Alive (5 page)

I unscrew the caps of my prescription bottles and empty two pills of Avapro and one of Imuran into my open palm. The medicine doesn’t even make me throw up anymore. If that’s not
progress, I don’t know what is.

I take a swig of water from a leftover cup on my nightstand.

Right as I hit “enter” I wish I hadn’t. My parents would die if they saw that and, besides, my entire existence has caused enough pain as it is.

huskiejones8: speaking of which, did u survive ur first day back?

I’m glad he ignored my comment. I was lucky that Brynn and Henry let me tag along with them all day. In the past year and a half, Henry has gotten popular. Like really popular. The kind
where girls doodle his name on notebooks. Sometimes I swear I’m just a fixer-upper project for him. Take pity on the sick girl. A plot out of one of those ’90s teen flicks where the
homecoming king tries to be nice to the misfit. But I know I’m only being cynical.

stelbelle022: Ish.

I don’t mention the bloody handprints. Or the fact that they made me feel as if I’m losing my mind.

huskiejones8: a rousing endorsement.

A couple minutes pass without the chime of a new IM and I take the opportunity to check my celebrity blogs, but no one famous has either broken up or gotten back together within the past
twenty-four hours. It’s a real downer.

The window containing my conversation with Henry flashes with a new message.

huskiejones8: well, i’m glad ur back…

It’s the dot-dot-dot that worries me. I’m still not ready for this conversation. I’m not ready to decide what Henry and I are yet. It’s too soon. And what if it ruins our
friendship? I’ve only got two and a half friends as it is. I can’t stomach losing another.

Henry and I became friends over a stringy-haired girl with dated clothes and telekinetic powers. Her name was Carrie and she was a character in a Stephen King novel that Henry and I both read at
age twelve, well before either of us was old enough. We’d call each other in the middle of the night:
Are you sleeping? What page are you on?
Both too frightened to keep going but too
competitive to stop. Pretty soon we were challenging each other to see who could out-scare the other. First there was
The Exorcist
, followed quickly by
Hell House
,
Rosemary’s
Baby
, and
The Amityville Horror
, until we were no longer freaked-out little kids but connoisseurs.

We began mainlining episodes of
The Twilight Zone
in the basement of Henry’s house, and we eventually discovered this crazy paranormal conspiracy podcast called
Lunatic
Outpost
via a superfan message board. We would spend hours coming up with our own nutty theories about ghosts and dead presidents, and I could almost forget I was sick.

I return to the window.

stelbelle022: I should probably get started on this homework.

huskiejones8: and get to work planning your next stage stealer from the Replacement Child

stelbelle022: It’s weird…I’d have thought the whole heart transplant thing would have done that.

huskiejones8: chubby cheeks are a hard card to trump.

stelbelle022: True.

I sign off and ten seconds later, the screen goes dark. So much for that distraction. Now all I have to do is wait.

It’s four thirty-five. Thirty-three minutes left.

I navigate to YouTube and watch a couple of stupid cat videos, which are only mildly amusing. When I’ve run out of attractive links there, I flip on the TV. I like the background noise.
Plus there’s a
Friends
rerun I haven’t seen in a long time.

I do my best to avoid checking the time, but with seven minutes to go, my hands start to sweat.
Relax,
I try to tell myself when I notice my fingers digging into the comforter. My dad has
a theory. He says I anticipate the pain, therefore get stressed about the pain, therefore cause the pain. I’m a walking, talking self-fulfilling prophecy—or, as my dad claims, a
Pavlov’s dog.

I looked it up. The term refers to an experiment performed by Ivan Pavlov. Every day, Pavlov rang a bell at the exact same time he presented a group of dogs with food. In time, the dogs began to
salivate at the ringing of the bell, whether or not the sound was accompanied by a side of Kibbles ’n Bits. They’d been conditioned by the anticipation. In other words, I’m the
equivalent of a German shepherd with a drooling problem.

Yeah, it’s not the most flattering comparison.

Two minutes to go.

I try to laugh along with the laugh track, but it’s hard to concentrate on the silliness, you know, to really buy into it. In another minute, I know why.

It starts out small. An itch under my ribs that gradually becomes discomfort. That discomfort spreads from my back all the way through the top of my intestines. My breathing gets heavy. While I
can still move, I tear down my covers and crawl underneath. Cradling my pillow, I pull it against me as if that will be able to stop the thing that’s growing inside.

A deep breath.

Five oh eight.

That’s when it hits. The pain spikes through my entire body and races up my neck and into the base of my skull, a white-hot light that blinds me. It scorches everything it meets.
Incinerates my insides. My back arches. I scream into my pillow.

I’m torn in two pieces, and out from the brokenness pour words. Only I can’t make them out. They’re hushed—no—muffled. I strain against the pain. Against the
pressure in my ears.

Waves lap at the edges of my mind and I try to haul myself out. But nothing washes away the pain. And the words hover out of reach.

The moment lasts seconds and forever and not at all. All I can see is the light, glaring and dazzling.

It hurts. God, it hurts.

Tears streak my face and soak my pillow. As the light backs away from the edges of my vision and of my mind, the pain subsides, dwindling until it fades into a pinprick in the cavern of my
chest.

And then it’s just me left at the end. Slumped and ragged.

“Cross, Cross…Come in, Cross!” My eyes flit up from my turkey sandwich on pita when Henry snaps his fingers underneath my nose.

It’s been a week, and I’m worn down by the process of trying to catch up. There’s never enough daylight, sleep, energy, concentration, never enough
time
to break even on
all the work I’ve missed. Henry’s binder taunts me from under the nightstand in my bedroom. One tiny peek? I’m just stubborn—or stupid—enough to resist.

I’ve been picking at my food for twenty minutes and Brynn’s already accused me of being anorexic twice. It’s not like I’m
trying
not to eat. I just haven’t
been hungry since the transplant. It’s most likely a totally normal side effect and Brynn just hates that I’m finally skinnier than she is.

“Huh?” I say thickly. I’ve been doing that blank stare–y thing again, and Henry’s looking at me across our lunch table, eyebrows raised, clearly waiting for me to
say something. Anything.

I clear my throat. “Sorry…can you, um, can you repeat that?”

Brynn snorts but doesn’t look up from her math book. She’s scribbling down the last few answers to an assignment due today. Her hair’s still wet and wadded up into a bun and
she’s bitten the drawstrings of her sweatshirt until they’re a darker color of red at the ends. Lydia’s sitting with us today, too. Lydia’s a floater. She sits with us some
days and with another group other days. Technically, she’s Brynn’s friend from swimming. She’s kind of quiet in a way that seems purposeful, and I sometimes wonder if she hates
standing out as the only black girl in our school. For someone who barely talks, it’s funny that she’s the one who feels the need to split her time between social groups.

“Sorry.” I kick Brynn under the table. “I was to-do-listing in my head.” Brynn holds up her middle finger but keeps her eyes on the glossy page, muttering numbers under
her breath. Charming.

Henry removes his baseball hat and flips the bill backward. It’s a nervous habit of his, backward, forward, backward, forward. I’ve watched him do it a million times in Calc, which I
know for a fact is definitely not his thing.

“We’re all going to do something tonight.” His glance flicks over to Brynn before returning to me. “You wanna come, maybe?”

He said “we,” which means he’s not asking me out again. It’s a friends thing. Friends are good.

Brynn slides her textbook off the table and rams it into her crammed backpack. “He’s asking if you’re officially off house arrest.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” I ask. “And go do what?”

Lydia giggles, her lips parting into a wide, sheepish smile. Brynn stares at me like I’ve sprouted tentacles out the top of my head.

“What’s wrong with that?”

Brynn exaggerates a sigh. “Do we have to put all our cards on the table?”

I look to Henry for help. He shrugs. “She’s right. We can’t let you become a hermit. Not on our watch.”

“But—”

“Stel.” Brynn slaps her forehead. “We’re trying to surprise you, moron. That’s it. You’re coming.”

A smile tugs at the corners of my lips. “Fine. You guys are so strict.”

“You ready?” Lydia asks me. We have the same period after lunch and usually wait to walk together. She shuffles a stack of notes she’d been looking over and places them in a
red folder.

“Be ready at eight,” Brynn calls after me. “We’ll grab you on the way.”

“On the way to where?” But she’s not listening. She’s already turned her attention back to Henry.

Lydia and I walk to Anatomy. Each time she speaks I have to strain to hear her over the school’s normal hustle and bustle.

“Are you coming?” she asks.

“To what?”

Her giggle is melodic and she looks at me only out of the corners of her eyes, through a feathery arc of thick eyelashes. “To Michelle Boerne’s.”

I realize I must have missed a chunk of her conversation, but I put together that Michelle’s having a party either next Friday or the Friday after that.

“Oh. Sure, I guess so.” It’s not like I’ve got plans for any Friday night in the near future. Lydia smiles, but her eyes are trained right back at the ground and I know I
won’t be getting much more out of her. Still, I take this as an invite. Or at least close enough.

Somewhere between the cafeteria and our classroom it occurs to me that Lydia, who tends to total only three sentences every hour, is probably my third-best friend in the world right now.

Inside Ms. Birkbauer’s anatomy class, Lydia and I weave our way through the rows of empty lab tables and find a two-top near the back of the classroom, where the beakers are lined up next
to the sink.

At the front of the classroom Ms. Birkbauer gets up from her computer credenza and rings the teacup-size bell she keeps on her desk. “As you get settled, please retrieve the pig hearts we
were working on earlier this week. We’ll try to finish up with the dissection today so that you all can have plenty of time to write your lab reports by next week.” Plenty of time? As
if.

Lydia shudders. “Ew, that stuff smells like brain juice.”

“
Brain
juice?” I giggle and get behind her in the line forming behind the refrigerated case. “Is that a smell you’re well acquainted with?” I ask.

She levels her chin, moving one step forward in the line. “No, but I think that’s like what Hannibal Lecter preserves the brains in before he eats them. You know?”

“Okay, disgusting. I prefer my brains preservative-free.” I slide the covered tray marked cross from the thin refrigerator shelf and trail Lydia back to our lab table.

“I don’t care either way, as long as there’s no gluten.”

I snort. That may be the first funny thing I’ve ever heard Lydia say. I set the tray down on the black countertop. The smell hasn’t fully hit me with the lid still on, but I know
exactly what Lydia’s talking about, only to me it smells like sickness and old people. Or maybe like those big morgues where they perform autopsies.