Kiss Me Again

by Rachel Vail

  “That’s what he said,” I didn’t lie.

  “Well, text me if you need me,” she said, buckling her helmet under her chin. “You know, if you suddenly get that gotta go feeling.”

  “I will, thanks.” I sat down on my back step. “Hey, Tess?”

  “Yeah?” She was already straddling her bike, ready to go.

  “From now on, don’t, if I tell you something about Kevin, don’t …”

  “You both need to lighten up.” She blew me a kiss and flew down the hill on her bike, her long hair streaming out behind her.

  thirty

  I LET HALF an hour pass after the parents left for dinner with their friends before I went to look for Samantha. She wasn’t in the kitchen or the living room, so I pulled myself up the stairs, yanking on the banister. Kevin’s door was half-open, but I didn’t see him in there. Samantha was on her bed with her eyes closed and a huge, heavy book open on her stomach.

  “Hey, Sam,” I said. “You okay?”

  “Just resting.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You want to teach me how to blow those bubbles?”

  “No, thank you,” she said.

  “Sorry I couldn’t rally last night.”

  “That’s okay,” she whispered.

  I leaned against the door frame and watched her pretty face relax little by little, her eyelashes resting on her pale cheeks.

  It was nice.

  I could have stayed there for hours—maybe I should have, in hindsight. But instead I turned around and saw that Kevin was standing in the hallway outside Samantha’s room, staring at me with those intense, half-closed eyes that are my kryptonite.

  I stepped around him and was on my way to my room when he asked, “You really going out with that pothead?”

  I turned around, in front of his open door, to face him. “He’s not a pothead, and none of your business,” I said. “You really going out with that airhead?”

  “I thought she’s one of your crew,” Kevin said, stepping toward me. “Don’t you people tell each other everything?”

  “I think you got me mixed up with you,” I snarled back, not letting myself enjoy the fact that Kevin hadn’t denied that his girlfriend or hookup or whatever, Felicity, was an airhead. “How much did you tell Brad about us?”

  “I’m not the one who—”

  “If you guys are going to fight,” Samantha called from inside her dark room, “could you do it downstairs? I’m trying to fall asleep.”

  “We’re done,” Kevin called back to her. “Let’s not …”

  “Absolutely,” I agreed, crossing my arms over my chest. “Let’s not.”

  “So … can I get into my room?”

  “Your room.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Look, I didn’t ask to move in here. You don’t want me here. But here I am. Right? And I have no frigging out. I have no place I can go to not be here. Or I’d go in a heartbeat. You don’t like my shampoo? Well, sorry it’s not up to your standards, but honestly? Screw you. I don’t want any part of the stupid little dramas you and your friends cook up to torture one another. You want to hook up with every skeezy guy in school, even if he’s way too old for you, which he is, by the way? Good. Fine, whatever. Do it. Why should I care? I don’t care what you do, or what your conniving friend Tess thinks I did, or your mother’s feelings about goddamn hammocks, or my father’s stupid rules, or my deadbeat mom’s sorry-ass excuses, or the frigging cleanliness of the freaking bathroom! So, for now, yeah. My room. Because I have no damn choice. So how about you take two steps to the side and leave me the hell alone.”

  “I hate you!” I yelled.

  “Right back at you.”

  “Sam,” I said, seeing her emerge at a slant from her room, just the top half of her angling out, disheveled and squinting.

  “I …” Her eyes were mostly closed.

  “Sorry,” I told her. “We’re done. We were just—everything’s okay. Go back to bed. Sam? You okay?”

  She was sort of slumping down against her door frame.

  “Sam?” I asked, stepping toward her.

  “I don’t feel so … ,” she mumbled.

  And then she hit the floor in a heap.

  thirty-one

  SAMANTHA WAS BLUISH-WHITE and limp, a tiny rag doll there on the floor. I took her head onto my lap. She was breathing, but not very much.

  “Kevin!”

  He was standing above us in a flash. Then he sank down beside us, bluish too, like it was contagious.

  “Call nine-one-one,” I said.

  “I don’t, I can’t—”

  “Now, Kevin,” I said. “My phone is right there, by your foot. Grab my phone and call nine-one-one.”

  “Maybe I should call my mom,” he said. “Is she … what happened? What’s wrong with her?”

  “I don’t know. Kevin, nine-one-one.”

  “I didn’t, if anything …”

  I didn’t want to bobble Samantha’s head, but Kevin was useless, muttering to himself, his head between his knees. I slipped one hand under Samantha’s head and reached past Kevin to grab my phone. I pressed the buttons I had never called before, because you never call 911 unless it’s a real emergency, or you could get in big trouble or distract them from the real emergencies.

  Kevin, meanwhile, was saying, “We better call—I have to call my dad—call my dad first because, if, he’s gonna be so mad, so … at me, if we …”

  I stopped listening to him because the operator had picked up.

  “I have an emergency,” I told her, thinking, No kidding. Thought you called 911 because you wanted to order a pizza. “I need an ambulance because there is a nine-year-old who just passed out and she is, she looks like she might be, um, dying.”

  There’s a joke Tess told me last year. Two hunters in the woods, one collapses, the other calls 911 and says, “I’m hunting in the woods with my buddy, and I think he’s dead; help!” The operator asks, “Are you sure he’s dead?” The hunter says, “Hold on a sec.” There’s a gunshot, and then the hunter gets back on the phone and says, “Okay, now he’s definitely dead. Now what?”

  I was answering questions and following directions: giving the 911 lady my address, checking in Sam’s mouth to make sure she wasn’t choking on anything. I had my finger digging around Sam’s wet mouth, but everything was happening in slow enough slow motion to let me have that stupid middle-school joke running through my head at the same time, and berating myself for it on a separate track. My voice, answering the operator, sounded far away and like Mom’s—calm, capable, in control: No, I don’t think she ingested any poison, drugs, or alcohol; yes, in fact, she did seem a little ill earlier in the day. Yes, she is still breathing. Yes, I can feel a pulse in her neck, but I don’t know how strong a pulse is actually supposed to feel.

  “Yes,” I answered. “I’m her … her, well, I’m her, uh, stepsister.”

  “Is there an adult in the house?”

  “No, we’re babysitting.”

  “Who’s there with you?”

  I looked over at Kevin, his face tight and pale with worry, crouched beside us, rocking, bunched up tight.

  “It’s my, just, he’s, we’re babysitting—can you just please send an ambulance?”

  “It’s on the way. Send your boyfriend down to open the front door, honey.”

  “He’s not my …” I just hung up. “The ambulance is coming. Kevin? You need to go down and open the front door. Okay? Kevin? Kevin!”

  “Charlie, if anything—”

  “Now. Go. The front door, Kevin; not the back door. You have to unbolt it. Go. I’ll call the parents. She’ll be okay. I swear. Trust me.”

  Kevin nodded and sprang up. I heard him cursing the whole way down the stairs and then flinging the door open. From the distance, sirens approached.

  I pushed Samantha’s hair back from her forehead and whispered at her, “I just promised Kevin that you would be all right. And I’m done lying. So you better not die.”

&n
bsp; Without opening, her eyes twitched three times, and then she whispered, “Okay.”

  “Samantha?”

  She didn’t respond at all. While I called Mom’s phone and silently begged, Pick up pick up, I wondered if maybe I had imagined that Okay.

  “Hello?”

  “Mom.”

  The sirens were right outside already.

  “Hey, Charlie,” Mom said, the wonderful lightness lilting in her voice. “Everything good there?”

  I took a quick breath. “No. Something’s wrong with Samantha. You need to come home. Actually, you need to meet us at the hospital.”

  “What? Joe, something happened to Sam. What happened? What’s going on?”

  “She collapsed. I called nine-one-one. The ambulance is here. They’re on their way up the stairs. They’re here. Meet us at the hospital, okay?”

  She was talking, and Joe was yelling questions in the background, but I said firmly to her, “I have to go now, Mom. See you at the hospital. Come quick.”

  I put the phone down because the paramedics were pushing me away. The man was checking Samantha, poking and grabbing at her, slapping her cheeks, asking me questions like if I gave her any drugs. Drugs? No. I argued with her brother, that is all. The woman, who was the bigger of the two, started firing questions at me.

  “Does she have any medical conditions?”

  “Just the lack of consciousness,” I answered.

  “Before this, wise guy.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be—no. Not that I know of. She’s nine.”

  “Did she fall?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she hit her head when she fell?”

  “No,” I said, picturing how she just kind of went boneless, liquefied, not solid flesh—what was that from? Oh yeah, Hamlet: melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew. “I don’t think so. I’m not sure.”

  Both EMTs froze and stared at me. “Did you see her fall?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get the collar,” the woman barked at the man. He dashed down the stairs. They were obviously about to arrest me.

  “I’m pretty sure she didn’t hit her head,” I said. Collar is cop-speak for arresting somebody. I definitely saw that on TV. I swear I wasn’t trying to be fresh! It’s just a habit, when I’m nervous!

  “Better to be sure,” the woman said, I guess to explain why they were about to slap handcuffs on me.

  The guy clattered up the steps and snapped a collar not on me but around limp Samantha’s neck. Kevin winced as they lifted her onto a stretcher and began to navigate her through the hallway, which was clearly designed by somebody who never planned for a sweet little girl getting carried around its corners on a stretcher.

  Kevin followed them down. I grabbed my sneakers, which had been placed emphatically beside my doorway by Joe after I’d left them in the kitchen again. What else? I pocketed my wallet and cell phone. Think, Charlie. What else? Anything? I wanted to be responsible. Nothing jumped out at me. As I passed Samantha’s room, I considered, for a split second, dashing in to get her shoes or a stuffed animal or a book, maybe look for her bubble gum, but I didn’t want to risk getting left behind, so I skipped it.

  At the bottom of the stairway, I slid to a stop beside Kevin.

  “Who’s family?” the EMT guy asked brusquely, his ballpoint pen clicking against the sheet of paper on his metal clipboard.

  “I am,” Kevin and I both said. The guy paramedic looked down past our faces. So did we—and saw that we were holding hands, fingers interlocked. How did that happen? My sneakers hung from my other hand. Kevin squeezed me one pulse, and I pulsed him back. We didn’t let go, just looked at the EMT guy.

  “Okay, then,” the EMT said, rushing out the front door. “If you say so. None of my business. Let’s hustle. You’ll need some shoes, son.”

  I carried my sneakers. Kevin jammed his sock-covered feet into my mother’s Ugg slippers and slammed the door shut behind us.

  We squeezed into the back of the ambulance, where the woman EMT was doing stuff to Samantha as we lurched away from the curb, sirens blaring. There was an oxygen mask over Samantha’s ashen, elfin face.

  My phone buzzed. Thinking it was Mom, I checked. It was a text from Tess: I need to talk to you. In person. Can you come over?

  Sorry, I quickly texted back. In an ambulance. Something v. wrong with Sam.

  I shut my phone and shoved it back into my pocket. Kevin gripped my empty hand tight as the EMT talked softly to Samantha, explaining that she was checking Sam’s blood pressure. Sam did not respond.

  Silent tears ran down Kevin’s cheeks. A pretty crier, I thought; figures. Not like you and me, Sam. Still, I held his hand, and held it together, the whole way to the hospital.

  thirty-two

  A GIRL WHO looked like an exhausted prom-queen/math-nerd hybrid told us in an absurdly British accent that she was the fellow who’d be taking care of Sam.

  I considered pointing out that she was clearly not a fellow, so why would she say she was? But she was in her pajamas, poor thing, and also trying to help Samantha, so I didn’t say anything. Anyway, I was all smart-mouthed out.

  The fellow was gone, then back. Kevin and I were standing like abandoned mannequins in the same place she’d left us. She explained that they were admitting Samantha. This made no grammatical or logical sense to me. I nodded. CT, MRI, MRA, EEG. I nodded more. Get all the information, I kept telling myself. Kevin sat down in a chair with his head clutched between his hands, so the fellow and other pajama people were talking to me, until the parents dashed in, frantic—and even after that, I stayed standing, listening, getting all the information. Joe went with Sam; Kevin stayed in the chair; Mom and I took turns pacing and sitting on hard, plastic seats until our butts itched.

  Only at three in the morning, when it finally was absolutely confirmed that Samantha was officially not dead, not dying, could I take my first full breath.

  I must have dozed off at some point, because the next thing I knew, it was ten a.m. and the fellow who was a woman had come in to escort us to someplace where Joe was already waiting. When we got there, Joe gripped Mom hard and held on as the fellow explained that the attending would be in to see us in a minute. Please sit down. So we did. Mom, Joe, Kevin, and I all buzzed in our chairs, yellow jackets whose hive has been kicked.

  A doctor in a white coat came into the room and told us her name and her qualifications—attending, neurologist, professor. We didn’t care. She could have been the janitor, as long as she gave us some good news.

  “She’s fine,” the doctor said.

  “Fine?” Joe asked.

  “She’s recovering. It seems she had a complicated migraine.”

  “A migraine?” Kevin asked.

  “You know what migraine means?” the doctor asked. She sounded exactly like our third-grade teacher asking, You know what migrate means?

  “A really bad headache?” Kevin said in exactly his third-grade voice. I looked at him and he looked at me, and we both started laughing, completely inappropriately.

  “Kevin,” Joe said. “Please?”

  Kevin and I were both convulsed with laughter. “Sorry,” Kevin said between gasping laughs. “Inside … long story.”

  Just as abruptly as it had started, the spasm of laughter ended. I hugged my arms around my body; it was so cold in the room my teeth started chattering.

  “Her mother gets migraines,” Joe said.

  “Ah,” the doctor said, making a note. “Family history of—”

  “She has to lie down in a dark room for two days,” Joe interrupted. “Samantha’s mother, I mean. I don’t think she ever passed out from it.”

  “Samantha suffered a special kind of migraine, we think,” the doctor explained. “Very rare. Basilar-type migraine. Though there’s some disagreement over whether that’s a misnomer.”

  “What’s the prognosis?” Joe asked. “For Samantha? For basil …”

  “Basilar-type migraine,” the doctor sai
d, clicking her ballpoint pen. “Fine. Excellent.”

  There was a tremor in Joe’s voice as he asked, “So she’s okay? She’s, it’s a headache?”

  The soft-voiced, sleek-haired doctor nodded, her calm face a universe of patience. Mom paused in taking notes and mumbled, “A migraine.” She underlined the word on her black Moleskine pad that had been, as always, in her pocketbook.

  “Yes,” the neurologist said, and smiled. “Well, basically. Although the symptoms of a basilar-type migraine are very scary to witness, they’re not dangerous. No long-term damage or effects. She may have a pretty bad headache for a day or two, and we want to run more tests to be sure that—”

  “She’s going to be fine, though,” Joe interrupted. “The baby is, she’s okay.”

  “Yes,” the doctor said. “We want to keep her …”

  But none of us were listening because Joe was suddenly crying his eyes out, in my mother’s arms. And tears were running down Kevin’s cheeks, too. I put my hand on his back and rubbed, but then that felt so thoroughly inadequate I gathered him up in a hug.

  The doctor waited until we all got ahold of ourselves and then said a bunch more stuff that Mom wrote down in her pad.

  I wasn’t really paying attention. I was looking at Kevin’s feet, which were in my mother’s slippers, and his white socks, and loving the fact that he didn’t even care because Samantha wasn’t dead.

  She was napping when we got to her hospital room. Mom said she’d sit with her while Joe and Kevin and I went down to get some food, that a walk-about would do us some good. She asked Joe to bring her a coffee.

  In the food line, he picked out a dark chocolate bar with almonds. Mom’s favorite. He put it in the bag with her coffee, with a wad of napkins between them as insulation, before we found an open table.

  We unwrapped our greasy food and started eating. I was so hungry I didn’t even taste anything for a while, but then, with my mouth full, had to admit, “This is the worst grilled cheese I ever ate.”

  “I make excellent grilled cheeses,” Joe said, his mouth full of his turkey club.

  “I know,” I said. “It’s the thing that you’re out-of-proportion proud of.”