Sunshine (30 page)

I hear things. Little, muffled things at first, like I’m underwater. People walking around me. The low beeping of a machine. Another one making a soft whooshing noise. I try to get an idea of what kind of shape I’m in.
Nothing seems to hurt too much, but I know that things are supposed to. My stomach, my chest. And then there are new things. My side, my throat, my face and head.
I know I’m not breathing on my own, which isn’t too much of a surprise. I can feel warm air going down my throat and into my lungs. Expanding them, keeping me alive.
Slowly, my heavy eyes open.
It’s dark, but as my fuzzy vision adjusts, I can see there’s a faint light illuminating some of the room I’m in. I’m guessing it’s above wherever I’m laying, because I can’t see it.
Hospital. Again.
I want to know where Myles is. My family. I want to know if I’m all in one piece. Most importantly, I want to know what happened to Michael. If he’s dead. Judging by the blood that was smeared all over Myles, I’d say so, but I need to be sure.
And what the hell happened with my head? Why did Michael bleed into a gash on my head? What did Myles do? I reach up with one hand to feel for the spot. My wrist—both of them, actually, are wrapped in magenta casting. Well, at least someone has a sense of humor. But when my fingers reach my head, all I feel is a layer of thick gauze.
A guy I don’t recognize walks in, shutting the door behind him. He’s about middle aged, wearing light blue scrubs, and he has long, honey colored hair secured to the back of his head in a pony tail. I don’t try to talk, but I squint at him.
“My name is Evan,” he says, coming closer. He has a slight accent but I’m too tired to try to figure out exactly what it is. “You are in the hospital ICU, about an hour outside of New York City. You are safe here.” He fiddles with a tube coming out of some part of my body.
Wait—Evan? Like the club owner, Evan? What’s he doing here? In
scrubs.
This is already too much information and ultimately, not important in the grand scheme of things. My chest aches, my left side is sore, and my throat and head aren’t too much better.
Evan’s hand appears near my right, magenta enclosed, wrist, placing something that feels like a pen in my palm. “You can press this button for medicine,” he says. I push the little button at the top twice. “I will go get Myles for you,” he tells me before backing out of the room.
I close my eyes for a minute, alone with the machines again.
Someone squeezes my hand.
Myles.
And there he is.
His clothes are dirty. There are brown, red, and black stains all over his jeans and T-shirt. His eyes, the most brilliant shade of blue-turquoise they’ve ever been, searching me.
He sits in the chair nearby, moves it closer so he’s no more than a few inches away. “I know you want to talk to me,” he says. “But you have a tube in your throat helping you breathe.”
I slowly blink to say,
yeah, I know.
“But you and I can still communicate,” he says.
He places a hand on the side of my face.
See?
Myles’ lips don’t move; I hear it inside my head.
Well, this is going to be a one sided conversation.
“The drugs they have you on weaken the walls around your mind. All you have to do is think
towards
me. I think I’ll be able to hear you.”
So I think of the most important question first. I imagine it as a little thought bubble, like in a comic book and I send it over to Myles. I have no idea what I’m doing and I doubt it’s even going to work, but it can’t hurt to try. I feel my head tingle a little bit as my imaginary bubble reaches him.
What happened? I want to know everything.
And Myles raises his eyebrows and smiles at me. It worked.
He speaks to me in the more conventional way when he answers. “Michael could sense that he hadn’t killed you. When he found us at the rest stop, he told me he’d kill you if I didn’t give him a ‘head start.’” He swallows hard, gives my hand a squeeze. “I couldn’t keep him away from you long enough. He crushed your lungs, broke more of your ribs. He stabbed you in the stomach.”
Whoa, stabbed?
I direct towards him.
He nods once.
That explains the sharp thing I landed on. Shit.
He stops talking, but there’s more I want to know.
He bled into the cut on my head. Why?
Myles swallows again. “His blood is poisonous to humans,” he says. “If I had let it stay in your body, you would have died.”
The scene comes rushing back to me in a matter of seconds. Only I’m seeing it as Myles saw it. My car, me lying on his lap, Adrienne holding me down. I glance at Myles, and he nods. He’s showing me what happened.
In the memory, Myles is breaking my back seat window, taking a piece of the glass and cutting his own wrist with it. Then he presses it to the gash in my head. And I scream. The memory stops. “His blood has a mind of its own. It seeks other vampire blood.”
So that’s why he cut himself open. His blood against mine, in mine. Sucking out Michael’s.
I can’t put off asking about him any longer.
Is he gone?
Did you...kill him?
Myles sighs again, he squeezes my hand more. “They don’t want me telling you all of this now.”
Myles. You have to tell me.
I shoot the thought at him.
He nods. “He can’t hurt you anymore.”
Are you sure?
He nods again.
Then we’re quiet. And the few minutes we don’t say anything is kind of nice. It isn’t awkward, or scary. I’m not scared anymore. Michael is dead. He can’t hurt me.
“You’re going to have quite a few scars,” Myles changes the subject. I could not be happier.
I smile. That is so not something to worry about. I mean, I'm alive.
What’s one more?
I direct at him. But I still have to ask,
what’s the damage?
Apparently, I have a load of damage:
Scraped up face. Fractured skull. Two broken wrists. More broken ribs. Stab wound. Two collapsed lungs. Two chest tubes. One Tracheal tube helping me breathe, right through the center of my throat. And one huge scar that trails from the middle of my chest to right above my belly button. That scar, Myles explains, is there because I had internal bleeding. They had to see where it was coming from.
With that out of the way, I ask,
when can I get out of here?
Turns out, sooner than I think.
The morning of Christmas Eve, the tubes are taken out, and I get to go home.
Jade settles me into my bed. There are a crazy amount of flowers and stuffed animals arranged on any spare surface in my room, not only are they from my friends and family, but kids at school that I don’t even know.
They all feel bad about my
car accident
. At least, that’s the story we’re sticking to. I had, according to the hospital, hit a patch of black ice and crashed into a tree. The fact that I have no recollection of this is common in cases like these. Needless to say, my car is wrecked, thanks to whoever it was that was tasked with creating the evidence of the car crash.
I still have a whole bunch of stitches that need to come out, not to mention the row of staples running from my chest to my belly button that I refuse to look at.
I sleep mostly.
When I wake up, my room is quiet and dark except for Christmas lights someone has hung on the walls. Myles is sitting next to me in my bed. I’m happy to see him and I don’t try to hide it from him or myself. I watch the Technicolor glow of the rainbow lights reflect off of his face.
“Hey.” With the tube in my throat removed, I can talk, but it’s easier to whisper. My chest aches, but it isn’t that bad.
Just then I can hear muffled voices rising and falling above us in Stevie and Jade’s house. “They’re celebrating,” he explains, smiling at me and moving closer. He grabs a hold of my hand and squeezes it, cast and all.
“Celebrating what?”
Myles slowly lifts my hand to his lips and kisses it. “Besides having you home, different things,” he says. “Your mother is celebrating the fact that your accident brought Adam and her together again, Stevie and Jade are happy you’re home and healing, and Boo and Trei are excited to be moving to New York soon.”
I blink a few times. Is he serious? I can’t go to New York now. None of us have a chance at playing at his friend Evan’s place now. I can’t audition with my hands wrecked and risking my chest coming unscrewed. I look down at myself like I’m trying to relay all of this to Myles. “We’re not going to New York,” I say quietly, even quiet for a whisper. I don’t want to think about that now. I can’t dwell on it.
“Yes, you are,” he says it like I’m supposed to know. He has a look on his face that tells me he’s up to something, so I wait for more. “I kind of did something that you may not like,” he says.
“What?”
“I found one of those CDs you were working on. I gave it to the club.” He waits for me to get angry, but I’m not. I mean, that’s what those CDs are for, aren’t they? He continues with a wide smile on his face. “They’re so happy to have your band on their list. Evan said you can start there any time you’re ready.”
“Really?” A huge smile spreads across my lips.
“Really.”
I take a minute to bask in my happy warm feeling. Then I get a little sleepy, I lay back more comfortably. I motion for Myles to sit closer, and he doesn’t need to be told twice. He places an arm behind my neck, his nose against my temple. He’s careful when he moves me, like I’ll bust open like a piñata if he’s not.
I play with our hands, mine awkward and itchy inside its pink casting and his smooth and slightly cool in mine. “Are you in any pain?” he asks.
“No.”
“Are you sure?” he asks.
“If I were, you’d know,” I remind him.
He seems to straighten up a little bit more, “No,” he says.
I stare up at his face, a white canvas for the lights to dance on. “What do you mean?” I whisper.
Myles shrugs, smiling at me, “I have no idea why, but I can’t feel what you’re feeling anymore.”
“Just me?” I ask.
He nods.
Weird. “Oh.” I absentmindedly turn his hand in mine, there are little blue threads poking through his pale skin.
“I’ll have a scar,” he says softly.
“Really? I didn’t think you could get them.”
“Michael’s blood hurts us. But I’ll be alright,” he seems like he doesn’t want to talk about it, and that’s fine by me. He looks at me, smiling for a second then looking away. “I’ll understand,” he starts, but he has to take a deep breath to finish. “I’ll understand if you don’t want to do this anymore.”
And I can’t say I didn’t think about it for a second while I was in the hospital. It was only a matter of time before he thought the same thing and brought it up.
“Don’t be crazy.” I kiss his cheek
I just want to move on. Everything’s alright now.
Myles glances at me, a twitch of a smile comes to his face and then disappears. “I feel horrible. If I hadn’t told you anything, maybe it wouldn’t have happened.”
“Yeah, maybe. But you’d also be lying to me and yourself about who you are. And you know what’s worse than feeling bad about this?” He waits for me to continue, raising an eyebrow. I try to make my voice come out as more of a voice, but it’s still a coarse whisper. “Making me feel bad about it. So stop.”
I guess he decides to let it drop, because he smiles before letting his head rest on top of mine. “Alright,” his voice is sincere, “I don’t want to make you feel bad.”
We’re quiet for a long time. “Myles,” I say. He lifts his head so he can look at me again. “I love you.” And it doesn’t feel weird. It doesn’t feel like I shouldn’t be saying it or feeling it. It feels so completely right that I can feel it in every single bone of my body. Even the broken ones.
He hugs me, “I knew that. But it’s nice to hear you say. I love you too.”
“You know what else?” I say.
“Mmm?” he sounds relaxed, content.
“I don’t care who knows about it.”
He hugs me tighter. And it feels right.
“Oh,” he says, taking one of his arms from around me and reaching to the floor by the bed on his side. “I got you something.” He hands me a thin square wrapped in shiny green paper. I reach for it and rip, revealing a really beautiful looking notebook. It’s thick and heavy, bound with brown leather. And it smells like a new book. “Look inside,” he urges.
I set it down on my lap so I can open it, and familiar lines and symbols appear on each page in neat cursive-like writing.“Sheet music?” I ask.
“Not just any sheet music.
Your
sheet music.” He points to a page. “It’s only a few. Ones that I’ve heard on your computer. But if you want to share more, I can write it down for you.”
I give a short, astounded laugh. There are even lyrics under the piano notes. “You can read sheet music?”
“Everyone from my early years knew how. I can’t play very well, but I can read it. I’ve never had any interest in the piano until now.”
I flip the pages carefully, not really sure what I should say. “Thank you,” is a good start.
“You’re welcome,” he says.
And I feel like the biggest asshole alive because I don’t have anything for him.
Or do I?
“Go get my laptop.” He gives me a questioning look. “I have something for you,” I clarify.
“You don’t have to give me anything. I already have what I want,” Myles tells me. I roll my eyes. Oh how cheese-tastic is that? But the cuteness of it isn’t completely lost on me.
“Please?”
He gets up and goes into my music room, coming back with my silver laptop in hand. He sets it on my lap and I open it, clicking on the music program and finding the song I wrote after the dance. Our dance.
“It’s not done, but I think it’s meant for you,” I say honestly
I take a deep breath and click play.
And the notes start out slow, deep, with a hint of lighter ones layered over them. And the voice on the computer sings. It’s mostly just humming where I wanted the actual lyrics to go, but I have a solid chorus down. I watch Myles’ face as he closes his eyes, like he’s in a different place. The chorus starts:
“I want to see the world.
In black and white.
A silent film.
A snowflake.
Your face.
All black.
And white.”
When the song ends, Myles opens his eyes like he’s waking up from a dream. “Like I said, it’s not done,” I’m already defending myself.
Myles holds up a hand to stop me. “It’s beautiful,” he says softly.
“You think so?” Now I’m all self conscious about it.
He nods slowly, “Yes, I love it.” Then he smiles at me, taking the laptop and setting it aside so he can embrace me again. “I love you
,
” he says in my ear. And I never want to move again.
A few seconds later, there’s a knock on my door. Myles slowly takes his arm from behind me, placing a pillow where it was. He opens the door and Jade is standing there with a plate full of food.