Meena Meets Her Match

by Karla Manternach

  He puts a slice of bread in the toaster. “That’s a pretty big bowl you’ve got there,” he says.

  “Those are pretty big feet you’ve got there,” I mumble around my Pops.

  He peeks into my bowl. “Still three colors to go, I see.”

  I do a big swallow. “Still bigfoot, I see.” He points his toe and poses just like a shoe model, which makes me giggle. “You look like a scuba diver in that outfit,” I say.

  “It’s not an outfit. It’s gear.”

  “Then what’s with the neon stripes?”

  “They’re so cars can see me at night.”

  “You don’t run at night.”

  “Duh. It’s dark then.” He grabs a banana from the fruit bowl and starts to peel it. “You gonna show me your project today?”

  And that’s when Rainbow Pops go flying right at his face.

  “Hey!” Dad says.

  I gasp. I look down at my empty spoon.

  “What’d you do that for?”

  He grabs the towel from me and jerks it across his face.

  “It was an accident,” I say.

  “You accidentally threw cereal at me?”

  “I didn’t mean to! My arms are still waking up.”

  He puts his hands on his hips.

  I slump in my chair. “Fine, then I’m just clumsy, okay?”

  He tosses the towel onto the table. “Nobody’s that clumsy,” he grumbles.

  I push my bowl away. “Nobody but me.”

  Dad squints at me. His eyes get a little softer. “What’s up with you today?” He doesn’t sound mad anymore.

  But I don’t know how to answer. My arms do things I don’t tell them to. The cereal makes my stomach feel worse, almost like—

  That’s when it hits me. I must be getting sick. But that’s not fair! I can’t get sick on a Saturday! Why couldn’t I have gotten sick yesterday, when we had our spelling test and they served fish burgers for lunch?

  I rub my eyes. My head is starting to spin, and my skin feels scratchy. I peel off my hoodie and drop it on the floor. Maybe I just need to lie down. I slide out of my chair, but the couch seems so far away, and I’m too dizzy to make it. I sink down onto the kitchen floor.

  “Hey,” Dad says, coming around the table. “Are you okay?” He crouches next to me.

  I’m not okay. Not at all. My stomach is worse than ever, and now the room is going around and around. I curl up into a ball.

  “Let’s get you back to bed,” Dad says.

  He starts to scoop me up, but I moan and pull away. I don’t want anything to touch me. My skin is stinging, and my stomach gives the biggest lurch of all.

  “Meena?”

  His voice sounds far away and hollow, like he’s talking through a pipe. I can smell his toast burning. I squeeze my eyes shut until all I see is the darkness behind my lids. . . .

  5

  Meena?”

  I open my eyes. Mom is leaning over me, her body outlined in a ring of bright light. The burnt-toast smell is gone. Now it smells like those Band-Aids with the medicine already inside.

  Where am I?

  I’m in a bed with rails. I start to sit up, but the room sways like a teeter-totter. I lie back down and feel something catch on my finger.

  I gasp and jerk away. “It’s okay,” Mom says, rubbing my arm. “She’s just taking your pulse.” Mom guides my hand over to a lady who fastens a clip to the tip of my finger. It looks like the clothespins we use at school, except there’s a teeny light at the end and a cord coming out the side.

  A machine next to the bed starts beeping, and I jump. “That’s just your heartbeat,” Mom says, squeezing my hand. The number “91” lights up on a display. I slump against the pillow. Mom starts to stroke my hair, but it makes my head hurt. I moan and turn away.

  Dad is here too, on the other side of the bed. “What’s the story, morning glory?” he says, leaning in close to me. Didn’t he already say that? He’s wearing his running clothes, which is weird, because he’s not allowed to wear those outside the house unless he is actually running. Which reminds me . . .

  He was getting ready to go for a run.

  I was getting ready to work on my box.

  How did we end up here?

  There’s no color at all in this place. Everything is white and beige. My eyes dart around the room. There’s a hard floor and a sink and some cabinets and a curtain hanging from the ceiling that looks like it could whoosh around with just a little tug and close me up in a white cocoon. My heart starts to rattle around in my chest.

  But just then Dad holds up something in front of my face that fills me with color. “Do you remember this guy?” he says.

  I squint until the colors take shape in Dad’s hand. It’s a stuffed zebra with rainbow stripes. I’ve never seen him before, but right away I know his name should be Raymond. “Where did he come from?” I ask. My voice sounds scratchy, like I haven’t been using it.

  “They gave him to you in the ambulance,” Dad says.

  My stomach tightens like a wad of crumpled paper. “What ambulance?”

  “The one that drove you here.”

  Is this a hospital? Is that where I am? I don’t realize my heart is beating faster until the beeps coming from the machine speed up. “What happened?” I ask.

  “You had a seizure, honey,” Mom says.

  A seizure. I don’t know that word. It sounds like “sea” and “treasure” mixed together: SEA-sure. But my head is still full of static, and my stomach is shriveling up, and it’s hard to think. “What’s that?” I ask.

  “It’s something that happens in your brain,” the lady next to Mom says.

  My breath gets caught in my throat. “My brain?”

  The lady rolls a little stool over to the bed and sits so her face is just over the top of the rails. She has on one of those shirts that nurses wear. It’s blue with alligators swimming in all different directions. “You know what your brain does, don’t you?” she asks.

  My heart is beating in my ears, and the machine is beeping fast. I’m so scared, I can’t even think about what my brain does. My teeth start to chatter. I clamp them together and take a big breath. I remember now. “It’s in charge of your body,” I say to her.

  She nods. “That’s right.” Her eyes are brown and marbled, like tree bark. “Your brain is kind of like the president of the body. It gives all the orders and makes sure everything else is doing its job.”

  I nod. Her explanation makes me think of my portrait of President Meena. I imagine her sitting at a big desk inside my head. She has rainbow hair and not even one purple scribble on her face, and she’s calling into a megaphone: Heart! Keep up that beating. Lungs! Don’t forget to breathe. Everybody come on up here later for cake.

  “That’s what your brain is supposed to do,” the nurse is saying. “But during a seizure, your brain goes off track. It stops sending messages that make sense and just sends random impulses instead. It sort of sparks. Like fireworks.”

  I blink at her a few times. “You mean my head lit up?”

  “No, sweetheart,” Mom says. “But you couldn’t talk, and you couldn’t hear us, and your body started shaking.”

  “I was shaking?” I ask.

  “Not for very long,” Dad says.

  I start twisting up the edge of the sheet. “Then why don’t I remember it?”

  “Most people don’t,” the nurse says.

  “Were you guys shaking too?”

  Mom and Dad look at each other. “No, honey,” Mom says.

  “What about Rosie?” I look around, then sit up with a jolt. “What happened to Rosie? Where is she?” The beeps speed up again.

  “She’s fine,” Mom says, easing me back down. “I took her to Eli’s.”

  Just then something starts squeezing my arm. I whip my head around and see a band on my arm getting tighter and tighter.

  Dad lays a hand on my head. “That’s just taking your blood pressure.”

  But it�
�s clamping down hard. “It’s crushing me,” I say, wriggling against it. I swat and claw at it with my other hand, and I’m just about to yell “stop” when it loosens up. For a long minute I hold my breath while the machine next to the bed hums and ticks. Finally, the band makes a sighing sound and lets go.

  “One twenty over sixty,” the nurse says. “That’s actually not bad, considering.”

  I slump back onto the bed. My head is pounding too much to wonder what those numbers mean. It feels like President Meena is inside my skull, hammering to get out. It reminds me of those fireworks that boom so loud, you have to cover your ears—the ones that create a puff of smoke instead of something beautiful.

  I hate that kind.

  “So, she hasn’t had a fever?” I hear the nurse say.

  “She’s been fine,” Mom replies.

  “Any blows to the head? Did you get hit by a kickball yesterday, Meena? Maybe knock your head on the monkey bars?”

  I shake my head no.

  “Do you remember what you did at recess?”

  I can hardly think through the pounding. But then I get a flash, remembering the back of Eli’s jacket. I was reaching for it. We were running. “I played tag,” I say.

  “Any toxins she might have been exposed to?” the nurse asks Mom and Dad. “Lead paint? Pest-control products?”

  “No, nothing,” Mom says.

  “Fish burgers,” I mumble. Everyone turns to look at me. “We had fish burgers for lunch.”

  Dad gives me a little punch in the arm. “You packed your own lunch yesterday.”

  “Yeah, but I bet just the smell is toxic.”

  The nurse grins while she clicks on a computer. “How about video games? Do you play anything with a lot of flashing lights?”

  Mom is shaking her head. “All she did yesterday was work on an art project.”

  That’s when I remember something. “The ice,” I say.

  The nurse looks up.

  “When I was walking home with my cousin Eli,” I tell her. “The sun was shining on the ice. It was all bright and dazzling. It made me so dizzy, I had to look away.” The nurse nods slowly at me. She types something into the computer. “Does that mean anything?” I ask.

  “We’ll see.” She closes her computer and stands. “We’re just putting down everything we can think of right now, okay? I’m glad you told us about the ice.”

  Just then I feel a big wave of I’m-gonna-be-sick. I roll onto my side and hug my stomach. “I don’t feel good,” I say, sucking in as much air as I can.

  “We can give you something for that,” the nurse says, “but we need to check a few things first. Do you think you can hold on a little bit longer?”

  I squeeze my eyes shut and nod.

  “Good. We’ll get you through just as quick as we can. The doctor ordered a CT scan,” she says, turning to Mom again, “and we’ll need to draw some blood to check her insulin levels.” The nurse unhooks the clip from my finger. The machine next to me stops beeping. “Right now we’re going for a little ride, Meena.” She gets behind the bed and starts pushing.

  I grab hold of the rails. I didn’t know this thing was on wheels! “Hang on,” I say, reaching for Mom. “You’re coming with me, aren’t you?”

  Mom gives the nurse a worried look.

  “She’ll be right outside,” the nurse says to me. “The scan won’t take long. Can you be a trooper for us?”

  I swallow.

  Mom gives my hand a hard squeeze. Then she pulls it up to her lips, kisses it, and lets me go. She brushes the hair off my forehead. “You can do it, kiddo,” she says, blinking fast. “You’ve got this.” She smoothes down the front of my pajama shirt.

  The nurse starts wheeling the bed toward the white hallway. The front of my shirt goes cold.

  “Wait!” I say. “Where’s my hoodie?” I look all over the room, but I don’t see it anywhere. I start gasping for air.

  “I think it’s at home,” Dad says.

  “Can you get it? I need it!”

  “Meena, we’re twenty minutes away. You’ll be done before you know it.”

  I can’t go rolling off into all that white without something! “What about Raymond?” I say, thinking fast. “Can he come?”

  Nobody says anything at first. They all just look at me. Then finally Dad leans in closer. “Sorry, who?”

  I grab the rainbow-striped zebra out of his hands and clutch him against my chest. “Raymond.” I turn to the nurse. “I’m bringing him.”

  She smiles. “You got it.”

  I press Raymond right up to my face. I take a deep, shaky breath that goes all the way through to his stuffing. I suck in all the color I can from his rainbow stripes. Then I lie back down as the nurse starts pushing the bed toward the door.

  I hold tight to Raymond and watch the ceiling tiles pass by while she wheels us out of the room.

  6

  We get home from the hospital in time for lunch. There are muddy footprints on the kitchen floor. There are dirty tracks where it looks like something was wheeled through. There’s a bowl of gray mush on the table that used to be Rainbow Pops. Mom starts cleaning up right away, like she wants to erase what happened.

  That would be fine by me.

  My hoodie is thrown over a chair. I set Raymond down long enough to pull the sweatshirt on, then I tuck him under my arm while I get a pair of scissors. I wedge the point under the plastic bracelet they put on me at the hospital. I really have to work the scissors, making one little notch at a time until finally I cut the whole thing clean off.

  It was much easier cutting off the bracelet Sofía made me. I thought that thing would last forever. But it turns out rubber bands disintegrate after a while, even if you remember not to chew on them when you practice your handwriting. Maybe that’s what happened to the one I made her. Maybe that’s why she stopped wearing it after our fight.

  Or maybe not.

  “We should get you some lunch,” Dad says, coming up behind me and easing the scissors out of my hand. “What do you want?”

  I slump into the chair and put my head on the table. “Nothing.” My stomach is finally better, but even with my hoodie on, I feel drab and wilted, like all the colors have been wrung right out of me. I squeeze Raymond.

  “How about mac and cheese?” Dad asks.

  I shrug.

  “How about green mac and cheese?”

  My head shoots back up. Mac and cheese is okay. But add a few drops of blue food coloring, and whamo—it looks like a pot of slugs! “You’d really make that for me?” I ask.

  “Sure, why not? You’re supposed to eat the rainbow, right?”

  “You’re supposed to eat spinach,” Mom says, dumping the gray mush into the sink. “And tomatoes and squash—”

  “—and jelly beans and sprinkles and green mac and cheese!” I say.

  She sighs and gives me a tired smile. “In moderation.”

  “We should all have some!”

  “Not on your life,” she says. “Why don’t you go lie down for a bit?”

  I groan.

  “Maybe you could watch something until lunch is ready.”

  I stare at her. Green mac and cheese and screen time? They didn’t even make me do my homework first! I wonder if I could get anything else out of this little situation here. “Any chance we could have cream soda with lunch?” I ask.

  Mom raises an eyebrow at me. I bat my eyelashes at her until she smirks. “Just this once,” she says.

  I hop up and start to run for the living room. Only just in time, I think maybe I should take it a little slower, in case they’re watching. As soon as I’m out of sight, I bounce onto the couch.

  I don’t know what to watch first! There’s this show where monster trucks drive over and flatten cars, or videos of a guy who pumps electricity through his body until his hair starts to smoke. There’s even an eat-or-be-eaten series where Eli always roots for the gazelles and I cheer for the lions. I’ve just made up my mind and settled
under the blanket with Raymond when Rosie runs in, dragging Pink Pony by the mane.

  “Meena!” she yells. She’s still wearing her nightgown, and her hair is springing out every which way.

  “Hey, squirt,” I say.

  Rosie runs over and slams me with a hug. I hug her back, but she doesn’t let go. She just hangs from my neck for so long that I have to tap her on the shoulder. “It’s getting kinda hard to breathe here,” I say.

  She finally sets me free. But then she drops Pink Pony, puts her hands on my cheeks, and looks at me with big eyes. “You rode in an ambulance,” she says.

  She’s so serious, but I can’t help it, I smile. The way she says “am-blee-ance” is kind of cute. “I know,” I say.

  “Was it scary?”

  “Nah.” She looks so impressed that I forget to mention that I don’t remember the ride.

  “It was for me,” she says.

  Rosie climbs onto the couch and slides under the blanket to sit right next to me. She leans her head on my shoulder, holds on to Pink Pony by the tail, and starts sucking her fingers.

  Until this moment I hadn’t thought about what Rosie saw. It’s weird that she remembers something I don’t. I mean, it happened to me. Only, I guess it happened to her, too. Were there sirens? Did they wake her up? Did she come downstairs and see me on the kitchen floor, shaking and not responding to anything? Did she watch whoever made those muddy footprints when they came and took me away? I want to ask her, but by the way she’s sucking on her fingers like she does after she’s has a bad dream, I’m not sure I want to know.

  I wonder how I’d feel if an ambulance drove away with her.

  I was going to watch my monster truck show. I was all set for those big, noisy trucks stampeding over one another in the mud.

  But now it feels like something is nibbling at my stomach, and I don’t want to watch anything big or exciting or loud.

  So I put on Rosie’s favorite show instead. I cuddle against her with Raymond, pull the blanket up to my chin, and stare at the screen while cartoon dragons count pieces of pie.

  • • •

  My stomach still has that gnawing feeling when Dad calls us for lunch. But when I see how slimy the green slugs look today, it starts to growl a little. There’s fruit salad with all the other colors in it too. I dig right in and load my plate with strawberries and pineapple and orange slices and grapes. The fruit explodes into juicy deliciousness in my mouth, and I wash it down with a cup of cream soda that fizzes in my face when I swallow.