I cover my mouth. I sink down onto my bed, my knees no longer able to support me. “Are you sure about that?”
I don’t know why I asked. Chrissy is the queen of gossip—she’s never wrong.
“I’m so sorry.” Chrissy’s voice breaks on the words. “I really like Nick, and… I mean, I’m sure he’ll pull through. He’s tough.”
“What hospital is he at?”
I know I said I wasn’t leaving here until my face was healed. But circumstances have changed. I’ve got to see Nick.
Prom night can’t be the last time.
Nick
I wake up and I’m alive.
I’m freaking alive.
Barely. I’ve got a tube stuck down my throat and my head feels like it’s floating away from the rest of me and my body feels battered. No part of me is okay.
My eyelids feel glued together. I manage to crack open my right eye and I can see that I’m in a hospital bed. I can see the tubing sticking out of my throat, which is aggressively pushing air into my lungs. It gives me a sensation like I’m choking. There’s a white sheet covering my body, and at the edge of the bed, my mother is sitting in a folding chair. Her eyes are shut—she’s sleeping.
The tube in my throat hurts like hell, and having it there is making me panicky. I reach out with my hand and wrap my fingers around the tubing. Then I pull.
An alarm immediately starts going off, but that doesn’t stop me, although it’s not as easy as I thought because the damn thing is taped to my mouth. Ma’s eyes fly open and she cries out, “Nico!” Then she grabs at my wrist to keep me from pulling the tube out. But it’s too late. It’s out.
A dark-haired nurse in pink scrubs comes to join my mother at my bedside. She looks at me accusingly, “What happened here?”
“I pulled it out,” I say hoarsely. Oh Christ, my throat hurts.
“I was asleep,” Ma admits guiltily. She looks at me now, but not in a scolding way. She picks up my hand from the bed and holds it in hers. “I guess he woke up.”
“How long have I been out for?” I look at Ma, who doesn’t appear to be twenty years older or anything freaky like that, so it doesn’t seem like I’ve been in a coma for decades.
“You were in and out most of the day yesterday,” she says. I don’t remember any of that. “You spent a lot of the day in surgery.”
I rub my goopy eyes. Damn, I feel weird. I could close my eyes and go to sleep for a week, but I’m scared to go back to sleep. What if I don’t wake up? Or worse, what if they put that tube back in?
The nurse is busying herself looking at some monitors, and she puts this clip on my finger. She keeps clucking her tongue. “You shouldn’t have pulled that tube out,” she tells me.
“Sorry.” I rub my eyes again. “You don’t gotta put it back in again, do you?”
“Hopefully not,” she tells me. “But I need to page the doctor.”
Thank God. It looks like I pulled through somehow. They did surgery and they fixed me and I’m okay. I don’t feel okay right now, but I’m alive and I’m sure I’ll get better. It doesn’t feel like I’m going to die anymore. Not like when I was bleeding out on the street. I was sure I was a goner.
The nurse disappears to find the doctor and my father, and I’m left alone with my mother. She won’t let go of my hand. She kisses it, then holds it against her cheek. It’s annoying, but considering her youngest son almost died, I’ll let her do it.
“How do you feel, Nico?” she asks me.
“Okay,” I lie.
My back aches. I try to shift in the bed, but it’s hard. Every movement I make is like I’m moving through molasses. I notice that there are IVs in both my arms, the one on the left tying me to a pole next to me.
Pop appears at the door to my hospital room, looking as tired and scared as my mother does. His brow furrows as he looks down at me. Did my dad look this old a week ago? Maybe I really was unconscious for twenty years.
“I’m okay,” I say to him, repeating the words I recited for my mother.
But as I say it, I feel a sharp jab of pain in my belly. I touch it, and it hurts so bad that I gasp. The pain radiates all the way up and down my left side. My eyes water.
“Holy shit,” I manage.
“You were bleeding a lot, Nicolas,” Pop tells me. “They had to do a big surgery on your belly to stop the bleeding.”
Maybe that’s why I feel so weak. Don’t they say you get weak when you lose a lot of blood? I wonder if I got transfused. I wonder if someone else’s blood is running through my veins.
I try to bend my knees to adjust myself in the bed, but for some reason, I’m having trouble doing that. I don’t know what’s going on. I feel really out of it. They must have pumped me up with drugs to do the surgery.
“Are my legs tied down?” I ask Ma.
My parents have identical creases between their eyebrows. “Why do you ask that?” Ma says.
“I can’t…” I make another attempt, but my legs don’t budge. Damn. “If you untie them, I won’t get up. I promise.”
“Nico.” Pop puts his hand on my shoulder. “Your legs aren’t tied down. Are you having trouble moving them?”
“Yeah, I…” I try again and this time I start getting freaked out. Because I don’t feel my legs either. The blanket is covering my entire body—are my legs… gone? Did they need to be amputated?
But no, I see my feet sticking up at the end of the bed. I reach down to touch my thigh and at first I think I’m touching a pillow, but then I see it’s my leg. What the hell is going on?
“My legs feel weird,” I complain.
“Teresa,” Pop says, “where’s that doctor?”
My panic starts to rise, replacing that tired, spaced out feeling. I grab handfuls of the sheet with my fists. “What’s going on? Tell me what’s going on!”
“Nico,” Pop says. My parents are flanking me on either side. Pop has his hand on my shoulder and my mother is holding my forearm. “Calm down. The doctor will be here soon. He’s on his way.”
As if on cue, a man in green scrubs blows into the room. He has a surgical cap on his head, but I can see gray hairs peeking out. I wonder if this is the doctor who saved my life. Maybe he’ll be able to tell me what the hell is going on with me. Because my parents sure won’t.
“Hello, Nicolas,” the doctor says brightly. “My name is Dr. Stark. I’m a spine surgeon here at the hospital.”
“I thought I got shot in the belly,” I say, wincing again at the pain in my abdomen.
“You sure did,” Dr. Stark tells me. “But on its way through you, the bullet also hit your spine.”
“Oh.” I don’t know what he’s talking about.
“We had to do surgery on your spine,” the surgeon tells me. “I fused the bones, but the cord itself was completely severed by the bullet. I told your parents this after the surgery. That’s why you can’t feel or move anything below where the bullet hit you.”
No. Fuck no. That can’t be right.
Except I try again to move my right leg. Nothing happens.
“How long is this going to last?” I ask.
Dr. Stark hesitates. “It’s hard to say for sure without doing a thorough assessment, but… the spine doesn’t generally heal, especially the way yours was damaged. So you have to prepare yourself for the possibility that this could be permanent.”
Permanent.
I look at my parents, who have equal grave expressions on their faces. I thought that all I had to do was live through this. I was wrong.
A cold sweat breaks out on my forehead.
“Nico, are you all right?” Ma asks me.
“Yeah,” I manage.
A monitor goes off to my side. Dr. Stark’s eyes flick upward. “His heartrate is through the roof,” he notes. He motions at the nurse. “Get me some IV Ativan.” He looks back at me. “We’re going to give you something to calm you down, Nicolas.”
“No.” Even though I’m starting to see spots, I know I d
on’t want to be drugged. “I don’t want it. I don’t.”
“It won’t be a lot,” the doctor says.
Barely a second later, that nurse is striding toward me with a syringe in her hand. And then I really start to freak out.
“No!” I scream. “I said I don’t want it! I don’t want it!”
I take a swing at the nurse, which isn’t easy to do because I still feel out of it and I can’t even move or feel half my body. I don’t even manage to get close to her.
“Mr. Moretti,” Dr. Stark says to my father. “Could you hold down his left arm and I’ll hold his right.”
“I don’t WANT IT!” I scream at the top of my lungs.
I thrash around so they won’t be able to grab me, but between the three of them, they manage to pin down my arms. If I had my legs, they couldn’t have done it. No way. But that vial of medication goes straight into my vein. And almost right away, I feel painfully tired. I don’t have the energy to lift my arms anymore, much less fight them.
Ma is crying. “Did you really have to do that?” she says in a small voice.
“He was having a panic attack,” Dr. Stark says in a voice that sounds far away. “And probably some of the effects of the anesthetic were getting him agitated. This was a big shock to him. Let him sleep.”
“Doc,” Pop is saying from that far away place, “do you… do you really think this is gonna be permanent? Because Nicolas is…”
I’m trying to listen and hear the answer to his question, but I can’t keep my eyes open. Against my will, I find myself drifting back to sleep.
Chapter 24
Nick
When I wake up, I’m alone in the hospital room. There’s this moment of panic where I don’t know where I am or what I’m doing here, but then I remember.
I got shot. And I can’t feel or move my legs.
That doesn’t make me feel much better.
I feel hazy from whatever drugs they gave me before. I can just barely make out two voices coming from outside my room. It’s a male and a female, but they’re not my parents.
“I told the parents to get some food in the cafeteria,” the female voice says. “I don’t think they’ve eaten the whole time they’ve been here.”
“Are they coming back soon?” the male voice asks. “I’ve got to get out of here and I’ve got to address this before I go.”
“They won’t leave him for long,” the woman says. “They’re really nice. Really concerned.”
“Too bad they’ve got a fuck up for a son,” the man snorts. I wince because I know he’s talking about me. “What the hell was he doing to get himself shot?”
“I think it was one of those gang related things,” the woman says. “There was a robbery and the money wasn’t split fairly. That’s what I heard.”
“Great,” the man says. “Well, the next place he tries to rob better have a ramp.”
I get this sudden, horrible pain in my stomach, so bad that I groan out loud. The two people who had been talking about me seconds earlier enter the room. The female is a nurse and the male is wearing green scrubs like the surgeon I met earlier, but he looks younger. He flicks his cold blue eyes over me with an impatient look on his face.
“I’m Dr. Lovell,” he says. “I work with Dr. Stark.”
“Hi,” I say, already hating the guy for what he said about me outside the room.
“Dr. Stark is in surgery, but he asked me to come do a neuro exam,” the surgeon explains. “If you’re up to it. If you’re not…”
I stare him in the eyes. “I’m up to it.”
I hear my parents’ footsteps in the hallway. They’re talking but it’s too soft for me to hear, which is unusual for them. Usually, people have to tell them to keep their voices down. Pop is louder than any man I ever met.
When they see Dr. Lovell standing there, both their faces pale. He explains to them about doing an exam on me, and they nod in understanding.
“I don’t know if he’s going to feel up to it though,” Pop says. “He got a lot of sedation earlier.”
“I’m okay,” I insist. I don’t want to wait to do this. I want to prove this asshole doctor wrong right now.
Without any ceremony, Dr. Lovell rips the sheets from my lower body. There are blue boots on my legs, and I watch as the doctor undoes the Velcro to remove them. I feel unsettled again by the fact that I can’t feel him doing this. Once my legs are free from the boots, my ankles turn in and my feet fall against each other. I try to correct the position, but I can’t.
“All right, Nicolas,” he says, putting his hand on my foot. “I want you to move your ankle for me.”
A few minutes ago, I had somehow believed I could do it. I close my eyes and grunt with effort, trying to remember what nerve signals I had sent to my ankles in the past to get them to move.
“Did it move?” I ask Dr. Lovell.
“No,” he says briskly.
He repeats the same test with my other ankle without any results. He then tests the muscles higher up in the leg. By the end, I’m sweating with effort, but I haven’t moved my legs even a twitch. At one point, I look up at my mother and see that she’s crying again. Why the hell does she keep crying? I’m the one who can’t move my goddamn legs.
The next thing Dr. Lovell does is test my sensation. He gets a cue tip and a safety pin and touches me all over my legs. A few times, I’m sure I can feel it, but when he has me close my eyes, it turns out I can’t tell when he’s touching me.
At that point, he yanks up my hospital gown and I see something that shocks the hell out of me. I can’t believe I hadn’t realized that I never noticed any sensation of needing to go to the bathroom, and now I see why—there’s a tube sticking out of my dick. And worse, I can’t feel it. I see the damn thing and I want to throw up. At least my parents have the sensitivity to look away.
The sensation returns a few inches above my belly button, right below the white bandages covering my abdomen. I can feel everything above that point and nothing below it.
“There’s one more thing we need to do to complete the exam,” Dr. Lovell tells me. “I need to do a rectal exam.”
I don’t want that. At all. But what choice do I got?
I can’t even fucking roll over on my own. I grab onto the railing of the bed, and Dr. Lovell folds one of my legs over the other, then pushes me onto my side. For a second, the pain in my belly is almost blinding. My eyes tear up and I take deep breaths until it subsides.
“All right, Nicolas,” Dr. Lovell says. “Tell me if you feel this pinprick at all.”
I wouldn’t even know he was touching me. And I can’t feel it when he does the rectal exam.
“Now I want you to bear down,” he tells me. “Like you’re trying to hold in a bowel movement.”
I close my eyes and try to do what he’s telling me to do. “Am I doing it?”
“No,” he says.
Dr. Lovell doesn’t even bother to cover me up again once I’m on my back. I can at least pull the gown back down, but my legs are bare on the sheets. Not moving. Mocking me.
“What do you think, Doc?” Pop asks anxiously.
“He’s got a complete injury,” the doctor says, addressing my parents rather than me. “That means that no nerve signals are getting through. That’s consistent with what Dr. Stark saw during his surgery—the spinal cord was completely severed.”
“What does that mean?” Pop asks. “Is there a chance he’ll recover?”
“No,” Dr. Lovell says. “Obviously, it’s not a hundred percent. You know, people win the lottery sometimes. But in all likelihood, he’s not going to recover any movement or sensation in his legs. He’s not going to be able to walk, and he’s going to need a wheelchair for the rest of his life.”
That sick, dizzy sensation I had earlier returns. That can’t be true. I’ve got to get better from this. Not being able to walk ever again? No way.
No fucking way.
My father’s face is ashen. My mother is s
obbing now to the point where I wish she’d leave. It’s hard enough without having to watch her cry like that.
“Surely there’s some research study,” Pop says. “Believe me, money is no object, Doctor.”
“There’s no study I know of that’s effective for someone with your son’s injury,” he says. “Maybe in his lifetime… who knows? But right now, he needs to get used to the idea of relying on a wheelchair for the foreseeable future.”
I hear a beeping noise, and Dr. Lovell’s eyes lift to one of the many monitors surrounding me. He glances back at my parents. “His heartrate keeps jumping. Any chance he could be in alcohol withdrawal?”
“Alcohol withdrawal!” Ma cries. “Dr. Lovell, my son is not an alcoholic! Nico is a good boy.”
The doctor actually rolls his eyes. He looks down at me. “What do you say, Nicolas? How much do you drink every day?”
“I don’t drink,” I say through my teeth.
Dr. Lovell laughs. “Maybe I shouldn’t have asked you in front of your parents, huh?”
I want to punch the guy in the face. If I could move from this bed, I’d be tempted to do it. But I’m going to do one better—I’m going to prove him wrong. Maybe I wasn’t able to do it today. But I will. I’m going to walk out of this hospital.
Chapter 25
Jessie
I hate hospitals.
I don’t like the smell. It smells like death in hospitals. Death and illness. Or maybe that’s just iodine. Either way, I hate it.
When I get to the information desk at the hospital, the woman there takes one look at my face and says, “The ER is on your left.”
I touch my bruised lip self-consciously. “Actually, I’m… visiting someone.”
The woman raises an eyebrow at me. “Okay. What’s the name?”
“Nicolas Moretti.”
I hold my breath as she bangs at the keys on the computer. After a pause, she reads the text on the screen: “He’s in the surgical intensive care unit. That’s on the second floor.”
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