by Avery Sawyer
“Thank you.” The words came out of my mouth like a croak, but it could have been worse. I was ninety percent sure they were right.
“You’re welcome. There, now it’s like you’re really back, thank God. You scared the crap out of me, by the way.” She hugged me close. “How do you feel?”
“Um, I don’t…know.” Terrified, I wanted to say. Confused. Guilty. Wrong. My throat was sore; even whispering was hard to do. My arms and legs felt strange, like they weren’t mine. Was this a bad dream? Wake up. Now.
“Should I put the TV on until you get tired again? Or maybe another blanket?” Mom propped herself on one arm and slowly reached for the remote. I didn’t understand what she was asking me.
“I don’t understand…what happened,” I couldn’t decide what was worse: the pounding behind my eyes or the waves of nausea washing over my body and settling in the back of my neck.
“The paramedics said they found you and Emily in a heap next to the Waffle House at Fun Towne. This is what I get for never being home.” Her face crumpled up as she tried not to cry. Mom is finishing her bachelor's degree so she can go to law school, and she’s always completely stressed out because she’s a full time waitress too. The Waffle House? What was a Waffle House? A heap?
“Emily.” The fog in my head cleared a little and I knew I had to tell the doctors something about her, but I couldn’t remember what. “Will she be…okay?”
“They say she’s stable, honey. I don’t know; I think she hit her head too. I suppose it was her idea to pull that stunt?”
“I…I can’t remember!” I said, way too loudly. I started to cry, shaking in my mother’s arms, even though it made my head hurt worse. “I fell!”
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry. It doesn’t matter. Calm down, baby bird.”
She rocked me until I fell asleep again. I dreamed I was running as fast as I could because the ground below my feet kept crumbling away.
CHAPTER 4
TWINKLE, TWINKLE LITTLE PRESSURE MONITOR
Why don’t they let you sleep if you’re supposed to sleep? Nurses kept coming in to check on me. All I wanted to do was pass out, because every time I opened my eyes, everything was too bright, too loud, too painful. I didn’t want food. No, I don’t want a drink of water. Yes, my head still hurts. Yes, I still feel like puking my brains out. When will this all stop?
Please, just leave me alone.
I fell.
I fell.
CHAPTER 5
WE’RE HERE TO HELP YOU FREAK OUT
The next day two social workers came to my room. Until they showed up, I’d been trying to write down everything I could remember since I’d arrived at the hospital. The nurses said it could help to organize my thoughts. Since nothing had happened to me that morning except an MRI test and the removal of the pressure monitor from my skull, my notepad was pretty empty. I doodled in it because I noticed that if I kept my hands busy I stopped thinking about the screaming. So far, all I had were creepy-looking eyeballs. They were crooked: I couldn’t draw a circle even though I’m pretty sure I used to be able to.
Where is Dr. Kerlin? Corlin? That lady doctor. I wanted to ask her for more headache meds before the dull throbbing behind my eyes lit up into a brain apocalypse again. I did feel better. Just a tiny bit better.
One of the social workers was an older man with a bushy moustache and goatee; the other was a young woman with glasses and thin lips and possibly only nine and a half fingers, although I may have imagined that. She looked like a spaniel because her hair had waves in it that started halfway down her head. I stopped shading my latest eyeball. To make eyeballs look real, you have to show the reflection of light somewhere on the iris or the pupil. Of course, it also helps if you draw them round. I ripped out the page and crumpled it up.
“Hi Robin. I’m Pedro and this is Kelly. We’re from Kissimmee social services and we’re here to help you.” Pedro sat on the edge of my bed, which felt like an invasion of my personal space. The bed was part of me now. What was “social services?”
“Help me…do what?” Could they order more pain medicine? I set my notebook down. “I fell.”
“We know. Help you get better. Your mother mentioned to one of the nurses that you were feeling anxious. That’s very common when people experience a brain injury,” Pedro said. His voice was all concern. I spent a few moments thinking about what he said. Anxious. Anxious means scared. Yes. Yes, I was definitely feeling that.
“Oh.” I guess that made sense.
“We need to ask you a couple of questions. The circumstances of your accident were pretty unusual.” Kelly sounded like she was mad about something. I frowned, startled by her harsh tone. She made me want to say I’m sorry, even though I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be apologizing for. Circum…circum…huh? “Can you tell us what happened?” she asked.
I looked at them both, my eyes wide. “We climbed the Sling Shot. After. After it closed. Nighttime. I guess that was...not in the law?” I trailed off in a whisper. “I’m sorry. We fell. We fell.” Would they call the cops? I thought about what I had said. Not in the law. Against the law.
“Why?” Kelly asked. She took her glasses off and polished them with the hem of her vest. Her eyes were green. I appreciated that her question was just one word. But then she spoke again. “Did you have some sort of pact?”
“Pact? What?” What is she talking about? Pact. Agreement.
Pedro shot her a look and said, “It was an accident, your fall. Right?”
Like a firecracker going off in my head, I understood what Kelly was getting at. Pedro’s words arranged themselves in the right order all at once. The social workers wanted to know if Emily and I had jumped. As in, on purpose. My bottom lip trembled. I wanted to run out of the room, but I couldn’t. My head was pounding again.
“Accident. Yes. We fell.” I didn’t actually remember that, but there was no way it could have been anything else. “It was windy. I remember…there’s something important, but I just can’t…” My face crumpled up as I tried as hard as I could not to cry. Emily needed me to be stronger. She needed me to tell them something important, about what happened, and I couldn’t.
What happened, Emily?
Where are you?
“Can I please talk to her?” I begged. “She has blonde hair.”
“You can’t talk to her,” Kelly said, resigned. “I’m sorry. She’s in a coma.”
Pedro tried starting over. I stared at the window because I didn’t want to look at them. “Do you remember why you climbed up there in the first place?”
Why? Why? Why did we? I didn’t remember. I really didn’t. I opened my mouth to reply and then closed it again. My headache switched from major to severe. I closed my eyes. Worst social workers ever.
“The doctors say you’re suffering from some amnesia, but it should start to recede. Let’s back up a little. How long have you and Emily been friends?” Kelly asked. Her voice was one notch softer.
I kept my eyes closed. How long?
CHAPTER 6
HUGE IN EUROPE
“Come on, you guys! This is important!” Hadley Greer’s shrill voice made me want to stick a wad of Kleenex in each of my ears. Or better yet, a wad in her face. No, it’s not, I wanted to say. But I kept my mouth shut. For now. “We have so much to do if we want to win this year!”
Everyone in my sixth grade homeroom scurried around doing her bidding. We were supposed to be decorating a stretch of the hallway for Color Week. It was a school-wide competition and each homeroom was trying to beat out the others in a series of contests, to prove which one had the most school spirit. Hadley, as our captain, had decided our hallway theme should be Space. So we were supposed to be cutting stars, planets, and space ship shapes out of giant rolls of white paper and sticking them on the walls. Even the boys were into it, which was something. Color Week’s winning homeroom got pizza. That was it. I could have that for dinner every night if I wanted.
I wandere
d away from my homeroom to the other end of the hall, mumbling something about getting a drink of water to get a few precious moments of non-Hadley peace. At the fountain, there was a girl I didn’t recognize. She was texting. Her blonde hair was perfectly straight. She was in my way, so I said, “Uh, excuse me.”
“Sorry,” she shuffled two steps to her right, not looking up from her phone.
“I’m a spy from 107,” I said for some reason. 107 was my homeroom number. “Checking out the competition.”
“Be my guest,” she said, but not in a mean way. “I think they’re doing a jungle theme or something. I refuse to touch the paint.” She finished with her phone, put it in her pocket, and looked at me. I liked her glasses. They were orange. Her shirt had I’M HUGE IN EUROPE written on it in tiny green print. “I wish I could transfer,” she said.
“To another school?” I pushed my hair behind my ears, intrigued. I thought I was the only one who didn’t love Color Week. Even Reno thought it was okay because he could usually get away with playing games on his phone while he pretended to help out.
“Yeah. Some place where sixth graders are too old to spend entire days coloring pictures. I’d rather work on my blog.”
“Ha. I’m, um, not really a spy. I just came over to get away from Hadley screaming ‘Come on, you guys! This is important!’ I'm, um, Robin.”
The girl snorted appreciatively. “Emily.” We did the hand-shake thing and watched people in her homeroom threaten each other with dripping paintbrushes.
“Check out Justin Holmes.” I nodded in his direction. “Hugging that many people in one hour is gross. I think he does it to see which girls are wearing bras and which ones aren’t.” I thought about the school-wide scoliosis screening the week before. The boys were separated from the girls and we had to pull the backs of our shirts up over our heads so nurses could get a good look at our spines. I was shocked to notice that some of the girls in my class had the kind of bra I’d never considered buying, in all colors of the rainbow. Even black. Mine, all three of them, were white.
“Totally. And did you notice he’s always saying to people, ‘Dude, that’s so true.’” Emily giggled again. It made me feel braver. I didn’t usually talk to people I didn’t know for this long. Make that ever.
“Aughhh!” She grabbed my arm. “Bra-seeking behavior at two o’clock!”
I looked. Justin was clutching a girl who was wearing leggings under her jean shorts. We both giggled. The girl in question was definitely wearing a bra. At least, she should have been. Justin didn’t need to check anything.
“He better stay away from me,” I said, crossing my arms.
“You want to leave for a little bit?” she asked. “I figured out that if you tell your homeroom teacher you’re going to get more paint from the art room, they don’t even notice if you disappear for like a half hour. We could totally make it to Dunkin’ Donuts and back by then.”
“Best idea ever.”
She got two Boston Creams; I got two Strawberry Frosteds.
It was a good day.
CHAPTER 7
LIFE OR DEATH
“Sweetheart, I’m sorry I wasn’t here when they came in.” Mom was horrified that she was filling my prescriptions when Good Cop and Bad Cop paid me a visit. “Don’t even think about them. The doctors say you can go home. And you’ll go back to school, and Emily will get better…” she smiled at me, but her eyes were full of fear.
Mom was very concerned about My Future. She was already sending away for college brochures and asking me all the time what I could see myself doing. It drove me freaking crazy. I always told her I could see myself lying on the beach and not contributing to society. Ever.
“Tell me what the nurses are saying,” I mumbled, determined to figure out what happened. I felt a lot better, but Emily still hadn’t woken up. “Was I awake when you got to the hospital the night we fell? When do they think Em will wake up?”
I pressed one of my hands against my head. Emily had texted me that night. Meet me @ Fun T in 20. I remember digging my bike out from our storage locker and seeing that the tires were flat. I couldn’t figure out how to put air in them in the middle of the night, so I’d ridden it like that, feeling like a loser. But I’d made it.
A dark cloud passed over her face. “Honey, I wish you’d stop. The doctors say stress isn’t good for your head.”
“Mom!” I shouted. I sat up straight and threw the box of tissues at the window. It made a really loud sound. She gasped, shocked. “Emily—my best friend—is in a coma and I want to know what happened. Tell me!” My breathing was ragged and I felt frightened. I don’t think I’ve ever thrown anything before, even when I was really mad. Nothing felt right. I wanted to climb out of my head, out of my skin, out of the hospital.
My hands fluttered at my sides and I started smoothing the blankets with them, over and over. If guilt was an object, I knew it was a stone that sat right on you, pinning you down, showing no mercy.
Mom swallowed, waiting to see what I would do next. When my breathing slowed down, she opened her mouth and spoke in a low voice. “I don’t know. You stopped talking to me about your life a long time ago. When I got here that night, you were unconscious. The doctors were deciding if they needed to do surgery. It was the…” She choked and had to start again. “It was the worst night of my life and I’ve had some pretty bad ones. I didn’t know…I didn’t know what was going to happen. Your head, sweetheart. This isn’t a joke. You have to calm down; it’s not safe for you to get so upset.” She stroked my hair, her eyes desperate.
I laid back, limp. I honestly didn’t care that it was the worst night of her life. What about me? What did she think the night was like for me? For Emily? “I keep having this feeling,” I gulped, “that I have to remember something.” It was like something inside of me was whispering, “Keep trying, you know what happened, tell the truth.” I hugged my legs and rocked back and forth, trying not to go completely hysterical. We fell. We fell. We fell.
“Robin, Emily is getting the best possible care. There isn’t anything you can do other than get your own strength back so you can be there for her when she wakes up. Please.” She kissed my cheek and pulled my fingers apart. I’d been literally wringing my hands as I rocked. Until then, I hadn’t even known what that meant.
CHAPTER 8
SLEEP IT OFF
After a few more tests, Doctors Kline and Corwin (Kerlin?) said the contusions on my temporal lobe were healing and what I needed most was lots and lots of sleep, which I could get just as easily at home as in a hospital bed. I’d have to come back twice a week to do therapy.
Hallelujah, they’re letting me go home.
I didn’t tell anyone that when I tried to dress myself, I put on the shoes Mom had brought in for me before I put on my jeans. It didn’t matter. I just wanted to get out of there.
I asked Dr. Kline about Emily as he did a final check on me before my release. He repeated what I’d already heard. She was in serious, but stable, condition in her coma. No change. The doctors weren’t sure why she wasn’t waking up and they weren’t sure how much brain damage she’d sustained. The unspeakable truth seemed to be that things were very, very bad. “Can I see her now?” I asked. “Please?”
“I’m afraid not, Robin. It’s only immediately family in the ICU.” He took the blood pressure cuff off of my arm. He handed me a stack of books about TBIs. I opened the front flap of one and saw a bookplate: From the Library of Dr. Jonas Kline. “When you get back to your regular routine, Robin, you might find that things you never had to think about before are more challenging.”
“No shit,” I said, thinking about how I’d tried to get dressed in the wrong order.
He raised one eyebrow at me. “Some of my patients have found it helps to write themselves notes or lists to avoid getting confused.”
“Notes?” I didn’t understand what he meant. My vision was odd again. It was as if I could see around corners, as if everything had gone f
lat, as if I was watching myself from above. I rubbed my eyes and tried to concentrate on what the doctor was saying to me.
“Yes. Maybe you can get a little notebook to carry around in your pocket. Or use your phone,” he suggested. He pulled out his own phone then and showed me his grocery list. He liked chunky peanut butter.
“I don’t know...what my phone is. Where, I mean. But okay. Thanks,” I said. I wanted to tell him I understood what he meant, but forming another sentence was too much work.
Dr. Kline left the room and I pressed on my eyes with the bottoms of my palms. Maybe if I just concentrate hard enough. I chose a spot on the wall and focused on it, trying to let my mind both relax and work. I could picture Emily; I could see her tell me something. But then she danced away like it was a joke, like it didn’t matter. Like we’d all live forever without even trying.
CHAPTER 9
SOMEONE GET THIS GIRL A MOOD RING, STAT
“Your chariot awaits, baby bird,” Mom said, pointing to the rusty Honda Accord in front of us. “I don’t trust the bus drivers in this town not to jostle your head, and I don’t want to fight with the insurance company about cab fare being covered,” she said. “So I borrowed it from Max.”
I looked around through squinty eyes, happy to feel the hot midday sun on my shoulders. I realized I was supposed to say something. I’d only heard the last word she’d said. “Max?”
“The manager at the Happy Bean. Where I work, remember?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know.” A sinking feeling gathered in my stomach. I felt depressed, which was the opposite of how I expected to feel when I was released from my freezing hospital room. It just felt wrong—hugely wrong—to be going home when Emily wasn’t leaving too. The only information I could get out of one of the nurses was that Emily had undergone surgery to repair part of her skull.