As I lurched down the stairs, Mom raced to the front door—which, unsurprisingly, was also glass—and slid it open. She held Amiga back, thank God, because Dad’s “puppy,” a 130-pound, eight-year-old Brazilian Mastiff that succeeded our two Newfoundlands, could have knocked me over with a single enthusiastic nudge. “What happened?” Mom said, gasping. Her face was practically white and her hands were shaking.
There wasn’t much you could do when my mom got hysterical except try to appear calm while she frantically swiped her hair away from her eyes. She had tons of hair, thick and brown and cut into a bob, with a little sprout of gray just above the left side of her forehead.
“I’m fine, Mom.” She touched my cheek and switched right away to Dad. He was a few feet behind me, carrying the busted pieces of my bike frame. He’d wanted to leave them behind back at the hospital, but I wanted to show them to my friends. When Mom realized what Dad was carrying, she freaked out.
“What happened?” she asked again, the volume shooting up from two to ten.
Dad gave her a quick summary.
She turned to me, speaking very quietly. “You were hit? Are you sure you’re okay?” The calm lasted for half a second. She spun back to Dad and started interrogating him. He explained everything as clearly as he could, and almost succeeded in chilling her out until he mentioned that the ER chief said I was quite fortunate.
Mom went ballistic. “Fortunate? How could my son getting hit by a car be fortunate?” It was kind of entertaining to see Dad catch some crap for once, but Mom’s voice, which I knew she intended just for Dad, was piercing my ears as well. Plus, she needed to relax.
“Mom, do you think you could tone it down a notch? I’m honestly just fine.” She let out a breath and her shoulders dropped. Dad, who was standing behind her, sighed quietly.
* * *
•
The next morning, I woke up feeling groggy. The ER chief had told my dad to awaken me every few hours to make sure I was sleeping, not unconscious, and my parents did that in turns all night. The second I swung my legs out from under the sheets, I felt pain surge through every inch of my body.
I slowly extended a sore arm toward the crutches resting on the wall next to my bed, dragging them along the carpet as if they were weights too heavy to lift. I positioned them under my arms and took in a breath. Wincing, I stood.
For several seconds, the pain was more intense, especially in my hands. They were already swollen, but now with blood draining down into them, increasing the pressure. There were stitches all over my fingers and both of my palms were beaten up; I wondered if any of the closed-up holes would pop open. I stood there, motionless, staring at my hands. I didn’t start moving until I felt sure they’d been adequately sealed.
I hobbled to the corner of my room. It really was a huge bedroom, as my friends always told me. Nothing made me realize that more than the pain I felt limping across it.
I struggled to pull up the shades, probably looking like my grandma did to me when I was a kid, when she made things that seemed so easy look so hard.
Sunlight poured into the room. It landed on the components of my laser project, which was what I’d limped over to the corner to check out. The rectangular plastic walls that formed the laser tube were there, on top of the wood base I’d cut for it. Glued to the surface were shiny copper plates that would be charged by the power supply on hold for me at C&H Surplus. Along the side was the “spark gap”—the area where the energy pulse was released that would cause the laser beam to form and fire.
I’d shown it all to Dad a few times, telling him how impressed the admissions people at Caltech would be when they read about it, but he never seemed to agree. “You’d be better off improving your grades,” he told me once. It pissed me off at the time, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t wait to see the look that would appear on his face when he saw the laser working.
There was a soft knock on my door. “Yeah?” I said. The door swung open. I was surprised to see my brother.
“So you’re not dead,” Ted said, smirking.
“Sorry to have dashed your hopes.”
“Seriously, I’m glad you’re okay. Mom wants to know if you can make it upstairs for breakfast or should she bring it down.”
“Tell her I’ll hobble up.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You sure about that?” He didn’t want to freak her out.
“Walk up, I mean.”
Ted rubbed his nose. “Do you need, like, any help?”
I laughed. “Go upstairs. Chill Mom out. I’ll be there in a minute.”
Ted nodded and disappeared into the hallway. I followed, only slowly, passing the bathroom and making my way to the base of the long staircase that connected my downstairs pad to the rest of the house.
The moment I looked up the stairs, my stomach tightened. I turned back, feeling like I needed to make a run for the bathroom, but just then, my head began to spin. I reached for a wall to steady myself, dropping one of the crutches. I looked at the door in front of me—it was moving. Soon there was a tunnel between me and it, and it kept elongating.
At some point, the spinning and stretching stopped. I stood there, blinking, for several minutes.
That was when I heard Mom calling my name, her footsteps approaching the staircase. The room had stabilized.
“Everything okay down there?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I had no idea what had just happened. But I was certain I didn’t want to freak her out.
I turned back and looked up at Mom. “Everything is perfectly fine,” I said.
* * *
•
Three weeks after the crash, Mom dropped me off at Paul’s house. He’d finally gotten back from computer camp. We’d become instant friends in seventh grade, when he called out of the blue to talk about model rockets and outer space and that kind of thing, after a classmate told him a story I’d shared about a rocket I launched at the beach.
Paul welcomed me with his big, toothy smile. “I’m just finishing up WarGames,” he said. I’d already seen it twice in the theater, a hair-raising movie where this teenage geek hacks his way into a U.S. military supercomputer and unintentionally almost causes World War III. “Come watch the last ten minutes with me.”
I sat down on the living room couch as he pressed play on the family VCR. It was at the freakiest part in the film. The supercomputer was about to launch America’s entire nuclear arsenal against the Soviet Union, “thinking” America could win, and the teenager was desperately trying to convince it that winning a nuclear war was impossible.
I grabbed a pillow and pulled it to my chest. Paul, who normally lounged on the couch with his feet on the table, was sitting straight up, his left hand covering his lips.
The moment came when the supercomputer got the launch code. A surge went through my gut, because the end of the world was moments away. But then the geek hero won the argument. Nuclear war “is a strange game,” the supercomputer said. “The only winning move is not to play.”
Paul and I sat there for a couple of minutes, watching the credits roll, until he got up and switched everything off. “Don’t you just love that ending?” he said, slowly shaking his head. He looked over at me.
I shrugged. “Nuclear war just scares the crap out of me.”
“You and the rest of the world,” Paul said. “My room?”
* * *
•
I plopped myself down on his beanbag. “So how was computer camp?” I asked. “Did you score with the ladies?”
He sat on his bed. “Boring, as always. How was your summer?”
I laughed. “Definitely not boring.”
Paul’s eyebrows shot up. “No way! Did you finally manage to hook up with Lucia?”
I shook my head. “Hardly. She’s still out of town, anyway. So no.” Paul looked
disappointed. “But I did manage to get hit by a van, just a block away from here.”
Paul frowned. We yanked each other’s chains so often we’d developed a pledge system for swearing something.
“Truth?” he asked.
“Truth,” I said. His face suddenly looked like mine probably had when the movie ended.
I told him the whole story, from how I was headed to C&H Surplus to pick up the last part for my laser project to thinking about Lucia to the clueless driver who smacked me, and finally to the super-cute nurse at Huntington Hospital.
“That’s seriously amazing,” Paul said. “Did you get her number?”
“Ha, no. But—truth—I asked her for it!”
Paul cracked up.
After catching up in his room, we went outside to bump a volleyball around. I was more into baseball, the first sport I ever played, and one that Dad took us to watch at Dodger Stadium when we were kids. But Paul was a volleyball fanatic—he had the whole vocabulary nailed and wore Sideout Sports clothes 24/7 and pretty much worshipped Karch Kiraly—so that was what we played at his place.
We bumped for a while, with Paul correcting my “technique,” which was funny to me because I didn’t know I had one. I was thirsty and it was hot out and my head started feeling a little weird, but we kept playing. Paul asked if I wanted to practice spiking, and I told him not really, but then this puppy-dog look appeared on his face and I gave in.
“We really need three people for this,” Paul said. “But I’ll pretend to receive the ball, and then I’ll set for you, and you can try spiking.” I rolled my eyes. “I know it’s hot. Just try this and we’ll go back inside.”
“Fine,” I said. He really wanted to get me into volleyball.
Paul cupped his hands around the ball and threw it into the air, stretched out his fingers and sort of caught it and tossed it back up at the same time, and then looked to me. The ball hit the ground in front of my feet and bounced away.
“You were, um, supposed to spike the ball just then,” Paul said.
“Oh, gotcha,” I said. I was feeling a little strange, like my head was lighter than normal.
“Jeff?” Paul said. “Everything cool?”
I drew in a deep breath and blew it out. “Yes. Spike the ball. Let’s try again.”
Paul smiled. “Cool.”
He picked up the ball and got back into position. Once again, he threw it into the air, and I watched it come straight back to him. Then he tossed it with his fingertips. “Now spike it!” he shouted.
Just then, my stomach tightened up. I lost my focus on the ball. Everything around me started spinning. I stumbled and felt Paul’s hand grip my arm, but I said I needed to get down. I dropped to my knees first. Paul was saying something loudly, maybe just my name, but I couldn’t make it out, and soon it was as if he were standing at the opposite end of an elongating tube.
I flipped onto my back. The trees, the garage, Paul’s house, the sun—everything was spinning. The tension deepened in my gut. The only other thing I felt was desperation, like the whole world was coming to an end.
When things finally got still, Paul’s face snapped back into focus. I think he’d been talking for a while, but I couldn’t understand a word that came out of his mouth. I finally made out “Are you okay?”
I managed to say I needed to go home.
Sometime later, Mom arrived. There was concern on her face. She questioned me, but I waved her off and slipped into the passenger seat. She interrogated Paul as I fell asleep.
* * *
•
Mom took me to see a specialist, a neurologist by the name of Hermann S. Gourevik. He was indeed special. From the graduation certificates on the wall behind him, you could figure out he was in his early forties, but the way he plodded through everything he might as well have been eighty. He was short and chubby and mostly bald with a black beard so scraggly that you’d think he’d missed puberty, and his tiny eyes were set five feet back into his head. Whenever I said anything, he blinked and his nose scrunched up as if he were allergic to me. His pale cheeks were flabby, probably because he never exercised them by doing anything like smiling.
On that first day I saw him, he didn’t smile once, and this was after we waited fifty-six minutes for the appointment to start. He just sat there with his hands cupped like a judge while I told him about the accident and all the strange things that happened afterward. He asked a bunch of questions, half of which I’d already given him the answers to, which he would have known if he’d bothered to listen. The ten-minute physical in his exam room was the worst part, because the man desperately needed some mints. Only when we sat back down in his office could I start breathing again.
He asked how long “the incident” at Paul’s house had lasted. I said I wasn’t sure, maybe thirty seconds.
Mom shook her head. “Seven minutes,” she said. She read back the transcript of her conversation with Paul and listed off everything I complained about to her in the weeks after the accident.
“Thank you, Mrs. Henigson.” I couldn’t tell if he was being sincere or a condescending prick. He cleared his throat and looked at me. Mom had her pen ready. “The episodes you describe may very well be epileptic seizures.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” I said.
“Well, are you familiar with epilepsy?” he said.
“You mean like falling down and flipping around and all that stuff? I’ve seen it in movies. But that’s totally not what happened.”
“Epilepsy is a group of neurological disorders characterized by abnormal electrical activity in the brain. The episodes during which this abnormal activity is occurring are referred to as seizures. There are many different kinds of seizures, with varying levels of intensity. What you experienced sounds very much like a seizure.”
“How exactly do you get epilepsy from a car accident?” I asked.
Mom seemed to have the same question—she was nodding.
“The accident may have caused trauma to your brain that subsequently led to the seizure. But you also could have been predisposed to epilepsy, in which case the accident simply triggered seizures.”
Mom stiffened. “What do you mean by ‘could have been predisposed’? You can’t tell which it was?”
Dr. Gourevik folded his hands, set them on the table, and smiled curtly at my mom. “It’s important we focus our attention on what matters. In this case, it’s getting Jeff’s seizures under control with medication.”
Mom noisily cleared her throat. “Without knowing exactly what the cause is?” she asked. I wanted to high-five her.
“I’ll order an EEG—an electroencephalogram, which is a test for abnormal electrical activity in the brain—but if Jeff isn’t having a seizure in that moment, it’s unlikely to show anything.”
“What about those CT scans?” Mom asked. I’d heard of them. They gave them to people they thought might have Alzheimer’s disease.
“Mrs. Henigson, while I appreciate that you’ve done your research, a CT scan is expensive and unnecessary. We should address the seizures first and move on from there.”
Mom shook her head. “I do not want to move on from there, Dr. Gourevik. I’m not a doctor, but I’m sure it’s better to know the cause of a problem before you start treating it.”
He started with “Mrs. Henigson—” but she cut him off.
“Would you like to set up my son’s CT scan or shall I take him somewhere else?” He considered protesting—you could tell—but everyone in the room knew he’d just had his balls handed to him. He reached over to his intercom and barked at his assistant to set up a scan.
Mom looked satisfied. She dropped her notebook into her purse and said thank you, and we headed to the door.
I was so happy to get out of there and never talk to that blowhard again. I had no clue how many times I’d
be coming back.
We didn’t get around to having dinner that evening until nearly eight o’clock, with Dad running late at work, and once again it was plain, overcooked chicken. Mom used to do really fun dinners, like her taco assembly line with homemade salsa and guacamole and Mexican cheese, but after all the news last year about kids dying from food bacteria, things had gotten a little boring. Meat was the worst. She cooked it so dry you couldn’t get through a bite without sipping from your water glass.
“How was your appointment with Dr. Gourevik?” Dad asked, rehydrating himself with some red wine after trying Mom’s chicken.
“I’d be happy to never see him again for the rest of my life,” I said.
Ted snorted. “Exactly how most people feel about you, Jeff,” he said.
Mom squinted at him.
Dad ignored Ted’s jab, pulling the napkin from his lap to clear droplets of wine from his beard. “Have you received any diagnosis?”
“He said I might have epilepsy, and he was going to put me on medication, but Mom said he shouldn’t treat something without knowing exactly what’s causing it.” I remembered how satisfied I felt when she said that. “It was pretty funny. She put Dr. Gourevik in his place.”
Mom smiled, her chin a little higher than usual.
Dad seemed to have missed my comment about her. “The epilepsy diagnosis,” he said, pausing for another sip of wine, “is it solely based on what happened at your friend Paul’s house?”
I hesitated. “Um, I guess.” I hadn’t told anyone about the incident at the bottom of the staircase just after the accident, or the three other weird spells since. I’d just been waiting for them to go away.
“You appear uncertain,” Dad said. I felt like I was on the witness stand.
I swallowed and looked up at him. “I’m not uncertain, Dad. It’s definitely the only thing he based his diagnosis on.”
Dad sat there for several seconds, looking at me. “So we’ll await the test,” he said.
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