I know, he replied. And I also know that when you get told something over and over again, you start to believe it and he hammered me with the fact that I was worthless. That it was my fault my mother died. I know he’s wrong, but I still sometimes hear his voice in my head.
Oh, my Lord. Milo was the least worthless person I knew. I wanted to travel back in time and kick down that closet door and hug that poor, sweet little boy that he’d once been.
Before I could respond, the screen of my phone shifted slightly as a new text appeared.
Outside.
What? Oh crap, that wasn’t Milo—it was from Dana. She and Cal had arrived.
“They’re here,” I announced as I went back to my conversation with Milo and quickly typed, Thank you for telling me that. I love you. I hit Send and was in the process of typing But Cal and Dana are here, when Milo sent back, Love you too. Gotta go. JD done w lunch & on the move. Sry sry sry
“I’ll let them in,” Garrett said.
For a second, I forgot about Cal’s situation, and I almost asked Garrett how he intended to maneuver Calvin and his wheelchair up the stairs that led to the outside office door. But then I remembered.
Calvin’s workable legs were going to take some serious getting used to.
The door opened and Calvin came into the operating room first. “Whoa!” he exclaimed. “This is, like, legit!”
Garrett was right behind Cal and back in bragging mode. “Yeah. It’s a nice little multimillion-dollar extension to my dad’s practice.”
Dana was the last to step into the room. And even though I was still preoccupied with the conversation I’d been having with Milo, I knew that something was very, very wrong as soon as I saw her.
Her face was ashen, her normally pink cheeks a sallow shade of gray. She carried a small canvas bag across her back—a load that normally wouldn’t have fazed her in the slightest. But at that moment Dana might as well have been lugging a stack of bricks—her temples were shiny with sweat. She glanced at me before setting the bag on the floor and then finding a chair in the corner and sitting down fast.
“Are you—”
“I’m fine!” Dana barked before I could finish my question. She turned to Garrett. “This is exactly what we need. This room. It’s perfect. Thank you so much.”
Garrett nodded, and I knew visions of flying Greater-Thans danced in his head. “You’re welcome,” he said. “Did you, like, draw your own blood or whatever to make the…you know?”
Destiny. Yes, we all knew.
“I’m fine,” Dana said again. It was becoming her personal aloha, used for both hello and good-bye, or in this case, yes. “We’ve got a batch already cooking in the trunk of Cal’s car.” She turned to watch Morgan, who’d already waved Calvin over to the scanner.
At second glance, Cal was looking pretty crappy, too. His hands were shaking, and his face held a tint of green.
“How are you?” Morgan asked as he helped Cal sit on the metal operating table. I knew, from last year’s visit to the ER after the accident, that you didn’t have to lie down to be scanned. You just had to sit still—and not even completely still, just mostly still. Calvin surely knew that. With all of his surgeries and checkups, he probably knew more about scanners and being scanned than any of us.
He shrugged casually and smiled at Morgan. “Never better,” he said in a nonchalant tone. “Although…would you rather have a med scan done by a hot gay guy or your even hotter girlfriend? Hmm, I think I’d go with girlfriend.”
I knew he was trying to be good ol’ funny Cal. But this was serious.
Morgan shut him down. “Yeah, well, the hot gay guy knows how to work the scanner so… Kinda hard not to notice your tremor there.” He pointed at Calvin’s hands.
Cal looked down before clasping one hand in the other. “Yeah,” he admitted. “I mean, the shaky hands rank high on the suck-o-meter. Other than that, I’m golden.” He used his head to gesture over to Dana and lowered his voice. “She’s the one you need to be helping right now. She’s stubborn as all hell and keeps saying she’s fine—but she’s not. Apparently, not even G-Ts can use their self-healing mojo to immediately replace a significant loss of blood.”
Dana’s face was hidden in her hands as she leaned her elbows atop her knees. “I can hear every word you say,” she grumbled through her fingers in a grumpy voice. “G-Ts have really good hearing. And FYI, I’d feel a crap-ton worse if I weren’t a G-T.”
“I know,” Calvin replied cheerfully as Morgan gestured for him to lie back on the table. “I’m just reiterating the fact that you’re hurtin’ more than me right now, even though you won’t admit it.”
“I’m dizzy, Scoot. You’re withdrawing from Destiny.” Dana leaned back and turned her palms up. She pretended to be a scale of importance. “Dizziness?” she said, looking at her left hand as it lowered, “Destiny!” Dana lowered her right hand even more dramatically.
We all got the point.
“So how long is this gonna take?” she asked Morgan.
“You mean the scan I just gave Calvin, or the backup scan I’m doing right now with him lying down, both to focus on his spine and to double-check the readout?” Morgan asked.
“State-of-the-art,” Garrett said. “Superfast scanner.”
“Actually, this model’s already obsolete,” Morgan said, giving Cal’s leg a pat in a You can sit up now signal. “There are new scanners on the market where the subject doesn’t have to stay still in order to be scanned.”
“It could at least beep or make lights flash or something,” Dana complained. “I mean, how else do you know when you’re being scanned?”
“You don’t.” Morgan pointed to the huge flat-screen on the wall that had come to life with a brilliant-blue background while a single word—Processing—flashed in the center. “Although this would be what we call a clue. But it’s definitely more of a clue for the scanner as opposed to the scan-ee.”
“So you could just scan any one of us, without us knowing it,” Dana realized.
“If I were unscrupulous, yes,” Morgan said.
“And with the newer scanners…” she started.
“I could set up a scanner at the mall and get a full medical readout on everyone who walks through the scanning field,” Morgan finished for her, adding, “And, again, if I were super-unscrupulous, I could use those results to pick the G-Ts or the little girls with G-T potential out of the crowd. Make a nice little wish list with photos and descriptions of the targets to give to my buddies, the G-T bounty hunters, so they could deliver the girls to me, so I could make millions from their blood.”
The blue screen turned into a display that was labeled Results: Young Adult Male. Weight: 170 lbs. Height: 5’11”.
“Lucky for us those newer scanners cost as much or more than this entire office,” Morgan continued, “along with the house and oceanfront property.”
“Yeah, but how long until that kind of scanner gets made into an app that anyone can download onto their phone?” Dana shook her head. “Something tells me it’s gonna get much harder to be a G-T in the future.” She swore. “And I thought it was hard now.”
“One way to fool a scanner,” Morgan told her as he used the touch screen to scroll through the results of Cal’s scan, “is to always be in close proximity to another person. Walk through the mall with your arm around someone’s waist, and the readout will register as an error.”
“Or we need to create an app that’ll alert us whenever a scanner is being used,” Cal said as he slid down off the table to get a closer look at his results. As he stood there, he shifted back and forth from foot to foot, and I knew his constant motion was an attempt to hide the fact that he was shaking.
That was so not good.
Morgan was using the touch screen to scroll through the results, making little hmm and huh noises.
“What’s it say
?” Garrett asked eagerly.
“Good news?” Dana’s voice was more demanding than hopeful, as if she was trying to intimidate Morgan into making the news good or else.
“Good news…and not-so-good news.”
“Good news first,” I said. “Please.”
“Okay,” Morgan said, scrolling back to the top of the readout. “Calvin’s heart.” He turned to Cal. “You said there was some kind of damage done to it in the explosion?”
Cal nodded. “I took a piece of shrapnel to the chest, and they didn’t find it right away, and…long story short, I had a heart attack, which messed me up pretty badly. That’s the kind of damage that you can’t fix.”
“Well, right now,” Morgan said, “you have the heart of an eighteen-year-old. It reads as one hundred percent healthy. No sign of any previous trauma.”
That was amazing news!
Calvin laughed. “Wait. It’s…fixed?”
“Your heart is. Completely. Yes.” Morgan tried to smile back, but I could see that there was a serious but coming.
“So what’s the not-so-good news?” I asked.
As Morgan scrolled through what looked like a series of images from the second scan when Calvin was lying down, Dana came over and put an arm around Cal’s waist—in part to hold him up, but also just to hold him. It was weird seeing the two of them like that, but it was the perfect kind of weird.
“The damage to your back,” Morgan said, stopping on what looked like an X-ray of Calvin’s spine. “Appears to have been catastrophic.”
Cal nodded. “They had to go in and clean up the parts that were crushed.”
Morgan nodded back, pointing to the screen. “Like your lower vertebrae. Some parts of the lumbar section were removed entirely and replaced with a combination of steel and medical plastic.”
“Yeah,” Cal replied. He was still smiling from ear to ear about his repaired heart. “The doctors were surprised about how well I recovered from that. The initial prognosis was grim. But I worked really hard. Went to rehab diligently. Still do, as a matter of fact. Although—” He glanced down at his legs as if they held answers to a secret. The leg gaze was a move that was becoming habitual for him. “I don’t really know how much rehab I’m gonna need in the future.”
Morgan pursed his lips. “Here’s the thing, Cal. The damage to your spinal cord hasn’t been repaired by the drug. Not like your heart.”
Dana didn’t change her expression, but her hold around Cal’s waist grew tighter. “I don’t understand,” Cal said slowly. “I’m on my feet. I can walk.”
Morgan let out a long, slow exhalation. “Right now, the Destiny in your system allows the rest of your body to compensate for this injury. Your muscles, ligaments, connective tissues—they’re all strengthened substantially because of the drug. But, without it…that will go away.”
“So…what you’re telling me is that I need Destiny in my bloodstream in order to keep my walking legs walking. Without it, I’m back in my chair?” Cal glanced at me and I knew what he was thinking. Somehow, he’d already known this.
Morgan nodded. “Yes.”
Garrett looked stricken. “Man, that’s so messed up. Isn’t there a way around that?”
Morgan shook his head. “I think this might also explain why your body is burning through the drug so quickly. Your system is using the Destiny to try to heal something that won’t heal. Can’t heal.”
“So…I stop taking D,” Cal was trying to make sense of what he’d just heard, “if I survive detox, and that’s a big if, then boom, I’m back in the chair.”
“With a healthy heart,” I pointed out.
This time, he barely glanced at me, and I recoiled because his eyes were suddenly hard and cold, as if we were strangers. “Well, yay,” he said, obviously sarcastically. “So, great, I can live until I’m ninety—sitting in a freaking chair.”
“That is great,” I said.
“Excuse me if I don’t feel the same way,” Cal said.
“Cal,” Dana said quietly.
“What?” he said. “I’m supposed to be happy at this news? I’m not.”
We were all silent for a moment, but then Cal blurted, “I’ll manage the addiction.”
Dana turned to look at him like he’d just sprouted a second nose. “We’ve already talked about that. You know that’s absurd.”
“Well, no! I mean, listen, most D-addicts start out greedy. They want as much as their bodies can take. But not me. I don’t need all that. I don’t want to be the prettiest, or the youngest, or the strongest. Hell, I don’t even need to walk all that fast. But…just…there has to be a way to keep me walking. I know I won’t need that much D to make that happen.” Cal smiled, but his eyes held a level of desperation that I’d never seen in him before.
I looked at Morgan and frowned. This was exactly what the G-T had predicted—that Calvin would start to lose sight of reality. If we didn’t act fast, Morgan had told us, then Cal would descend into a place where the lines of morality became blurred and even eventually ceased to exist.
Morgan had started scrolling through the readout again, and now he pointed to a series of numbers on the screen. “Right now, you have remarkably little Destiny in your system,” he said, “considering when your first dose was injected. My best guess is that even just to manage your addiction with the smallest amount of the drug as possible, you’ll still need a dose of D every twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”
“What?” Dana went another shade paler, and I knew she was imagining having to draw blood on that same timetable. Of all the bad news we’d received, that was the dead worst.
“I can help you,” I murmured, but she just shook her head.
It was then that Cal blurted, “Seven! Nineteen! Twenty-one! Thirty! Fifty-four!”
“Um. What?” Garrett asked as I got out my phone and made a note of the numbers.
“Oh, man, I think I’m gonna—” But there was no time for Calvin to finish his warning as he raced across the room and threw up into the trash can.
“Oh my God, Cal!” I rushed toward my best friend, but Dana beat me over to him. She knelt down beside Calvin and I hovered nearby, as he retched and choked over the side of the garbage pail. His normally chocolate-hued skin lost almost all color. He looked up at me for a second, in between heaves. When his eyes met mine, I felt like I was being stared at by a corpse.
“Guys, it’s time,” Dana said.
“We’re not ready to try the detox,” Morgan warned, and Dana nodded.
“I know,” she said. “That’s not what I meant. But we’re not injecting Cal here. We’re heading back to the Twenty to do it.”
And I realized that the only thing that could save Cal right now was the one thing that would also end up killing him.
“It’s time, Calvin,” Dana said more gently as she helped him to his feet. “For more Destiny.”
————
When we got back to the twenty-plex, Milo was waiting by the hole in the fence, astride Dana’s motorcycle.
I wasn’t expecting him, and my stomach did a somersault into my throat at the sight of him in his leather jacket, with those long, jean-clad legs, his hair windblown around his face—as if it had come out of his ponytail holder but he’d been in too much of a hurry to get here to stop and fix it. He found me instantly, there in the front passenger seat beside Garrett, and his dark eyes met mine.
“I texted Milo to meet us here,” Dana explained. She was sitting in the back with Calvin and Morgan. Cal was looking even worse, but Dana appeared to have plateaued. She still looked, though, as if she could use a long nap. “Precautionary stuff.”
Garrett had offered to drive Cal’s car so that Dana could focus on Cal, and it had been a bumpy ride. Garrett was, after all, a far cry from a Greater-Than, and he’d had a hard time figuring out Cal’s wheelchair-friend
ly hand controls. By the time we turned into the twenty-plex parking lot, I’d grabbed the holy shit bar above my head more times than I could count.
But I’d also taken the drive time to tell Dana and Cal about my depressing phone conversation with Jilly’s mother. Garrett was in the Let’s just go into Rochelle’s house and drag Jilly out of the closet whether she likes it or not camp. But Dana was quick to point out that the girl was a G-T, and the last time we’d tried that, it hadn’t gone well.
So some of Garrett’s driving may have been a passive-aggressive response to being completely shut down.
Now, he cut the engine with one final jolt. “If we wait too long to save Jilly, then she’ll be dead. Of course, if she’s dead, then she won’t have to go back to her owners, on account of being dead, but then again, she’ll be dead, so…”
“First things first,” Dana said. “And first is Calvin. We’ll get to Jilly, I promise.”
“But if we wait too long—” Garrett said again.
“We get it,” I interrupted him, not wanting to hear him say the word dead another twenty times.
“Here,” he said, turning around to hand the car keys to Calvin in the backseat.
“I’ll take those.” Dana grabbed the keys out of Garrett’s hand before Calvin could get to them.
Calvin frowned.
“Precautionary stuff,” Dana repeated as we all got out of the car. She tossed Cal’s keys over to Milo, then opened the trunk, pulling out both the bag she’d brought into Garrett’s dad’s office and a larger duffel. I assumed it contained the cooking batch of Destiny and all of the paraphernalia needed for Calvin to get the drug into his bloodstream.
The reality of the situation was setting in big-time, and Dana’s mention of precautionary stuff over and over was making it all the more real. She truly thought there was a chance that Calvin might joker.
Which was why, I realized with a sinking feeling in my chest, Dana had made sure that Milo was here. He was Dana’s Whoops, Cal Jokered and I’m Suddenly Dead Plan B.
Meanwhile, Cal was arguing with Dana over the absconded car keys. “I mean, for real. It’s not like I’m gonna just fly off the deep end here.”
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