by Lee Davidson
“It wasn’t a breakup, it was cancer,” Tate growls, as if her clarification will wipe the look off Ms. Doc’s face. Instead, the pitying expression deepens.
“And our son just died.” Mr. Jacoby barely gets the words out, rubbing Tate’s arm and blinking tears away. “It’s been a rough few months.”
Ms. Doc nods as if she could possibly understand. “I’m sorry.” She takes the rest of Tate’s vitals in silence.
“You’re stable, but you’ve lost a lot of blood,” she says to Tate when she’s finished. Then she directs her attention to Mr. Jacoby. “I would like to discuss treatment options and admit Tate overnight for monitoring.”
Tate expels an over-the-top sigh.
Mr. Jacoby ignores his daughter’s nonverbal response. “My wife will be here soon. I’m sure she’ll have some questions.”
Ms. Doc nods. “I’ll come back in a few minutes.”
“We have a younger son. If you wouldn’t mention anything in front of him, that would be appreciated.”
“Certainly,” Ms. Doc agrees before leaving the room.
Tate runs her tongue over her top lip, but her colorless lip remains dull and cracked. “I’m not taking their drugs.”
“We’ll talk about it later.” I’m guessing this subject has already been exhausted. Her dad wraps his arm tighter around her. “We can’t lose you too, baby.”
I have to turn away when Tate starts crying, and my eyes squeeze closed even tighter when her sobs ramp up.
“It hurts so bad, Dad. It won’t stop hurting. Elliott was the only one who understood,” her voice muffles. “I can feel Grant around me sometimes. It’s like he’s still here.”
I spin around, unable to hear what her dad’s saying because I’m shouting, “I’m here, Tate! I’m here!”
Her high-pitched shriek cuts us both off. She covers her ears, screaming and hurling herself under the bed, bringing the IV tree down with her and almost ripping the tubes from her arm. Two nurses fly through me and try to calm her down.
The overwhelming truth has my hands shaking even more than the rest of my body. Jonathan was right. My being here isn’t helping Tate.
It’s making her worse.
The sun is still bright when I get back to Ryder’s.
“Why are you being like this?” Hannah asks.
Even with his back to me, Ryder’s defensive stance beside the fridge screams that something’s wrong. My eyes jump from the wet stain on the yellow wall to the broken glass on the floor.
“Just get out!” he yells, seemingly at the countertop.
“I know you’re upset…” Hannah trails off and wraps herself around the back of him. “Just talk to me.”
He twists out of her grasp and she stumbles backward, looking wounded.
“I said, get out! And take that with you.” Ryder directs his dirtiest look at a pamphlet on the kitchen table. “Grieving” is the only word I see on the paper cover before Hannah snatches the pamphlet and slams the door behind her.
Ryder belts out a frustrated groan. I block him before he opens up on the drywall like before; then I focus my energy again. “Haze,” I order, projecting my thoughts for him to go after Hannah. When I break the connection, he grabs his keys.
I consider blocking him yet again so he’ll slow down the car, but I don’t. The faster he fixes this, the faster I can get back to Tate.
In Hannah’s driveway he slams the breaks, barely missing the back bumper of her compact red car. He rolls his window down. “Get in!” he yells to Hannah, who’s on the sidewalk digging through her purse.
Really, Ryder? No girl in her right mind would respond to that.
They stare at each other for a full minute before she stalks around his car and yanks the passenger door open. My jaw snaps closed, and I jump awkwardly into the backseat before she sits on me.
Ryder’s tires squeal down the street while they both petulantly look straight ahead. He stops at a dead end and turns off the car. I finally get the nonsense expression my mom used about silence being deafening. I drum my fingers on the vinyl seat as the minutes tick by.
Ryder breaks first. “I’m sorry.”
Hannah drops her head. “I just thought it would help. You’ve been so distant lately.”
He has? I stare through the window at the now overcast sky, promising to pay closer attention…as long as he picks up his snail-like pace, that is.
“A self-help book isn’t going to do me any good.”
“It might,” Hannah says, hopeful.
“Unless it can bring my dad back, it won’t,” Ryder says firmly, and I can see the corners of his eyes begin to fill with tears. I decide against blocking him, with the goal that his emotional state will soften Hannah, or at least make her more tolerant of his foul mood.
They sit in silence for a while until Ryder finally talks. “I just need more time.”
“I’m sorry. I was only trying to help.”
“You’ve got to let me handle this in my own way.”
When she doesn’t respond, he grabs her hand and kisses it. “I am sorry,” he whispers.
When Hannah plants her mouth on his to accept his apology, I hurl myself out of the car and hang out on a stump in the snow-covered field. I’m so jealous I could scream! They’re making out like wild animals while I’m stuck being dead. Meanwhile, my fiancée has added self-mutilation to her list of hobbies.
The happy couple comes up for air an hour later. Instead of riding in the backseat, I fly behind the car to clear my head. Not in the least bit breathless from the flight, I kick the toe of my boot against the curb while Ryder walks Hannah to her door. They say goodnight with their tongues because, apparently, they haven’t gotten enough of each other yet.
Back at Ryder’s, I take my chances and leave him unprotected for the handful of minutes before break. I go straight to the hospital, where Liam sits rigid and pale in the chair beside Tate’s bed. Amidst the tubes and wires, Tate sleeps. The low murmurs of her parents talking with someone in the hallway compete with the beeping machine beside Tate’s bed.
In a blur, Liam’s across the room with his back pressed against the wall. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know—”
“Shut up.” I keep my eyes on Tate because I can’t stomach looking at him. Every cell in my body wants to lay into him for being a failure.
Liam clears his throat and then says, in almost a whisper, “She’s getting worse.”
My jaw tightens and I fight to keep my voice level. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Nothing.”
I force my eyes off Tate. “No, not nothing! What?”
Liam’s chest muscles become defined under his thin shirt as he pushes himself harder against the wall. “You shouldn’t be here. Your presence…this isn’t the way things work around here.”
Even through my anger, his worried expression makes me feel uneasy, like his reasoning goes beyond my breaking the rules. My presence is making her worse. Is that what he was going to say?
My calimeter buzzes, and the hospital room becomes so silent that it feels like it was screaming five seconds ago. Liam apologizes again and displaces, leaving Tate and I alone in the quiet, dark room. I brush my lips against hers, but her lack of breath makes me anxious.
“I love you,” I whisper, trying to ignore the smell of blood and antiseptic. Frozen, Tate appears so peaceful. Certainly me being here couldn’t have attributed to her suicide attempt. Could it?
I consider coding during break when I displace back to my room, but my mind is too jacked up. I couldn’t relax if I tried. Instead, I make coffee and spend the time on the sofa, staring at the shelves of picture frames and thinking about Tate. If she wasn’t as frozen as Ryder right now, I could be with her. I hate the Schedulers for what they have done to her and her family.
When my calimeter finally buzzes, my mind is made up. Ryder was doing homework when I left him before break, so I should have at least an hour of him being preoccupied.
The hospital is further away than Tate’s house, but by air I cover the distance in mere minutes. I ignore Liam when he moves to the far side of the stale room and I sit beside Tate on the mechanical bed. She’s so thin that I almost have the whole uncomfortable thing to myself. I adjust my position so Tate’s body is curled toward my chest and I watch as she scribbles on a music sheet.
Liam proves hard to ignore as he goes from pacing, to pulling at his hair, and then back to pacing. He stops mid-stride and shocks me by yelling, “Get out of here!”
I stare dumbly back at him. Does he seriously have the nerve to yell at me?
“Don’t you realize how much trouble we could be in for this?” he says angrily. “Her book—” he begins, but then he stops himself and the worry on his face scares me.
Before I can respond, Tate chucks her pencil across the room, destroys the music sheet, and sits up so fast the tubes almost rip from her frail arms. She reaches for her purse on the bedside table and digs until she finds what she’s looking for. Using the compact mirror, she ruins both eyes with more black makeup. She should have at least wiped off the remnants of the last layer. The black smudges under her eyes—upside down triangles—make her look like the most depressed circus clown in the world. After she returns the mirror and makeup to her purse, she digs for something else and pulls it out. What’s she doing carrying that around?
“What’s that?” Liam asks tensely.
“I bought that for her at the Arch. Just before my treatments made me too sick to leave the house,” I say, more to myself, watching her turn the object over in her hands.
“Does she make a habit of carrying around snow globes?” Liam asks, which is a good question.
Tate holds the globe in front of her face, and the silver glitter swirls through the water around the tiny replica of the Saint Louis Arch. She juggles the globe in her left hand, tosses it to her right hand, and then launches it at the wooden closet door across the hospital room.
“Haze! Block!” Liam yells.
My vision goes black and a freezing chill courses through my veins. In panic, my breath quickens for the five seconds until I can see again. When my vision returns, Tate’s sitting cross-legged and sobbing into her hands.
“This is what I’m talking about. She’s off her bloody trolley. Sorry about the snow globe, but you need to get out of here!”
I take a steadying breath to decrease my adrenaline flow. Something feels wrong. I get up from the bed and walk across the room to study the mess that has Liam’s attention. “What did you say?” I ask, staring at the tiny metal city in a puddle of water and broken glass on the floor.
“You need to go.”
The sound of running feet in the hall coming toward us makes me talk faster. “No. Before that.”
“Sorry she trashed your gift?” he says as a question.
I focus my energy and run my finger along the silver arch and mini buildings, confused. “I don’t know what this is.”
“Whatever,” Liam sneers when two nurses push into the room. My guess is the women are looking through me right now, seeing the fragments on the floor, but I don’t look up to confirm this.
Liam, now standing over me, looks confused. “You just told me about it.”
I suddenly feel panicked. “What did I tell you?”
“Huh?”
“What did I tell you?” I ask again, more irritated because I have no idea what he’s talking about. “Liam!” I demand.
He looks at me like I’m pointing a gun at him. “You bought that for Tate when you went to the Arch.”
The city, now enclosed in my sapphire-blue energy and balanced on my finger, falls to the linoleum. The nurses never notice because they’re too worried about sedating Tate, who’s putting up a decent fight.
I think back to how I felt during coding when things went wrong.
“She’s erasing my memories,” I whisper. It all makes sense now. I’m not losing my memories; Tate’s stealing them away from me.
Liam’s questioning expression is replaced with one that says I’ve lost my mind. I’m starting to wonder myself.
“Every time she destroys something, I forget the memory connected to it,” I explain, standing up but keeping my eyes on the glass fragments. “This can’t be happening!” I growl, pacing between the closet doors and the hospital bed.
“I don’t want to sound like Mr. Negative or anything, but when you’re around, she’s worse. It’s like she can sense you,” Liam says.
He’s right. I know he’s right; I see it, too.
“I didn’t mean—”
I raise my hand to cut Liam off. “Just stop.”
He opens his mouth to say something, but I displace before he gets a word out.
Back at Ryder’s, I’m too terrified of what Tate is capable of to notice Ryder’s pen scratching against the paper while he works on his Sedimentology homework.
After a quiet night of contemplating whether to visit Tate or not, I decide that I should stay with Ryder. I need to be more focused on him, I know, but Tate doesn’t make this easy. She’s all I can think about, which makes me feel even more guilty about what I’m doing to Ryder. He needs me, but I’m so distracted.
Ryder does well through the next day; his spirits are actually better than they’ve been in a while. I’m sure this is largely due to his excitement about making dinner for Hannah tonight. When he hung up the phone with her last night after making the plans, his smile was the first genuine one I think I’ve seen since being here. With everything that has happened, this significant gesture made me feel happy for a brief moment. Today, he appears as anxious as I am to get out of school in the afternoon.
Not able to stand the separation from Tate any longer, I displace while Ryder’s strolling through the grocery store. Break is less than an hour away. Plus, he’s humming. Humming! He’ll be fine.
I get to the hospital, but Tate and her stuff are gone. I glance at the floor by the closet (now glass-free) before throwing my body through the wall and landing outside, three stories below. I jump into the air and fly over the houses to Tate’s, praying that she’s there. I don’t relax until I see her.
“When did they release her?” I ask Liam, trying to use my nice voice.
“No! No more questions.” Liam is obviously in an extra sour mood. “I’m not telling you anything. I’ve spent too many years working my tail off, and now there’s finally a position open for an Elite. I’m not going to let a nancy like you ruin my chances of being selected just because you’re choosing to break the rules.”
Sheesh. What is it with everyone wanting to be an Elite? “I’ll be the one in trouble, not you,” I assure him. And whatever the punishment is, it’ll be worth it. Realizing I need Liam to help me, some of my anger towards him evaporates. “Please, man, give me something,” I plead.
Liam appears to be having ethical issues. Or he’s constipated. Probably the first, considering we’re dead and no longer need the facilities. Finally, reluctantly, he asks, “Know anything about a concert?”
“Should I?” A brick settles in my stomach.
“Probably. She shredded some tickets earlier.”
“At this rate, she’ll have my mind erased in a week.” I slide down the wall beside Tate. On the floor by her desk, she punches through a playlist on her iPod and ignores me because I’m dead. I’m dead! Get it through your thick skull, man.
What am I gaining here? There’s never going to be a happily-ever-after for us. In truth, I’m here for me; I’m being selfish. There’s a good possibility that my being here may cause her to erase me completely. If I can’t see her anymore, at least I could have my memories. It’s not a lot, but it’s better than nothing.
Liam does a fantastic job of pretending I’m not here. So well, in fact, that I forget he’s even in the room. Breathing in Tate’s sweet scent, I close my eyes and imagine that I’m still alive with her.
A knock at the door pulls me out of my own head. The door slowl
y swings in, and Fischer’s head appears around the side like it’s floating.
Tate pulls out one of her earbuds. “Hey Fish,” she says in a croaky voice.
“Can I come in?” he asks.
She licks her dry lips. “Sure.”
He walks over to her and I move out of the way before he sits on me—or, more appropriately, in me.
“I’m glad you’re feeling better. I didn’t like when you were in the hospital.”
Tate yanks her black sleeve down to cover her bandaged wrist and puts her other arm around Fischer. “I know. I’m sorry.” She pauses and pulls him closer. “I love you. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, I know. I love you, too.”
“It’s just you and me now,” Tate says in a sad voice.
Fischer sniffs and leans his head against Tate’s chest. “Wanna hear a joke?” he asks a couple minute later, his face brightening a little.
“Absolutely,” Tate answers, trying to sound enthusiastic.
“Why was six afraid of seven?”
Tate already knows this one. She’s told me the same joke before, but she plays dumb. “Don’t know. Why?”
“Because seven ate nine.”
Tate takes a deep breath and stares down at her brother. For a second, her eyes shine with life.
“Get it? Because seven eight nine. Like you’re counting!”
Liam laughs first because Fischer is just too damn cute not to laugh at. Then Tate joins in. Fischer, thrilled that his joke was such a success, cracks up with her.
Frozen, I watch her. Her whole face has brightened; it’s a stark contrast to her black wardrobe. The glow lingers in her eyes like a spark ready to ignite dry kindling. She’s stunning.
A tear runs down my cheek. She could get better with enough time. She could live again. This makes me so happy, yet so sad, all at once.
I push my calimeter to shut it up. Tate and Fischer become motionless and as silent the rest of the house.
No—stunning isn’t a strong enough word to describe what Tate looks like right now, frozen in happiness. There’s no word spectacular enough to encompass her beauty. I barely notice the frailty of her arms or her black fingernails.