzed.
Lucky? It’s a miracle she’s even alive.
“She should rest,” Dr. Abrams tells him. “Stay off her feet, no physical exertion—”
“You said she hasn’t had any more seizures after the first one,” my dad says.
Dr. Abrams nods and explains why it’s important to keep an eye on me anyway.
To anyone else, it would look like my dad is listening respectfully and absorbing the details. I know better. He tugs on his left ear, which means he’s annoyed and running low on patience. He asks specific questions that suggest more medical knowledge than he has, which means he’s shown my test results and chart to someone at the Bureau, probably a medical examiner.
I don’t exactly care, though, that my dad has been giving everyone in the hospital a hard time. I’ve got more important things to focus on. Like what the hell Ben Michaels did to me. It’s just about all I’ve been able to think about since I woke up. I tried to have the conversation several times—where I said, “Alex, I died,” and he patted me like a two-year-old and basically said,
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I roll my head to the side to look at Jared. “What’s up, dude? You gonna tell me what happened to your hand?”
His right hand looks slightly bruised. I reach out, touching his knuckles. He winces. “What happened?” I whisper.
“I tried to punch Alex,” Jared says with a shrug. But he at least has the decency to drop his eyes and look embarrassed. “He’s fine, though.”
I made Alex take self-defense classes with me the summer before sophomore year. We always joked that if a guy attacked us, Alex would duck and I would knee the guy in the balls. (There’s a rumor I’m the reason Dave Kotlar only has one testicle now, but it’s a total lie. I have no idea what he did to himself, but since he hasn’t made any big attempts to dispel the rumors, it must be way more embarrassing than getting beat up by a girl.)
So I know if my brother—who’s never been in a fight in his life—tried to throw a punch at Alex, my best friend would do what he’s best at. He would duck.
“You were in the hospital, dying for all he knew, and Alex took me to polo.”
“Um, because I asked him to. Alex is well trained.”
Jared