Chapter 12
Colin
She knows. I’m absolutely certain of that when her eyes meet mine as I set foot in this stupid greenhouse. Admittedly it’s quite a nice venue with all the threadbare armchairs and sofas they’ve got here. Olive’s expression has changed. I see concern instead of disdain.
Word that I’m diabetic is gradually getting out, so it was only a matter of time before that fact reached her too. I was kind of surprised that her dad hadn’t mentioned it to her, but apparently he takes doctor–patient confidentiality seriously.
I immediately look away and bury my hands in my hoodie pockets.
I’m already regretting having come. I didn’t even want to, but after first Sinclair and then Kit invited me, I thought I could at least give it a try.
Besides, I couldn’t stand the idea of spending the whole weekend holed up in my room, wallowing in self-pity because Maresa’s snaps keep popping up in my head.
I stroll over to a bunch of guys from my English course, where I spot Kit too, give them a nod, and then glance aside. Suddenly, Olive Garden is standing in front of me.
“Hi,” she says curtly, her green, catlike eyes boring through me. Her long dark hair falls over her shoulders, the skin pale and soft-looking. Yeah, soft. I can’t think of another word for it.
“What’s up?” I say, forcing myself to look away again. Don’t want her thinking I’m pleased to see her because I’m not. Not one bit.
“We need to talk.” It sounds like a threat. Is she pissed with me again? What have I done now?
“At a party?” I laugh. “Crazy idea, Olive Garden.”
Before I have time to react, she’s grabbed my arm and is pulling me away.
Past the others, to the door, and outside.
The night is fresh, and I can’t help noticing how she shivers and hunches her shoulders.
Briefly I consider lending her my sweater.
But I’m not doing that. This isn’t some crappy teen romance.
Quite apart from which, she’d be way too proud to accept anything from me.
“So . . .” I cross my arms and lean back against the wall behind us. “Talk to me.”
She doesn’t talk. She looks at me and swallows. My mouth kind of dries out. And then she does speak.
“I heard that you—” She pauses. “. . . You’re diabetic?”
“Don’t worry, it’s not catching,” I snap, but she’s not being scared off by that.
“I know it’s none of my business, but you’re going to tell me what to do in an emergency.”
I narrow my eyes to thin slits.
“I mean it, Fantino,” she insists.
I can see that, Olive Garden. “Why do you even care?”
“I don’t care.”
“You’re contradicting yourself every other sentence.”
“Yeah,” she says stubbornly. “Well?”
“So you want me to explain it to you even though you don’t care?”
Her glare could kill. “I haven’t got all day.”
I sigh, but common sense wins out. If things ever do get complicated, it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea for someone to know what to do.
“OK,” I say coolly, pushing myself away from the wall.
“It’s basically very simple. It’s about sugar—i.e.
, carbs—and insulin. When I eat, I need insulin so that the sugar reaches my cells and can be turned into energy.
Your body can produce its own insulin and does that automatically. Mine can’t anymore.”
She gives a controlled nod. “So you have to inject it?”
“I have a pump,” I say, but I can tell she has no idea what I’m talking about.
So I lift my T-shirt to show her the round pod above my left hip that combines my pump and a measuring system.
I’m surprised she hadn’t spotted it on Sunday night by the display cases, but hey, it was dark.
Now I can’t help noticing the way Olive’s gaze flits over the waistband of my jeans and my belly.
I suppress a grin. Oh, Olive Garden, are you really that easily impressed?
Then she seems to remind herself of who she is, because she looks away from my belly and back up to my face. “That’s it?” she asks calmly.
I nod.
“I always thought . . .” She stops. “No, doesn’t matter. Forget it.”
“That it would be more noticeable?” I ask.
She stares at the ground, like she’s been caught out.
“It used to be, until a couple of years ago. Back then, I had a tethered pump with a tube and a separate sensor for the glucose meter. The technology’s improving all the time.
So are the meters. Now everything works through this pod, and I can control it on an app. ”
“But how does it work? That’s only a plaster.”
“The pump system’s in there, with a needle to supply the insulin and measure my blood sugar.”
“A needle?” She’s taken aback. “You mean, it’s in there? The whole time?”
“It’s really small and fine,” I explain. “But yeah, the whole time. Of course I have to change it regularly. About every three days.”
Great, she’s got a phobia of needles. Her face has gone even paler—I can see that even in the dim light out here.
“It doesn’t hurt or anything.” No idea why I say that.
She’d probably be glad if it did. Most of the time she looks at me as if she isn’t exactly averse to the idea of hurting me.
But now she’s looking at me differently.
With that fucking worry in her face. Suddenly I wish we hadn’t had this conversation.
“OK . . . How do you know how much insulin you need?”
My smile is tired. “I’ve had diabetes since I was eleven. After a while, you can just kind of tell.”
Such a long time now. I can see from her eyes that she’s thinking the same thing.
“The pump releases small amounts of insulin all the time, which covers what I need for the day,” I continue. “At mealtimes I can give myself a bolus dose. So that’s fast-acting insulin for when I eat. I don’t really think about it anymore—after a while, it’s just routine.”
Olive nods but doesn’t speak.
“I used to have to actively check on my levels, but now I can look at my daily profile in the app at any time, which also shows me if there’s a trend up or down.
But most of the time, I can tell anyway if I’m having a hypo or a hyper.
So then, depending which it is, I either eat something or adjust my blood-sugar level with insulin. ”
“How do you feel it?” she asks.
“I just do,” I say. “The important thing is to be around one hundred most of the time. That’s the baseline.”
“So your blood-sugar level has to be a hundred?” she repeats.
“Yes, wait.” I pull out my phone and open the app. When I hold it out to her, her eyes widen slightly.
“Colin, that’s too low.” She lifts her head. “Isn’t it?”
Colin . . . Not Fantino. I think it’s the first time she’s ever called me that.
I turn the screen back toward me, and oh, she’s right.
I don’t actually feel that low. I remember what Dr. Calder, my doctor in New York, said before I left, when we were talking about my levels over the last few months, which get sent directly to her by the app.
Too many hypos that I didn’t notice, or didn’t notice in time, and were reflected in my HbA1c level being too low—that’s the long-term blood-sugar level that she calculates at every checkup.
In the long run, that tends to be better than being permanently too high, which can damage your blood vessels and lead to problems with your eyes or kidneys, or pretty much any other organ.
But all the hypos are more annoying because they sometimes catch me by surprise and they can get serious pretty quickly.
They call it impaired awareness of hypoglycemia, which means that my body’s gotten used to the warning signals and doesn’t bother sounding the alarm until things are critically low.
So low that I don’t have much time to act.
Dr. Calder wanted to sign me up for a special class that would teach me to be better at paying attention to the warnings, but then I was suddenly in Scotland, not New York, so I never had the chance.
I reach into my pants pocket. “Yeah, so what are we gonna do, Olive Garden?”
She looks at me, and I can see this slight panic in her eyes. God, she needs to chill.
This early in a hypo, I can still help myself, and I’ve got at least fifteen minutes before my body switches off the lights.
“Eat,” I say, shortly, holding an individually wrapped candy under her nose. “Anything sugary. Cola, juice, candy, they’re all great. Followed by carbs, which you metabolize more slowly.”
“Muesli bars or bananas,” she says tonelessly.
Sure, the swimmer who can’t swim would know that stuff. I unwrap the candy. “You were pretty pissed off at me for being allowed to eat anytime, weren’t you?”
She blinks, caught out. “I thought you were being rude,” she explains, crossing her arms over her chest.
“I think passing out in class would be kind of rude too.”
Olive freezes. “That can happen?”
“If I didn’t do anything about it.”
“So . . . if you didn’t eat?”
I nod.
“So you always have to have something on you?”
“Generally a good idea.” I’m trying to sound sarcastic so that she won’t notice the slight tremor in my voice that always sets in if I start to get shivery and a cold sweat breaks out.
But she spots it. Her eyes flit from me to the benches a few yards away. “Want to sit down?”
“No,” I say immediately. If she hadn’t been standing there, I might have considered it. But there’s no need. I’ll be better soon.
“What happens if you forget?” she asks.
“Forget what?”
“To bring something to eat.”
“I don’t forget. It’s just habit now. Like the way you always have your phone with you, don’t you?”
“What if you can’t respond anymore?” I don’t like how serious she sounds. “Tell me what I should do.”
“Nothing,” I snap.
“Colin . . .”
“Call an ambulance,” I say curtly. “Or get your dad. They have a glucagon pen in the sick bay for emergencies. They know what to do.” When Olive doesn’t reply, I turn away slightly. “Right, so that’s everything you need to know. See you, Olive Garden.”
“No, wait.”
“What?”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be alone just now.”
There’s a treacherous tingle in my belly. “I’m not.” My voice is hoarse as I point to the greenhouse with my chin. She doesn’t speak as I head for the door. Then I stop and turn back to her.
“What?” I ask again. “Planning on putting down roots out here?”
Her eyes rest heavily on me, and I feel weird.
She’s looking at me differently. Less hatred in her expression.
Gentler. Almost like she cares. Something stirs within me, and it takes all my strength to push it down.
Not an option. I can’t develop feelings and be the rejected one again.
I’ve had enough of that. The thing with Maresa should’ve taught me a lesson.
“No.” She shakes her head, and the defiance comes back to her eyes. I repress a grin. “No, that’s sorted now.”
But apparently, I never learn.
Olive
I left the midnight party early, shortly after Colin went.
I’m still surprised he was even there. After our chat, we avoided each other as far as possible, which wasn’t hard because he hung out with Kit, Will, and some other lower-sixth lads, while I was with my friends.
Even so, I spent the whole time thinking about our conversation.
Now I’m lying in bed, and for a change, I’m not panicking about going to sleep.
Instead, my head is whirling with thoughts that won’t let me rest. I can’t stop thinking about Colin and the insulin pump that’s permanently attached to his body.
I spent long enough in hospital to imagine what that must feel like.
But for Colin, it’s not just a few weeks. It’s forever.
I’ve had diabetes since I was eleven.
Eleven. That’s so young. How do you teach an eleven-year-old kid to inject themselves with insulin every day and to check what they’re eating? Or wasn’t it so bad then? How did he get diagnosed? Why didn’t I ask?
Because I was overwhelmed. Because I only had eyes for the two-digit number on Colin’s phone when he was trying to show me how he checks his blood sugar.
I automatically reach for my own phone. The room is dark, and the screen is bright. I pinch my eyes together as I start googling.
Low-blood-sugar symptoms.
I click the link to the most serious-looking website and start reading. About the shivers and sweats, pallor, dizziness, and nausea that indicate hypoglycemia.
Colin’s shaking fingers as he unwrapped the sweet.
Aggression. Aha. Perhaps he’s permanently hypo. That would explain a few things.
I shiver as I keep reading: Anxiety, fidgetiness, difficulty concentrating, hallucinations. Heart palpitations, weak knees, headaches, confusion through to loss of consciousness, cramps. Stopping breathing. Potentially fatal if nothing is done.
How could he not tell anyone? OK, apparently, he did. Apparently everyone knew but me. But how could he not tell me? I had no idea, and now I feel a total idiot for going on at him about eating in class. That was out of order. And now I understand why no teacher ever told him off. They all know.
So does Dad. Colin had that appointment with him on Wednesday.
Why didn’t he tell me? We’ve only seen each other a few times since then, but it’s an important piece of information.
Didn’t Colin want me to find out? I saw how uncomfortable he was when we were standing outside the old greenhouse.
Obviously, he was trying to sound distant and pissed off, but that couldn’t hide how serious this is.
I put my phone down and stare at the half-drawn curtains that are letting a little moonlight into my room.
I don’t know why this new detail has changed my view of Colin. Previously, the thought of him just made me angry, but now there’s something else too.
Worry. I’m worried about him. About Fantino.
Damn it. That’s got to stop.
I couldn’t give a fuck. I really couldn’t give a flying fuck.
I roll onto my left side and stare into the darkness.
I could. There’s no point in denying it. Colin Fantino has burst into my life, seriously wound me up, and done something to me.
And now I’m thinking about him. At night.
Oh, shite.