And maybe it was that or maybe it’s the way he was last night with Mrs. Holgerson, defending Aja like that, or the way he went to him after, so clearly worried about his son—I don’t know. But he just seems so genuine. Kind. And not very much like the asshole Louise and I originally thought he was.
But there’s something else—another reason I can’t stop thinking about him, a reason I haven’t even wanted to admit to myself until now: I like the way he looks at me. Not like I’m an oddity, but like I’m just a normal girl, a woman. And I can’t remember the last time I felt normal.
Out the front windshield, the Manhattan skyline looms into view and I realize the Xanax is starting to take effect as the muscles in my shoulders and my arms begin to relax. But then, I notice, it doesn’t touch the growing pit in my stomach—the one that’s reminding me that I’m not normal, and it’s only a matter of time before Eric realizes that, too.
WHEN WE PULL into the parking deck in lower Manhattan, I press a finger into my cheek, and then two fingers. I massage the skin around, pushing and stretching it in different directions.
I can’t feel my face.
I know I should be alarmed by this, but the opposite occurs—a gentle wave of relaxation washes over me. I giggle.
“What’s funny?”
“Nothing.” The word kind of floats out of my mouth, making my lips vibrate, which is even more amusing. Another laugh follows, and I change my mind. “Everything.”
I giggle some more.
Madison puts the car in park and frowns. “Hmmm . . . maybe I should have cut that pill in half.”
I poke her on the forehead with my gloved index finger that’s still got remnants of cinnamon sugar. “Don’t worry,” I say. And then the song immediately bounces into my head, and I’m compelled to add: “Be happy!”
I form an O with my lips and sing: “Doooo-do-do-doodee-do-doodee-do-dee-do-dee-do. Don’t worry. Do-dee-doo-dee-dodee-doooooooooo.”
Madison rolls her eyes and opens her car door. “Come on, Bobby McFerrin, let’s get you inside.”
The song stays in my head for the next hour while we walk the two blocks to the Allergy & Asthma Center, while I get checked in, while I change into a paper gown and get all my vitals taken by a nurse in rubber gloves and a face mask who takes great care not to touch me (she must have been prepped). But then I’m left alone on the exam table, waiting for Dr. Zhang, and a soberness kicks in.
I’m suddenly a child again, sitting in one of the hundred doctors’ offices I was schlepped to while my mother tried to figure out what was wrong with me. It’s all a big blur to me, really. I was so young. But then, a memory, clear as day, hits me. It’s my mother, screaming at the top of her lungs. Don’t tell me you don’t know! That’s my baby in there. You have to help us. You have to. It pangs my heart, the plaintive desperation in her scratchy tone. Referring to me as her baby. And I just remember how I felt in that moment. Scared, yes. But also loved, protected, defended. And I wonder if maybe I tend to only remember the worst of her, and not the moments like that one.
The door opens, interrupting my thoughts. Dr. Zhang is smaller than I remember, less intimidating. She offers a warm smile. “Jubilee. How are you?”
I consider this. “Still allergic to people.”
She nods and smiles. “Got it.”
For the next hour, we delve into the twelve years since I saw her last, including the Incident in high school, my housebound years, and my most recent brush with death and hospital visit. She takes meticulous notes on a legal pad, piping up with questions as they come to her, but she doesn’t flinch—at any of it—which makes me like her more. Although when I tell her the Aja story, she says, “Maybe let’s leave CPR to the EMT next time?”
Finally, she takes a look underneath the paper gown at my rash.
“Have you changed anything recently? Your laundry soap? Lotion? New sheets?”
“No,” I say, “everything is the same.”
“What about new people? Has anyone been in your home recently?”
I think of Eric and Aja. “Yeah. I had some . . . friends”—is that what they are?—“over.”
“So they were sitting on your furniture, I assume.” She pauses. “Did they sleep over?”
I jerk my head to her. “No!” I say, but my face flushes at the automatic thought of Eric in my room. My bed. I try to compose myself. “I mean, yes, they sat on my furniture, of course. No to spending the night.”
She nods. “Just trying to understand if and how any indirect contact might have occurred. People slough skin cells all the time, and though it hasn’t been a problem for you in your past—your allergy has always been caused by direct skin-to-skin touch—my thinking is that your years of reclusiveness have caused your body to become even more sensitive, and maybe even sloughed skin cells are a problem for you now. Think—is there anything that could be coming in contact with your torso like that? You’re not sleeping on sheets that someone else has slept on. Are you borrowing clothes or anything?”
At that question, my heart jumps. Eric’s sweatshirt.
“I have been wearing a shirt,” I say. “Um . . . that doesn’t belong to me.”
“Hmm.” She taps her lips with her pen. “That could be it. Especially if the person wore it before giving it to you.”
I think of the way it smells—not like laundry detergent, but woodsy, like him, and when she says it, I’m sure that’s exactly right.
“When did you wear it last?”
“Um . . . last night.”
“But the rash started before that, correct?” She glances back at her notes. “A week ago?”
A flush creeps up my neck. “I, uh . . . have kind of been wearing it every night. But I’ve never reacted to that before—other people’s clothes or sheets or anything,” I say, thinking of my childhood romps in mom’s warm bed and playing dress-up in her closet.
Dr. Zhang nods. “Allergies can be strange like that. I once had a patient that had been eating shrimp for his entire life and then suddenly, at the age of twenty-six, nearly died at a seafood buffet. It’s a mystery. That’s extreme, but you see what I mean. Allergies—and their triggers—can change without rhyme or reason.” She puts her notepad on the counter. “So, how about this—you don’t borrow clothes anymore unless they’re clean,” she says, turning on the sink. “And maybe think about washing that sweatshirt?”
I do. Think about it. And I’m surprised to find the thought kind of devastates me.
Dr. Zhang scrubs her hands under the stream of water and snaps rubber gloves onto her hands. “Now, let’s do a thorough examination, get you a prescription-strength hydrocortisone along with the EpiPens, and go from there. Shall we?”
After the exam, I get dressed and go sit in Dr. Zhang’s office, waiting for her. I try to remember the visit twelve years ago, my mom sitting in the molded-plastic seat beside me. I’m sure she was wearing something low-cut, revealing, but I can’t picture the exact outfit. And then, more alarmingly, I realize I can’t picture her. I can hear her voice, plain as day, but her face is kind of blurred.
Dr. Zhang comes in and sits at the desk across from me. “So,” she says. “Jubilee. I don’t want to cause unneeded anxiety, but it really does concern me if your skin is reacting to indirect contact now.”
I look at her.
“From wearing another person’s sweatshirt,” she clarifies. “You need to be extraordinarily careful until we can sort this out,” she says. “That means absolutely no touching at all. I know you know that, but I can’t stress it enough. We have no idea how your body will react.”
“OK,” I say, but all I really am hearing is “until we can sort this out,” and I know this is the part where she’s going to ask to study me. To make me one of her research projects. And this is also the part where I walk out. Again.
“So, I don’t know if you’ve read any of my research—”
I shake my head no. Here we go.
“I’ve been running s
ome clinical trials the past five years on a Chinese herbal treatment to cure severe food allergies. We’ve had about a sixty percent success rate.”
I know I should be impressed by this. Allergies are a confounding ailment in the medical community. They don’t make sense evolutionarily speaking, especially mine. Why would my body fight the very thing that is its only chance of procreating? And no one knows the root cause of them—is it environment? Genetics? When the origins of a problem aren’t clear, it’s near impossible to find a solution. But I leave my face blank, unsure of where she’s going with this.
She continues. “I don’t think you’d be a good candidate. At least not yet. Your allergy being so . . . rare. I have no idea if it would respond in the same way as food allergies.”
I nod, waiting.
“But have you heard of immunotherapy?”
I shake my head.
She clasps her hands in front of her. “It’s a common treatment for allergies like rhinitis or bee pollen. Patients are injected with small amounts of the substance they’re allergic to, in theory building up a tolerance over time, in order to reduce the immune system response to the allergen. It often leads to relief of the allergy symptoms long after the treatment is stopped.”
“Like a cure?” I ask.
She pauses. “I hesitate to call it that,” she says, hedging. “It’s more of a management system—a way to keep the allergy under control, desensitize someone enough that they can tolerate whatever they’re allergic to.” She looks to make sure I’m clear on the difference. I nod. “Now they’re doing it for food allergies—things like peanut butter and eggs. It’s an oral therapy, where they give the patient a small amount of peanut butter or whatever they’re allergic to daily, building up their tolerance over time. Early studies have shown some promise.”
“OK. What does that have to do with me?”
“Well, Dr. Benefield believed—and I agree with him—that you have some sort of genetic mutation”—at the word “mutation,” I’m surprised to find I don’t cringe, like I used to; I think of Aja, and my lips turn up—“causing you to be absent one of the millions of proteins all humans have, which is the one you’re likely allergic to.”
“Right—but you said there was no way to tell which one it was.”
“Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Genetic sequencing could tell us, but twelve years ago it would have cost millions of dollars and taken several years, if not decades, to try and sequester a single protein.”
My heart starts thumping against my rib cage. “And now?”
“It’s cheaper. A little faster.”
“How much faster?”
“I think we could find it in a year. Or less.”
“And when you find it—”
“We’d isolate the protein. Make a solution containing very minute amounts of it, and give it to you every day, in the hopes that you build up a tolerance. That your body stops fighting it.”
I sit back in the chair, my heart thundering in my ears. A cure. OK, a “management system.” But still. I shake my head a little, not fully believing it. “What’s the catch?”
She sticks her pen behind her ear like my mom used to do with a single cigarette. “No catch. But you need to be aware it may not work. And it is still expensive. You’d have to agree to be part of my ongoing research. I’d need to clear it with the department, write a paper on it for a journal. Unless you’ve got hundreds of thousands of dollars lying around.”
I grunt. “Not exactly.”
“I didn’t think so,” she says, but not unkindly.
We stare at each other as I consider her offer. This is the moment I dreamed of so often in my childhood. A doctor saying there was a treatment—at least a chance at one anyway—instead of looking at me like they wanted to slice me up and put me in a petri dish for further study to assuage their selfish curiosity. So then, why am I not thrilled? Beside myself with excitement? Why does the heartbeat thudding in my ears feel more like fear than elation? “Thank you, Dr. Zhang,” I say, looking her squarely in the eyes. “But I believe I’m going to need to think about it.”
AT THE LIBRARY that afternoon, while I’m sorting returns, my body feels numb, like it’s just going through the motions. I wonder if this is a symptom of shock. I can’t believe there’s a treatment—an honest-to-god treatment—that might help me. I feel a buzz in my stomach just thinking of it—a hint of excitement blossoming.
But it’s overshadowed by a stronger emotion—fear, which seems to have morphed from just run-of-the-mill anxiety in Dr. Zhang’s office to downright terror. And I have to ask myself the question I’ve been dancing around since I left the doctor’s office: do I really want to be cured? Sure, I used to dream of it as a child, what it would be like to be normal, to be hugged, to play on the playground with others at recess. But what do children know? Maybe sitting on the sidelines kept me from breaking my neck on the monkey bars. Maybe this allergy has actually spared me this whole time. Maybe it’s the thing—the only thing—that’s kept me from getting hurt.
I stop sorting when I come to a book that’s obviously been dropped in a bathtub. Its pages are swollen and rippled, and to add insult to injury, the cover is punctured with teeth marks. I can’t believe someone just dropped it in the return box without saying anything. I look around for Louise to show her and ask what I should do about it, but she’s nowhere to be seen. When my gaze passes over the children’s section, Roger looks up and makes eye contact.
“Where’s Louise?” I mouth, and he extends the index finger on his raised hand toward the stacks—specifically, a row behind the computer carrels. I look in that direction but don’t see her. The computer seats themselves are nearly empty, save for Michael, the pillow golfer, who’s always there (I thought Louise was exaggerating, but he really does come every day), and an older woman with thick glasses and a thicker turkey jowl sitting just inches from her screen.
I walk toward the stack Roger pointed at, and when I turn the corner, Louise is there, bent at the waist, her head poked in the shelf between two rows of books. “Louise?” I say. She jerks and smacks her head on the ceiling of the shelf. “Ouch,” she says, and then, still bent over, cuts her eyes toward me, putting her pointer finger to her lips. She motions me over with the same hand. I move toward her.
“What are you doing?” I whisper.
“Look,” she mouths, pointing to the space on the shelf between the books. I bend over and peer through it, taking in the back of the older woman’s head at the computer carrel. Up close, her hair is thin, large swaths of her scalp apparent through the wisps of dull white locks, which have carefully been curled and teased in what I imagine was an attempt to create a fuller appearance.
I look back at Louise, not understanding.
“Look at her screen,” she whispers, emphasizing her words by stabbing her finger back at the hole on each syllable.
I turn back and shift my head so that I can see past the woman’s bouffant.
“Oh!” The exclamation inadvertently escapes my lips when I realize what I’m seeing is a close-up of a naked male. Specifically, his pelvic region.
Louise’s pursed lips are set in a self-satisfied I-told-you-so line. “It’s porn, right?” she whispers.
“How should I know?” I whisper back. My gaze returns to the screen, like it’s a gruesome car wreck and I’m unable to resist staring. I tilt my head for a better angle. “I don’t know,” I say. “Are those labels? It looks kind of clinical.”
“Well. It’s against the rules, anyway. We can’t have private parts up on the computers. What if a child walks by?”
I see her point. “I’ve got a book I need you to look at,” I whisper. “Totally damaged.”
She waves me away. “I’ll look at it when I get back to the desk.”
I stand there a minute longer, something else niggling me. “Listen, remember what you said a while back? About the city council cutting funding?”
“What about it?” she sa
ys, not taking her eyes off the screen.
I swallow and then get straight to the point. “Am I going to get fired?”
She turns to look at me, her eyes glistening with sympathy. “The truth?”
“Yeah.”
“Probably,” she says, scrunching her nose in apology. “Last one hired, first one fired and all that. Honestly, I was surprised Maryann hired you. That position has been open for four months. I figured we couldn’t afford to fill it. And if they cut funding again, we definitely can’t afford it.”
I pause, taking this in—why did they hire me? It’s not like I was overwhelmingly qualified.
“What can we do? What can I do? I can’t lose this job,” I say, trying to keep my voice still hushed to match hers.
She shrugs. “I don’t know. Figure out a way to fill this place wall-to-wall with bodies every day? Prove to Frank Stafford that this library is wanted—is needed—by the people of Lincoln.”
“But it is! Every town needs a library.”
“Well we know that. But our circulation numbers tell a different story,” she whispers. And then adds an octave lower: “Although I doubt he even knows how to read them, to tell you the truth.”
I ignore that and mull over the two most important bits she’s said: we need more books being checked out, and we need more bodies coming in. I’m glad that I had the forward thinking to invite Aja to come to the library every day. But he’s just one body. How am I going to get more?
The door opens and we both turn to look. A man shuffles in. A Tuesday regular, Louise calls him the TP Thief, as she once caught him trying to steal toilet paper out of the men’s room. She thinks he’s homeless—and from the looks of his dirty threadbare coat and the god-awful stench emanating off it, I think she’s right. He heads straight for the bathroom.
Right behind him is Aja. He takes a few steps forward and stands on the brown runner at the entryway, as if he’s waiting for an invitation to come in farther. A sort of silent acknowledgment passes between us, and then he breaks the gaze, lopes off toward a computer carrel on the other side of the aisle I’m standing in, and dumps his book bag to the ground beside an empty seat.
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