The Girl In Between
By
Laekan Zea Kemp
***
Copyright 2014
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the above author of this book. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 1
Bryn
The tide surged, carving a crescent in the sand. Water collapsed against my knees, tearing the beach out from under my legs. But when the wave receded the foam clung to something dark. Something long and still.
I saw his face, lashes tangled over blue lids, his lips parted against the sand. The breeze rippled off his clothes, ocean peeling from his face and dripping onto my hands. I was steeled there, not sure if he was real, until I saw his eyes, a flash of his dark pupils.
My hands trembled, afraid to move him, to wake him. Afraid he wouldn’t. Another wave spilled over him, the sand giving way, rocking him. I reached for his shoulder, pushing until he was on his back. He was the color of a hydrangea before it blooms, wilting like one too, every inch of him sunken and bruised.
I bent down, listening for a heartbeat. Nothing. My fingers trembled against his face and then I took a deep breath. His lips were cold and I pressed down hard, burying his mouth with my own. The water trickled down his jaw, foam sticking to his skin. I drew in another breath and then I forced it down to his lungs.
He was still and I sunk against his chest, pushing, pushing. Breathe. Please. The tide curled underneath him and then his muscles tensed. His back arched, air driving down to his lungs.
And then he opened his eyes and so did I.
***
“Bryn.”
I blinked.
“Are you okay?”
I heard my mom’s voice, her hands freeing me from the blankets.
“Awake?” she said.
I nodded, the dull shade of my room coming into view. I saw my David Mach Spaceman poster, my LP collage above my desk, my welding gloves on top of my hamper, and my mom’s face, shadows spilling down the bridge of her nose. This time I was awake.
“How long?” I said, my voice shallow and hoarse.
She brushed the hair from my face and I felt it stiff and sticking to her fingers.
“Four weeks,” she said.
Four. I sunk against the mattress. “That’s not…” Better. I’m not getting better.
“At least you didn’t miss Christmas,” she reminded me.
My pulse was in my ears as she gripped my hands.
“We’ll try again,” she said.
“We’ve…”
“We’ll try again.”
I let go of her.
“I’ll get you some water. Are you hungry?” she asked.
I shook my head, tears sliding down the back of my throat. But she didn’t see them.
“I’ll make you something just in case. Do you want me to grab you some clothes? I’ll run a bath—”
“Mom. Stop.”
She liked to fill the emptiness, especially when she was nervous, which was all the time. But words were just a side effect not a remedy.
“I can do it,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
I rolled to the edge of the bed and planted my feet on the cold wooden floor. I let the chill rise through the soles, waking the rest of me. Those first few steps were always shaky, muscles remembering to contract, blood trailing down to places that felt numb enough to cut off, but this time I’d been asleep for four weeks.
The last time I’d slept that long was two years ago when Dr. Sabine set me up in a hospital room for observation during some experimental therapy. I’d woken up five weeks later thinking I’d been cured. A month passed. Then another. Then six. Six whole months without an episode. But then one day I slumped to the floor in the middle of art class, out cold for two weeks, and I knew I hadn’t been cured. I still had Klein-Levin Syndrome and it still had me.
I shuffled to the bathroom, each step like needles pricking the balls of my feet. I sat on the edge of the tub, catching my breath while steam climbed the vanity mirror, but not before I caught a glimpse of my reflection. That was always the worst part because I always looked like shit.
This time was particularly nasty. My hair was in a tangled mess on top of my head, curls matted into knots I knew I’d spend the next hour desperately trying to untangle. I could see my collarbones sharp beneath my grey skin. My fingernails were long and cracked—the ones on the left shaved down from where my mom had most likely tried to clip them.
I thought about her wrestling with my 130 pounds of symptomatic defiance; with my disease. I hoped I hadn’t made it too hard for her even though I knew I always did, because when I was sleeping, I wasn’t always out completely.
It was a strange thing knowing that my body was able to function without consciousness. During an episode I could still eat and drink and do all of the necessary things it takes to live. I just couldn’t remember doing them. And yet those strange symptoms were really the only things doctors knew for sure when it came to KLS: the sleeping for long periods of time, the aggression, the binge eating, the delirium.
But the symptoms were subjective and inconsistent and, for me, sometimes non-existent. I didn’t have a normal strand of the disease. I had something else. Something worse.
I stared down at my hips, at my thighs. They looked foreign but not sharp enough to cut straight through. Not like last time. Sometimes I’d wake up ten pounds heavier and sometimes I’d wake up looking like a bag of bones. I didn’t even remember what my body was actually supposed to look like anymore. I didn’t remember normal.
I slipped down into the tub, the water pouring over me in a rush. I just simmered there, wanting to melt. But then I remembered the boy, the sallow color of his skin, lips peeling and blue.
I never dreamed when I was sleeping. Not like that. I went somewhere, tucked between moving photographs—the past and the present, every memory I’d ever had stitched into some fluid breathing patchwork. And the water. It was everywhere.
I spent most of my episodes sitting on some illusory beach waiting to wake up—the conscious’ coping mechanism, my doctors had always said, though no other KLS patients had experienced anything like it.
But this time when I felt myself drifting, just on the verge of waking, I’d looked down the shoreline and there he was. Spat out by the waves. A floati
ng corpse.
Until I filled his lungs with air and he woke up.
I heard a knock and the knob springing loose. I pulled the curtain, hiding my face.
“Bryn?”
I felt the steam pour out, cold air rushing in. Then my cousin Dani shut the door.
“Thank God. That was a long one.” I heard her lean against the bathroom counter. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine.”
No doubt my mom had already filled her in. Four weeks. She’s still sick.
“What day is it?” I asked.
“December 21st.”
I exhaled, feeling the water rise. I’d missed semester exams and my mom’s birthday. I’d missed the deadline for the scholarship contest at Emory.
“At least you woke up in time for Christmas,” Dani offered.
I imagined the parts of the house I hadn’t seen in four weeks covered in tinsel and ceramic ornaments; fake flower arrangements on every side table, my mom’s favorite Native American wind instrument Christmas CD on repeat.
In the past six years I’d missed three Christmases. I tried not to think about my mom and grandmother wrapping presents they weren’t sure when exactly I’d open, hoping that I’d be lying with them on the couch on Christmas morning watching old home movies and eating cinnamon rolls when really I’d still be in bed, neither of them able to gather enough resolve to even switch on the Christmas tree.
That was one of the worst things about being sick. Someone was always waiting on you, which meant disappointing people was inevitable.
“How was…?” My voice cracked and I swallowed. “How was I?”
I knew Dani would have been here most days, checking on my mom, she and my aunt bringing by groceries when my mom was too afraid to leave me and run to the store. She and I had grown up more like twins, though she had our mom’s signature dark skin and straight black hair while I inherited cork screw curls and a strange egg shell coloring from some long lost relative on my dad’s side.
“Not bad,” Dani finally said. “You pretty much stayed in bed the whole time. Got a little annoyed when your mom tried to turn you but that’s it.”
I remembered the first time I got bedsores. They looked like bruises at first, swirling up from the waist of my yoga pants and near the collar of my shirt. I’d been asleep for six weeks. Luckily that’s as bad as they’d gotten and once my mom started turning me every day I hadn’t gotten them since.
“And how was she?” I asked.
I heard Dani sigh. “Fine. Like always.”
Fine. That’s not what I’d heard in her voice that morning. My mom’s face was always the first thing I saw once I finally opened my eyes and every time she looked older. This time it had looked like I’d been gone for years, her laugh lines deeper and crawling to the translucent skin under her eyes. She looked tired.
“Are you sure nothing happened?” I asked.
“Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“What’s ordinary?”
I heard the air cut through Dani’s nose. “You know.”
“Did I miss anything at school?” I asked.
She grew quiet. Something Dani never did.
“Hello? Did something bad happen?”
“Well, I don’t know if it’s bad necessarily. Actually in your case it might be good news. Unless—”
“Spit it out, Dani.”
I hated when people tried to act like the world didn’t exist while I was sleeping, erasing the past however many days from their own memories for my sake. I wished they’d just hand me some kind of running list, Things Bryn Missed, and be done with it. No awkward skirting around whatever emotions they thought I’d still attached to things like time. I was way past that.
“Are you sure?” she said. “I mean you just woke up and—”
“I’ve been sleeping, not off to war or something. Stop tip-toeing.”
“Drew’s dating someone.”
“Someone…”
“Else.”
“Yeah. Got that. Who?”
“I don’t know. She doesn’t go to Imperial.”
My throat tightened.
“Are you okay?” Dani asked.
I bent my knees, letting the water rise to my chin. It was cold.
“Fine,” I said.
“Are you sure? You remember last time when he—”
“I’m fine.”
I thought about that stupid red box sitting on my nightstand. The anniversary present I couldn’t open. The one he’d thrown against my headboard because I wasn’t ready. Because he was tired of waiting and I still wasn’t ready.
Four weeks. It had felt like a long time when I’d first woken up but just then it felt like a flash, like it took him no time at all to find someone else. Someone normal. But as angry as I was, as much as I hated him, I hated myself a little too. Why can’t I just be normal?
“Can you wait out there?” I said. “I want to finish up in here.”
“Sure.”
I heard the door slide closed and then I was underwater, watching the soft ripple of the vanity lights as they swirled with tears.
Chapter 2