“They sure do like to hide, don’t they?”
Mrs. Michelle was one of the worst nurses I’d ever had. What she lacked in precision she made up for in southern charm but it still wasn’t enough to coax one of my arteries to the surface.
“Maybe because they know what’s coming,” I said.
“Oh, found one.”
She stuck me and I pretended not to feel it. She filled a vial full of my blood, stuck me again, filled another vial. Then she dabbed me with a cotton ball and pulled the gauze so tight I could feel my pulse in my throat.
“Okay, all done.” She smiled, proud of herself. “You can head back into the waiting room until Dr. Sabine calls you back.”
She pointed down the hall even though I’d already been to the office three times that month. If anyone knew the drill, it was me.
My mom was frantically flipping through a magazine when I sat down next to her.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
“I had Michelle.”
She grimaced. “Poor thing couldn’t pin the tail on a donkey even without the blindfold.”
I reached for a magazine, searching for a page that wasn’t an ad. There was some retro song pouring from the speaker but it wasn’t loud enough to drown out the snoring to my right. I glanced over. Michael Erickson.
He was your stereotypical narcoleptic. Fell asleep in the middle of the pool at his twelfth birthday party. I was standing in line for cake when someone started screaming. Thirty minutes later the ambulance was toting him off to the ER while everyone stood there in shock, well except me for me and Monica Row—another one of Dr. Sabine’s narcolepsy patients. I never got my cake.
Monica’s case was less severe. I heard that she was actually a cheerleader these days or something else terribly normal. One summer she and I spent every Sunday morning before our appointments naming the fish in the aquarium above the magazine rack. I spent a lot of time making the rounds with Dr. Sabine’s other patients but those friendships were as sporadic and unreliable as my disease.
I was the only KLS patient Dr. Sabine had ever had—I knew I was the only one in the entire city of Austin; probably the entire state—so those forced friendships shriveled up fast. It was a little hard to plan play dates around narcolepsy and even harder to plan them around a coma. And the dream-state. No one had ever heard of anything like it and I didn’t exactly feel comfortable discussing it after Michael started claiming I was some kind of alien.
Maybe I was. Better than dying I guess.
I saw nurse Michelle back at the front desk. She was whispering to one of the other nurses and eyeing me through a plastic fern. I tried to read her face and see if she was still holding my file. What if they’d found something in my blood? What if they knew?
They’d taken a lot of blood, more than usual, and even though I couldn’t tell if the nausea was from that or something else, I reached for one of the vanilla wafers she’d given me.
I let it dissolve on my tongue but I still felt on edge. The cold hit me and I scratched at my forearms, nausea settling like a pulse between my eyes. I felt like I was about to pass out. No. Not now. It’s nothing. He’s nothing.
Dr. Sabine stepped into the waiting room, ushering me back, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if I should tell her or if I should wait. Part of me was sick of hearing them refer to the place in my head as a coping mechanism because part of me was afraid that’s all it was. I was tired of being patronized, of them trying to convince me of some explanation for every strange unexplainable thing that happened to me. And I was tired of waiting for a cure. If I told them about the boy, what if I couldn’t participate in the trial anymore?
“How are you feeling today, Bryn?” Dr. Sabine asked.
“Fine.”
“Our favorite word,” she laughed. “Well, glad to hear it.”
I tried to concentrate while Dr. Sabine walked us through the rest of the procedure. It was simple. Basically they’d just stick a few needles in me and see how my body reacted to the medicine, test for allergies and abnormalities. If it seemed safe, because nothing is ever certain, then they’d distill it in capsule form and I would take a few pills a day, waiting to see if it kept the episodes at bay.
She kept talking but soon her voice faded out. I’d heard it all before. The drug is experimental. Results are subjective. Sign here, here, and here. I let my mom thumb through the paperwork, even though she probably had that memorized by now too.
Dr. Sabine faced me. “Now this particular medication might induce an episode.”
I picked at the gauze, trying to loosen it.
“Bryn?”
I looked up. “Sorry. You said it might induce an episode.”
“Right, but that’s a good thing. We want the medicine to be in control because it might also be a means of waking you.”
I nodded, not absorbing a single word. I didn’t need to after hearing the word might. It might work was always code for probably not.
On the way home we stopped by Felix’s dad’s garage. I’d been working on my sculpture sporadically. But all of the parts my uncle had brought me just weren’t the right texture. They were too corroded, flecks peeling off in my hands as I tried to heat them with the flame.
I let myself in through a side door, my mom waiting out front and taking the opportunity to ask Felix’s dad about some strange knocking sound under the hood that was probably just another imaginary product of her anxiety.
I spotted Felix standing under a black GTO, one I hadn’t seen in the shop before. He spun when he heard my footsteps echoing off the garage.
“Shit. Don’t sneak up on me,” he said.
“Sorry, slow day?”
He looked up and I saw that the car was completely gutted.
“Special delivery,” he said.
“For who? The mob?”
“Hey, hey.” He raised a hand. “Lower your voice.” He nodded to a table covered in shiny chrome parts. “Check it out. We’re putting in a new street engine. Seven-hundred horsepower. This things gonna fuckin’ fly.”
I brushed the finish. I’d never seen one in person, though I’d watched my uncle drool over plenty all of those Saturday afternoons we used to spend watching car shows on TV.
I ran my hand along the valves “And the camshaft?”
“Hydraulic roller, of course.”
“Any of these up for auction?” I asked, patting a valve spring that would have looked awesome on my sculpture.
“Yeah, right. I’ll take you to the scraps.”
I followed Felix to the back where they kept the recently dismembered—tables covered in glinting metal, garbage cans filled to the brim with scraps.
“Anything good?” I said, picking through a pile of license plates. “You guys sure do get a lot of these.”
“We’re the only shop that can do an exterior paint job in one night.” He winked. “In the dark.”
“Didn’t need to know that.”
“Don’t worry, it’s totally illegal.”
I tucked a few cracked spotlights into my bag along with a few of those license plates—one from Kansas, one from New Mexico.
“Sorry you missed the deadline,” he said. “That blows.”
“I’ve still got another shot. Have you applied anywhere yet?”
“Who? Me? Um, no, I’ll be here.”
I nodded. “Take over the family business. That’s cool.”
Felix had never been big on school. He was always that one kid who turned his pencil into a drumstick and every assignment into a paper football. He always had to be doing something with his hands, a tick that was perfect for being a mechanic.
But I knew that wasn’t the only reason Felix wasn’t going away to school. He had four younger siblings and after his grandmother had a stroke last year and went to live with them, they suddenly became his responsibility. I remembered us sitting on his back porch one afternoon, me teaching him how to French braid his little sister’s hair s
o he could do it for her before school in the mornings. Half an hour and a few expletives later, he was a total pro, two more sisters perched at his knees, waiting for their turn.
“Yeah.” Felix jumped up on one of the tables, swinging his legs. “I like it. It’s not so bad.” He cleared his throat. “So uh, is Dani going with you? Away to school, I mean.”
“I don’t know. School’s not really her thing. Why?” I said, eyeing him.
“Just asking.”
“Sure.” I grabbed some silver and copper coils, oil slipping under my fingernails. I raked them on my jeans. “You know Matt’s got two more weeks. Tops.”
Felix laughed. “Wow, that’s pretty serious.”
“Yeah, I think it’ll be a new record.”
I stuffed one last scrap of metal in my bag, the shiny partial exterior of a bumper, and then tried to wrestle it closed. It finally snapped shut and I looked up at Felix.
“You know she’s scared right?”
That’s all it was. Because even though Dani was afraid to be alone she was also afraid to get hurt again. Because the moment you find out you’re not exempt from heartache, it feels like that’s all you’re good for. Getting your heart broken. Breaking someone else’s. I knew Dani had feelings for Felix and so did she. But she also knew how it would end, thought she did anyway, and it was that anticipation that kept her at bay. Even if it meant she’d be crying over losers like Matt the rest of her life.
Felix stared at the ground. “I know.”
“She’ll come around,” I said, even though I wasn’t so sure.
He flicked a drill bit across the table and it spun.
“She knows you’d be good for her,” I said.
“Yeah, well no one ever wants what’s good for them, do they?”
I bent down, angling my face in his line of sight. “Don’t give up.” I patted my bag. “Thanks for the goods. There won’t be black sedans full of FBI agents waiting for me outside will there?”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We paid them off. You’re good to go.”
Chapter 11
Bryn