by Paul Mosier
“Fine.” The fly buzzes at the window, and I lift my head to look at him.
Mom is sitting behind my head. “She’s a little bit famous for not enjoying being in hospitals.” She smooths my hair out of my face.
“Have you eaten today?” the nurse asks.
I nod. “For lunch I had an almond butter and blackberry jelly sandwich. And mango slices. And tahini coleslaw.”
“Who’s packing your lunch?” the nurse asks. “I want them to pack mine, too.” She lets go of my wrist.
“And we stopped at an Indian place for naan after school.” Dad loves talking about Indian food. He always mentions it when we’ve eaten it.
“And we had dinner before we came,” I say. “Chinese.” I try to remember my fortune cookie fortune but I can’t.
“No health problems?” The nurse is looking at my mom. I tilt my head back and see Mom shake hers.
I sit up. “Can we go now?”
Dad looks to Mom. “Well,” he begins, “let’s visit with Echo for a while.”
I look across the room at Echo. She’s holding a cherry Popsicle, watching the movie. Something on-screen makes her laugh.
“She’s staying?”
Mom puts her hand back on my hair. “They want to do more tests.”
“Why?”
“Just to make sure everything is okay.”
“Didn’t you just tell the nurse Echo doesn’t have any health problems?”
Mom smiles faintly. “We were talking about you.”
3
WEDNESDAY I WAKE to the sound of jackhammers in the street and an electric saw in the town house next door. They wait until seven o’clock, and then it gets very loud very suddenly, like midnight on New Year’s Eve, but not as much fun. It didn’t bother me so much yesterday, ’cause I was practically awake all night with excitement about my first day at a new school. This morning, I’m filled with worry. The first thing to enter my mind is that Echo is waking up in the hospital. Her bed beneath me is still, the breakfast table will be too quiet. We won’t be fighting over the orange juice, but I wish we would be.
I shouldn’t worry. She’s six years old. Terrible things don’t happen to kids that young.
Practically never.
Even so, the thought of getting through day two at my new school seems overwhelming.
My phone buzzes on the dresser, and I cross the room to look at the screen. It’s a message from Maisy.
Good morning! How do you like your new school? PS 022 isn’t the same without you!
I don’t want to get into it right now, because I don’t want to tell the truth and I’m terrible at lying, just like my dad. You can tell I’m lying even on a text message.
Maisy is so together and so perfect, with the best vacations and the best everythings. I don’t want to talk about the hospital because I’m sure I won’t be able to sound like I’m not terrified of what might happen to Echo, even though I keep telling myself everything will be okay. So I just send emojis of a thumbs-up and of a girl running, like I’m in too much of a hurry to text right now.
I brush my teeth in the hall bathroom, which in this apartment is the only bathroom. Fortunately having only one bathroom is charming, as my dad frequently reminds me. He always reminds me that some of the hotels in the neighborhood have bathrooms that you have to share with other guests, which is supposed to make me happy I only have to share ours with three other family members. And Meowzers, whose litter box is beside the toilet. But today I only have to share it with Meowzers and Dad.
Brush-brush-brush. I spit the minty foam into the sink and give a big smile to my reflection.
“Hi! My name is El, and my little sister is in the hospital! But she’ll be fine!”
It’s a serious dent in my armor. With all the worries that come with being at a new school, I can’t afford to be distracted and vulnerable.
I put my toothbrush away and walk into the kitchen, where Dad is sitting at the table.
“Good morning,” he says.
“Good morning! My name is El, and my sister is in the hospital! But she’ll be fine!”
Dad furrows his brow and raises his coffee for a sip. “I’m sure she will, honey.”
There are two formerly frozen waffles on a plate at my table setting. They aren’t quite fully toasted by the looks of them, so I smile at Dad and without a word return them to the toaster.
I pour myself a hot tea, which generally helps me wake up, though I have my doubts it will work today.
I get the grass-fed butter from the fridge and set it on the table since Dad forgot to, then sit down.
I stir a healthy amount of sugar into my tea, by which I mean an amount that might be considered unhealthy. Then I take a sip.
The toaster announces toasted waffles, and I spring from my chair to get them. I carry them hot—ow—bare-handed to the table and drop them on my plate.
But while I’m buttering the waffles and drizzling them with syrup, and eating them bite by bite, the thought of Echo in the hospital creeps back into my mind. The thought grows larger and larger—the picture of Echo waking up in a hospital bed, with a bag of clear liquid dripping into her arm for breakfast—and it crowds out every other thought and sensation. The sweet butter and maple fades from my mouth until I can’t taste it at all, and I look down at my empty plate and wonder where it went.
Dad walks me to school. It’s a beautiful morning, but it somehow feels fake, or like it’s conspiring against us. It’s not a real beautiful morning, it’s the facade of a beautiful morning with fear lurking behind it, like a movie where everything looks fine but you know that it’s about to get very bad.
But it’s not going to get very bad. Echo is just a little girl.
In English with Mr. D, I feel like I’m listening to class from the bottom of a swimming pool. I can hear talking but it doesn’t really get through.
“El, do you have a response to any of the poems?” He stands before my desk, bouncing on his heels. I have a sinking feeling that he called on me twice but I didn’t answer the first time. “Was there one that had a strong impact on you?”
I wonder how he possibly knew. How he read my mind.
“You seemed excited to begin the Emily Dickinson unit,” he says. “Do you have a favorite?”
“Not a favorite,” I say, looking at the button pinned to his coat, which features an image of a very prim Emily Dickinson. “‘I heard a Fly buzz’ made me dizzy.”
A few kids laugh. I can’t believe that slipped out of my mouth.
“Dizzy?” Mr. D folds his hands together under his chin in a thinking pose. “That’s an interesting response.”
“Breaths held.” My words escape. “Buzzing. And then . . .”
He waits, watching me. I glance at the girl who sits to my left. She’s looking at me with big eyes, like maybe I’m crazy. Mr. D keeps waiting.
I take a deep breath, because I’ve forgotten to breathe again.
“Yes,” Mr. D finally says, breaking the spell. “It’s a powerful poem. How did Emily Dickinson get into the space of the fly, and the witnesses, and the dying narrator?”
Silence from my classmates.
“Thank you, El.” He smiles at me. I smile back. But exchanging smiles about a poem that made the hospital even more terrifying than usual seems like a strange thing to be doing.
The rest of the school day is even worse.
In math, I somehow missed that there was a second side to the homework page, so even though I got practically 100 percent on the first side, I got zero on the back.
In history, I’m happy to be sitting next to Emy again. But then at the very beginning of class a woman who’s apparently her mom bursts through the door to tell her she’s been accepted to the Midtown Academy of Ancient Music, which evidently was her first choice, and which she was on a wait list for. So she screams with happiness right in the middle of class and then gets up and leaves forever, without even looking over her shoulder at me. So I sit in my
seat in shock, which quickly turns to despair, as instead of being with Emy I’m stuck with a boy named Charles to make a diorama illustrating some part of Minoan civilization. And though he looks like he’s in a hurry to be an adult in a blue sport coat and his hair combed with hair oil, he smells like he’s never taken a shower.
Several times while we sit together brainstorming and discussing who will do what on our assignment, I catch a Charles-scented breeze and feel like I’m gonna throw up. As a result I take about half as many breaths as I might ordinarily take during an hour-long class, and so I feel dizzy and have a headache by the time the bell rings.
Dad forgot to make my lunch, and I forgot to make my lunch, and I forgot to ask about what I’m supposed to eat, so not only do I not have anyone to sit with since Emy has ditched this school, I’ve also got no food. Fortunately there’s just enough change in the bottom of my backpack to get a chocolate milk from the old ladies with the hairnets who dish out the grub. I’ve fabricated a story in my head that I’m on antibiotics for swamp fever and can’t have anything but chocolate milk just in case the hairnets or anyone else asks, but nobody does. And while I sit alone in the cafeteria, I keep looking at the clock on the wall to make anyone who might be looking at me think that I’ve got somewhere important to be or something. And I do wish I had somewhere to be, somewhere away from this school and this worry.
In phys ed we play street hockey again, and I score another goal, but this time I score it in the wrong net because I’m distracted and somehow lose track of which goal is which. Since this is extremely embarrassing, I pretend that I did it on purpose, and try to high-five the other team, but everyone ends up getting annoyed and thinking I’m weird. All around me the other students have friends or seem to be making friends, but I’m feeling like a combination of invisible and laughable.
In science with Mr. Bleeker we do a unit called “Why Seventh Graders Are Foul-Smelling: A Scientific Investigation.” It sounds like it should be fun, or that at least it will teach me why Charles smells like he’s rotting from within, but it isn’t fun because it’s so obvious Bleeker doesn’t like kids. I start to worry that maybe I stink as bad as Charles, and try to remember when I last took a shower as Bleeker discusses the various anatomical and developmental reasons seventh graders suddenly need to step it up with the bathing and deodorants. Worse, the cute boy who kept looking at me yesterday—whose name I learned is Octavius—keeps looking at me today, but now I think it’s definitely because there’s something wrong with me.
I’ve been looking forward to seventh-hour art class all day. I’m hoping I can get lost in whatever the assignment is, and stop thinking and worrying about Echo for a while.
Unfortunately, instead of an assignment Miss Numero Uno shows a video called The Proper Care of Art Materials. She greets us at the door with a frown drawn on her mouth and eyebrows with charcoal to demonstrate how unhappy she is at how we handled the classroom supplies the previous day. So instead of losing myself in an art assignment, we have to watch a video so dull it allows my thoughts to drift constantly to Echo. By the end of it I’m pretty sure I still have no idea how to clean brushes after painting with oils, and my stomach aches from worrying about my sister.
After school, after the walk home and Mediterranean takeout for dinner, Dad and I are back down in the subway station waiting for the train to take us to Midtown.
There’s a skinny, youngish guy with a scruffy beard playing a piano on the platform between the uptown tracks and the downtown tracks. I’m amazed that he’s brought the piano down here on a big six-wheel dolly, which stands beside it. And while it isn’t a big piano, it’s a piano. He plays it well, an old jazz song. Old jazz songs were exactly what I played when we had a real piano and I had lessons twice every week. But as Echo and I have gotten bigger our apartment has seemed smaller, so Mom and Dad sold the piano and traded it for a keyboard, which is almost always folded up and stowed away in the closet. Hearing this guy play brings back the happy memory of our old piano.
“Can we give him a dollar?” I ask.
Dad looks at the piano guy. He watches, listens for a moment. “Nah, we need to save our money.”
“Just a dollar? He brought his whole piano down here.”
Dad turns to me. “So if he was playing something small like a ukulele or a harmonica you wouldn’t want to tip him?”
“He plays really well,” I say, furrowing my brow. “But the difficulty of bringing the piano helps his case.”
“What if he just brought something really heavy down the stairs, like a bookcase? He could put a sign out that said ‘Hey, man, how about a dollar? I just dragged this heavy bookcase down here.’”
I frown. “If you don’t want to tip him, we should cover our ears.”
Dad smiles. I can never make him stop smiling. Finally he reaches for his wallet and hands me a five.
I return Dad’s smile and curtsy. I’m not sure why. Then I take the five and bring it to the man and his jar on the piano. He’s got lots of paper money in there. He smiles and nods at me as I put it in.
It feels good to do it, even though it was Dad’s money. Right now I’m so glad the man on the piano is down here making the subway station a more cheerful place. And maybe it makes New York City feel just a little bit magical or miraculous—that a skinny, scruffy guy has brought a piano down into the subway, like a little ant with a giant crumb on his back.
Then our train comes screeching in, momentarily drowning out the notes. We step on, the doors close, and we leave behind the magic and the music and enter the dark tunnel beneath the city.
At the hospital, Dad and I walk into the open door of Echo’s room.
“El! Daddy!” Echo opens her arms for hugs.
“Hands, please,” Mom says. “There’s lots of sickness going around.”
Dad and I take turns washing our hands at the sink, then take turns hugging Echo.
“El, watch this! It’s funny!” Echo is watching a cartoon. I sit on the edge of her bed.
Mom and Dad begin speaking in hushed tones across the room.
“Look at this guy!” Echo says, tugging my arm. “He flies with his beard!”
I watch, but I’m having a hard time getting into it. I’m distracted by trying to hear what Mom and Dad are talking about, and it’s just weird to even think of trying to laugh at something in this place.
There’s a dry-erase board on the wall where ten faces with expressions ranging from ecstatic to miserable measure the amount of pain Echo is reporting, but none of them are circled. The board also says which nurses are on duty tonight.
I catch a snippet of conversation from Mom. “She’s not being very understanding.”
Echo laughs. I look to the screen but my ear is tuned in to Mom. I wonder if she’s talking about Echo or me.
“Bring my bag tomorrow and at least I can get some sketching done.” Mom glances toward me and Echo, and I look back to the screen. “It’s not my fault this happened right before Fashion Week.”
She must be talking about her boss, who’s always pressuring her. Since Mom is a dress designer, this is a crazy time of year for her, getting new designs ready for Fashion Week. All over Manhattan the city is ramping up for it, with a huge tent set up at Bryant Park, where models on runways will display what’s coming next in clothing. The sidewalks of Midtown are crowded with models eating frozen yogurt behind their designer sunglasses, carrying their portfolios under their arms.
Dad clears his throat. “Well, tomorrow we’ll have a better idea.”
I look from the screen to Echo, who’s got a mostly finished food tray in front of her. She’s had veggie stir-fry and ice cream and apple juice.
“The food looks good,” I say.
“I stuffed myself,” Echo says. “I don’t get to eat after midnight because they’re taking pictures of me in the morning.”
“Don’t forget to say ‘cheese.’”
She makes a crazy face. “Not those kind of pictures, El
!”
“I’m just kidding,” I say. But my ear is still tuned to the other side of the room, where Mom and Dad continue their quiet conversation.
“It’s not like I can have my dress forms set up in here,” Mom says. “Does she expect me to turn this place into a dress shop?”
I listen for more, but all I hear is silence and gloom from that side of the room.
Meanwhile, Echo seems really happy. It’s like she’s on vacation. We don’t have TV at home, so she thinks it’s like when we’re staying in a hotel. She doesn’t have to go to school and worry about making friends among a pack of strangers, or crazy new teachers. Instead of beginning first grade she gets to watch cartoons and kid movies all day, and go to the play area, and make crafts. Mom told Dad that Echo is getting bored but it sounds like a pretty good trade-off to me.
But her tumor seems like it’s bigger. Looking at her in profile, her teeth are sticking way out, which doesn’t look good. Straight on she still looks cute even though her front teeth are now really crooked, but from the side she looks transformed.
And her tumor is growing. I can practically hear it.
4
THURSDAY. IT’S ECHO’S third day in the hospital and nobody knows anything yet. Or maybe they know but they’re just not telling me.
I’m so tired from the hospital visits in the evening and homework late into the night, the first hours of school are a blur. I doze off in each of the first three classes. That’s never happened to me before. Not until phys ed after lunch do I feel awake.
In science I get paired with the cute boy. We’re supposed to identify different kinds of rocks by looking at them and touching them and banging on them and pouring liquids onto them, seeing how they react. The cute boy goes to fetch the tray of rocks and stuff, because I’m apparently in too much of a fog to be of any use.
He pushes his desk over until it bumps against mine. I look down at the rocks in the tray, then up at his face. I want to push his wavy dark hair out of his eyes. Thankfully he does it for me.