They’re a little wobbly at the moment.
There’s not a lot of room on the narrow bench in the back of the ambulance. I nearly go flying when they pull away from the emergency room and crank on the siren.
I grin. “Floor it, dude,” I yell to the driver.
The doctor sitting on the other side of Eve’s stretcher sends me a what the hell? scowl.
I know it seems wrong to enjoy this, but still: the siren and the zooming through the streets of San Francisco while all the other cars scatter? Very cool.
Besides, Eve’s going to be fine.
I think.
We’re at the bridge in no time. The bridge. The Golden Gate, still the best, never get tired of it. I fantasize sometimes how great it would be to ride a longboard down the cable. Yes, there would almost certainly be a long plunge to a hideous death. But before that it would be amazing.
I sit with my elbows on my knees, trying to hunch my shoulders forward a little. I have good shoulders, might as well reveal them. I know she’s checking me out. Fair enough, because I’m checking her out.
“Ah ahhh ahhhh!”
Eve cries out suddenly. She’s in pain. Bad pain. So it’s possible she’s not really checking me out.
“Doc,” I say, “can’t you help the girl out?”
He leans over to check the IV tube. It’s gotten kinked, the flow cut off. He straightens it and tears off strips of white tape to hold it in place.
“She’ll be better in a second.”
“Cool,” I say. I lean in close so she can hear me. “I got him to crank up the morphine,” I say, speaking loud and slow.
Her eyeballs kind of roll toward me. She doesn’t seem to be focusing very well. And for a second I think, whoa, what if I’m wrong? What if she actually dies?
All of a sudden it’s like I want to cry. Not happening, obviously—crying, I mean—but there’s just this sudden wave of sadness.
I shake it off as well as I can. But once you start seeing the Big D, the Reaper, sitting beside you, it’s very hard to stop.
“Don’t die, okay?” I say.
Her confused eyeballs are looking for me. Like I’m a target and she can’t quite line up the sights.
So I get close again and I kind of touch her face and aim her head at me. Unfortunately, I lean my other hand on her leg—the wrong one—and there’s some yelling from Eve and from the doctor.
Which makes it impossible for me to say what I had planned to say to reassure her: Don’t worry. I’ve seen things. I know things.
Your mom has powers.
She won’t let you die.
– 4 –
Operation? What operation?
They tell me it lasted fourteen hours.
I wasn’t really there. I was in a weird landscape of dreams, nightmares, and memories—with a little shopping thrown in.
I’m pretty sure I had an extended dream where Aislin and I wandered around the big Westfield Mall downtown on Market Street. Of course, it could have been a memory. It’s hard to keep track of the difference when your blood flows with whatever drug they use to separate your consciousness from your senses.
My new doctor, the one who arrived with the private ambulance, has on a lab coat that reads:
Dr. Anderson
Spiker Biopharmaceuticals
Creating Better Lives
It’s a chic low-sheen black. He looks like he should be foiling my hair, not checking my pulse.
Solo keeps staring at me. Not a she’s dead meat stare. More like he’s an anthropologist who’s just discovered a new tribe deep in the heart of the Amazon.
The road was a little bumpy over the bridge, but I’ve discovered I can surf the pain, feel it roll and crest and crash. If you think about something, anything, else, it’s not so bad.
The fact that I can think at all, when my leg has recently been—well, chopped off and glued back on is, I believe, the medical term—is kind of a miracle, and I’m grateful for the random thoughts that flood my brain.
Things I Think About, Exhibit A:
How I got a B+ on my oral report in bio, which sucks because it’s going to bring my grade down, and possibly my GPA, which means I won’t get into a decent college, which means I’ll never escape the clutches of my crazy-ass mother, and I know this really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, especially now, but that’s not the point, is it?
I’m pretty sure Ms. Montoya dropped my grade because of my intro: “Boys have nipples.” Perhaps this was news to her.
It was a risky ploy, sure, but when it’s second period and you’re the first speaker and the Red Bull has only ignited a handful of brain cells, you do what you have to do.
There were twenty kids in the room. When I moved to the front to tie my iPad to the projector, I’d say I had a total of eight eyeballs out of a possible forty watching me.
I delivered my opening line, and thirty-nine eyeballs were trained on me. Jennifer has one lazy eye, so I was never going to get all forty.
“Why?” I asked. I cued the first slide, which was of a boy’s chest. It was a fine chest, a very fine chest, and I knew it would hold the attention of the nine straight girls and one gay boy.
It was a cheap ploy, but sex sells. It always has, it always will, and in the context of a boring report day in my boring eleventh-grade biology class at boring Bay Area School of Arts and Sciences, a smooth, hard chest over rippled abs was just the ticket.
The way I had the presentation laid out, we’d see that slide two more times. We’d also see DNA molecules, a little video snippet of dinosaurs demonstrating the concept of survival of the fittest—because seriously, there’s no bad time to show bored kids some dinosaur-on-dinosaur violence—and the inevitable graphs, pie charts, and equations that would earn me a decent grade. And chest to keep my audience.