Elvis and the Underdogs

by Jenny Lee

  Here’s something you need to know about my dad. He works a lot. So I rarely see him in the daylight hours, because he leaves before I wake up and gets home after dark. I Skype with him a lot, so I see him, see him plenty, but I don’t actually see him in person all that much.

  You know that expression where they say he’s as smart as a rocket scientist? Well, when they say that about my dad, they mean it, because he’s actually a rocket scientist. But it’s not like he builds rockets, which is what I used to brag about in the sandbox when I was younger. No, he works at the place where they build the rockets, and he works specifically in a lab where they make the fuel. As far as I can tell, it’s one of those jobs that sound cooler than they really are, because every time my dad talks about work over dinner, my mom makes her famous fish face, where she sucks in her cheeks and bats her eyelashes, which she says are her gills, meaning she’s trying to swim away as fast as her fish face will take her from his boring work stories.

  “Why is Dad coming? Am I dying?”

  “Of course not! Don’t you say that. How dare you say that? I’m taking away your jar of cherries for saying that.”

  “Mom, please tell me, why is Dad coming?”

  I know that normally when a kid lands in the hospital, the dad drops everything and rushes over, but now that I’m in the triple digits when it comes to hospital visits, he just gets updates by text from my mom.

  “What do you mean why? Because he’s your dad and he loves you. That’s why.”

  “Wait, where’s my titanium lug nut? Have you seen it? Where are my regular clothes?”

  “Benji, your clothes are in the trunk of my car and need to be washed.”

  My mom thinks I should leave my lug nut at home and not carry it around with me, because she’s afraid I’ll lose it. But it’s been over five years since I got it, and I still haven’t lost it . . . yet.

  Before I could ask her to go to the car and look for it, Dino walked in. Now, let me tell you about Dino. He’s crazy tall, like six feet seven inches tall, like professional basketball tall. He has to special order his shoes and jeans on the internet. When my mom takes a picture of the two of us on my discharge day, she has to back all the way down to the end of the hallway just to get us both in the picture. He keeps telling her he’ll buy her a panoramic digital camera when he wins the lottery so she won’t have that problem anymore. My mom is a crazy scrapbooker. She wants to remember everything, good and bad, because it’s the bad that makes the good so good. She pretty much has my entire life recorded in crazy detail. I know lots of moms keep the first tooth their kid ever lost, or even a little locket of hair after their first haircut. Well, my mom kept all my baby teeth (gross, I know). She took a Polaroid of each of them and put the picture under my pillow for the tooth fairy. She has the thread from the first time I got stitches, pressed on a page like it’s a flower. Enough said, right? She says I’ll be happy to have all this stuff when I’m older. I know she’s wrong, but I always agree with her, because she’s usually holding a hot-glue gun. Let me give you some life advice: you should always agree with someone when they are holding a hot-glue gun. Once my mom hot-glued one of the twins’ basketballs to the floor because she kept telling him not to dribble it in the house and he kept doing it anyway.

  “Hey, hey, hey, little man,” said Dino, waving his hole puncher in the air. “I heard you were back!”

  “One more visit and then you owe me a cool prize,” I said, handing him my punch card.

  Dino nodded and said, “You know it, little man.” He held up his massive fist, and we did a fist bump. Then he hightailed it out of there. He’s no fool. He took one look at my mother’s crazy eyes, made up an excuse, and left. He already has his own big loud mom in his life to deal with, so I didn’t blame him for not wanting to deal with a second one. We actually bonded over our crazy moms. One night when I couldn’t sleep, I snuck out of my room, past my own sleeping mom, and found him in the patient lounge watching soccer. We competed in the “My mom is crazier than your mom” game for an hour. Then we heard a bloodcurdling scream, which woke up half the floor. “Ahhhhhhhhhhh! Call the poooooliiiice! Someone stole my baaaaabyyyyy!” Yep. You guessed. The screamer? My mom. The baby? Me. Word around the hospital corridors was that the psychiatric patients heard her all the way on the top floor and freaked out. I didn’t move at all. I just shook my head. “Great. I’m never gonna hear the end of this one.” Dino took one look at my face and said, “You win this round, little man.”

  Okay, so now we’re all caught up. You know all the major players: me, my mom, Dino, and my dad, who had just arrived at the hospital.

  As loud as my mom is, my dad is quiet, except for when he laughs. But today he wasn’t laughing. He looked worried, which made me worried. My mom noticed this and smacked him on the arm to make him stop. Before he could respond, the twins stormed in. Here’s the best way to describe my older twin brothers. They’re absolutely everything I am not. They are tall, they are good-looking, they are strong, and they are popular. They are what you would call super winners in the game of life.

  Oh, here’s the other thing you need to know about them: Where I’m mouthy and have an exceptionally large vocabulary for my age, they’re quiet, and when they do talk, they pretty much use one-syllable words. Their names are Brett and Brick, though I secretly gave them the nicknames Grunty and Mumbles. They have not so secretly given me all sorts of different nicknames throughout the years: Baby B, B-Baby, BenjiWenji, Bundt (as in the cake), Bunt (as in the baseball term), Butt as in well, your butt, and every single variation of butt-something you can ever hope to dream of: Butt-Head, Butt-Face, Butt-Dog, Butt-Ball, Butt-Cream, Butt-Brother, Butt-Bread, Butt-Rump. You name it, they’ve put the word “butt” in front of it. I’m pretty sure it’s just a big-brother thing, though they’re careful not to let Mom catch them calling me butt-anything, because she overheard them once and they both got in trouble.

  Tonight’s greeting was much more subdued than normal, and I assumed it was because Mom already warned Dad, who warned them to go easy on me. So Brett just held up his right hand and said, “Hey Baby-B boy! Put it up top!”

  Usually when he does this, and I try to put it up top, he sucker punches me in my side or even tickles me under my arm. But not tonight. Tonight he just let me, and he even went so far as to comment on it. “Whoa, easy there, tiger cub, I’m going to need my hand tomorrow for basketball practice.” As sweet and brotherly as this exchange was, it made me nervous. What exactly had Mom told Dad to tell the twins? “Be nice, because this may be the last time you ever see him”?

  But before I went too far down that road to the intersection of Doom Street and Gloom Avenue, Brick showed up and dive-bombed me in bed. “Yo, what’s up, Rump Roast? How ’bout a side of noogie potatoes for dinner?” Just before he gave me one of his famous noogies, my mom pulled him off me by his ear.

  “Brick! I told you not to call him that!”

  “No, you said I couldn’t call him Butt-Roast. Rump roast is like pot roast, right, bro?”

  Brett nodded. “Yeah, Mom, I think the referee would definitely call it on Brick’s side.”

  “Both of you stop it right now, or your two rumps will get roasted, do you understand me?” She said this in her you-better-think-long-and-hard-about-what-you-say-now-or-else-who-knows-what-could-happen voice.

  The twins knew this voice well, and they fell in line immediately. Together and in stereo they said, “Sorry, Mom.”

  “This is a hospital—it’s not feeding time at the zoo.” My mom’s tone was still sharp. Usually when they did their “yes, Mom, sorry, Mom” routine with their big puppy-dog eyes, Mom immediately softened.

  I couldn’t take the tension anymore. “Mom, it’s okay. Why are you being so serious? I’m fine. Right?”

  Before she could respond, Dr. Helen walked in.

  “What’s everyone looking so serious about?” she asked, but none of us responded. “Benji’s fine.”

  We
all smiled. Brick reached out his hand again, but my mom slapped it away.

  “But . . .,” Dr. Helen continued.

  We tensed up again. And then Dr. Helen told us she was going to need to run a series of brain tests to see if she could understand what exactly had happened to me at school. The first test was a big one. They were going to do an EEG of my brain.

  “While it’s still in my head, right?”

  Everyone laughed when I asked the question, but I figured it didn’t hurt to be sure.

  Dr. Helen explained it was a test where they attach wires to your head and get a printout of your brain waves like in a lie detector.

  “Oh, it’s kinda Frankenstein-y?”

  Dr. Helen laughed this time. “I’ve never thought about it like that, but sure, I guess it is.”

  2

  The way I see it, my life is now divided into two sections. Before the brain tests, which is everything you just read about, and after the brain tests, which is what I’m going to tell you about now.

  My EEG was totally normal. My PET scan (which checked out my brain cells) was totally normal, and I guess it’s always third time’s the charm, because it was my MRI that came back almost perfect, but not quite. Dr. Helen showed my parents and me the digital images of my brain that the MRI had captured. She said that the MRI was the most detailed of all the tests.

  “Which one was the MRI again? The one where you had to shave my head, the one with all the colors, or the one where I went into the giant bread machine?”

  “Bread machine.” Anyway, on that scan Dr. Helen said she’d found a tiny spot, which could be a lesion or could be nothing at all.

  At the mention of the word “lesion,” my mom starting breathing a little heavy, but Dr. Helen nipped her worries right in the bud. “I’m telling you right now that all those terrible things you’re thinking are not true. So don’t go there.” My mom nodded. She completely believed in Dr. Helen, and so did I. She said for now, there was no way to tell if it was that tiny little spot that caused my episode, but it might have. She said seizures were far more common than we realize, and that most children who have seizures in their youth outgrow them as they get older.

  “So I’m going to have another one?”

  Dr. Helen shook her head. “Benji, we don’t know that for sure. But for now, since the tests were inconclusive, we have to label it as idiopathic epilepsy.”

  “What’s idiotic epilepsy?”

  “It’s idiopathic epilepsy, which means epilepsy of an unknown origin.”

  “But I faint all the time. Why is this any different?”

  “Benji, hush, let Dr. Helen talk. So are you saying Benji has epilepsy? That sounds serious. Is this why he faints a lot?”

  “No, I’m not saying that at all. But what happened at school wasn’t a fainting spell. Benji had a major seizure, and that’s much more serious. Now, what I’m most concerned about in Benji’s case is that during his seizure, he hit his head on the floor hard enough to get a mild concussion.”

  “Well,” I joked, “if it happens again, I’ll get my tenth punch in my hospital punch card. And I’ll get a prize!”

  “Benji, you were very lucky to be at school when it happened, so you were able to get immediate attention. But what if it happens again and you aren’t at school, or at home with your mom? What if it happens when you’re crossing the street, or at the mall, or swimming, or at home alone?”

  “Well, if it happened somewhere else, I guess I’d fall down. But if I was swimming, I’d . . .” Then I stopped talking. I understood what she was trying to tell us. My mom got her point too, because she started doing that short, quick breathing she does when she starts getting upset, and she also pulled me into her arms and squeezed me, hard.

  “So,” my dad asked Dr. Helen, “what should we do?”

  “Well, normally in such cases, we’d put Benji on an antiseizure medication just for a while, so we could make sure it didn’t happen again. But Benji isn’t a good candidate for the standard drug therapies, mainly because his asthma medication may cause an adverse reaction.”

  And this is the exact moment my life changed forever: Dr. Helen opened a box and pulled out a green helmet.

  “What the heck is that?” I shouted. My mom shushed me and told me to listen to Dr. Helen.

  “Benji, this is a padded safety helmet, which will protect your head if it happens again. It also contains a transmitter that signals for help if the need arises. I’m going to ask you to wear it for a while.”

  “You mean like now?”

  “Yes, but I’m going to want you to keep wearing it.”

  “You mean for the rest of the time I’m in the hospital?”

  “Yes, and then I’m going to want you to keep wearing it after that.”

  “You mean you want me to wear it, like, all the time?” I could barely breathe. “No way. Not a chance. Never, ever, ever gonna happen. And just in case I’m not being clear: No. Thank. You.”

  Even if you’d been there, you wouldn’t have believed this thing. It looked like the world’s ugliest bicycle helmet, only much, much worse. It covered my whole forehead and the entire back of my head too. Plus it was made of ugly green foam, and it had ugly green straps that buckled under my chin. Basically, it was a disaster. It was way worse than that new kid pulling his laptop bag through the halls on wheels. Billy Thompson would drop that kid like a hot potato and set his sights right back on me. I doubted I’d even make it through a whole day alive, and what’s worse, I was sure more kids would make fun of me too. There would be no more flying under the radar with this thing.

  “Mom, I am not wearing that thing. No way. Please don’t make me.”

  For the first time in a long time, my mom was speechless. So Dr. Helen continued.

  “Benji, I know it doesn’t look great, but it will protect your head in case you have another episode. And that’s really the most important thing here.”

  “I don’t care if I have another episode. I’m not wearing that thing. Not today. Not ever. Mom, you can’t make me wear it. I won’t wear it. And you know why this is happening, don’t you? It’s because I lost my lug nut.”

  Dr. Helen looked confused. “Your what?”

  “Benji, this has nothing to do with the lug nut.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Benji, it’ll turn up. I haven’t had a chance to look for it since you’ve been in the hospital. It could be in the car somewhere.” She looked at Dr. Helen and explained, “It’s his lucky charm.”

  “I had it right before I had my episode at school, and now I don’t know where it is. It probably got swept up by the janitor, and now my entire life is going down the toilet.”

  “Stop worrying about it—your dad will get you another one, won’t you, honey?”

  “Well, it’s not that simple, because like I said, it was made specifically for that particular rocket and they’re not—”

  My mom interrupted him. “Everyone stop talking about the lug nut; I don’t care about the lug nut. What I do care about is finishing our conversation with Dr. Helen, because I’m sure she’s very busy saving lives, and I don’t want to take up too much of her time. So, Dr. Helen, do you really think this is necessary? I mean, normally anything you say we would do, but Benji does have a point. It’s pretty unattractive.”

  “There is one other option, but I’m not sure . . .,” Dr. Helen said.

  “What is it? Just tell me!” I almost got down on my knees. I was that desperate.

  “There are specially trained therapy dogs that could—”

  Before Dr. Helen could even finish her thought, my mom cut her off. “Absolutely not. Benji is allergic to dogs, and I have white carpet in the living room.”

  “Mom, please. Let Dr. Helen finish.”

  Dr. Helen told us therapy dogs are used for people with epilepsy or other brain disorders. The dogs know when an episode is about to come on, and they know exactly how to get the person to safety, and to also call
for help. She said the dogs are expensive, but she was pretty sure she could make a few calls and help us find one if we were interested.

  “Oh, we’re interested. Definitely interested. Call right now. Mom, let Dr. Helen use your phone,” I said.

  “Benji, it’s out of the question. You’re allergic to dogs, and I doubt we could afford one.”

  “You’ll never ever have to give me an allowance for the rest of my life. I won’t go to college. You can use that money for the dog. And I’ll get allergy shots. I don’t mind. They have those, right, Dr. Helen?”

  “You hate shots, Benji. No.”

  “I’ll learn to love them, Mom. Please, Mom? Pretty please?”

  “I’m sorry, Benji. No.”

  “Mom, if you don’t let me do this, you’ll ruin my entire life. Show a little mercy. Please.”

  “It’s true that Benji is allergic to dogs, but there are great allergy shots that he could take, and I’m sure he could then tolerate having a dog around,” Dr. Helen said.

  “See, Mom, I was right. Please, please, please.”

  “So those are our only two options? The world’s ugliest helmet or a dog? What if we just bubble-wrapped him?” my dad said.

  Normally I’d laugh at this, because the idea of my mom and dad bubble-wrapping me every morning was pretty funny, but I didn’t even crack a smile.

  “Dad, stop joking around. This is serious. Like life-and-death serious, and by life-and-death serious, I’m talking about my life and my death.”

  Dr. Helen told me I should at least try the helmet on, because perhaps it wasn’t as bad as it looked. I was about to say no, but I knew that being difficult was no way to get my parents to stay agreeable. The plan was to make them understand how horrible it was, and then they’d do the right thing. After Dr. Helen strapped the helmet on to my head, I could tell right away by the expression on all their faces that it was not only as bad as I thought it was, it was actually worse.