Chapter Four #2
My eyes are suddenly stinging at the bright fluorescent classroom lights, so I ask Ms. Gonzalez for a hall pass and head to the infirmary.
When I get there, I hear laughter coming from the room.
I push open the door and turn to my left as Nurse Diamond’s still-smiling face goes from relaxed to alarmed.
She’s sitting at her desk, the two bunk beds for sick kids behind me.
“Oh, Zadie! How are you, honey?”
“Good,” I say on impulse. “I mean, I’m having a kind of headache?”
“In what way?”
I tell her about it, the way sound is starting to distort and everything is too bright.
“Hmm,” she says. “Sounds like the start of a migraine. All our beds are taken, but…”
“I was just leaving,” a familiar male voice says, before the owner emerges from behind me where the beds are.
Marcus Riddick. He is wearing a collared gray button-down over a black cotton shirt and black jeans.
In last year’s yearbook, Marcus put “Heath Ledger circa 1999” as his “style inspo.” It was too specific a reference to not look up, and while I can confirm that, with his dirty blond hair that hangs down to his shoulders, Marcus does look exactly like that, his inspiration is too ancient to be as cool as Marcus thinks it is.
“Hold on, Marcus,” Nurse Diamond says. “Let me just check if I have any more ice packs.”
As the nurse disappears into a back room, I notice that Marcus is giving me one of his easygoing smiles. His hair is slightly ruffled. He’s clearly spent the whole period in here.
My eyes give him a quick sweep, looking for any ailments. Predictably, there are none. I mean, he’s noncommittally holding ice to his left elbow, but that’s Marcus in a nutshell: noncommittal, indifferent, unbothered.
“Good nap?” I ask. In the background, a kid groans like they’re in pain.
Marcus’s smile gets wider. “Not bad. Though those pillows could stand to be a little softer. I go wild for duck feathers. What’s your preference?” he asks with a completely straight face. “Firm? Medium?”
“Marcus, get f—”
“Okay, here we are,” Nurse Diamond says, returning with a blue ice pack. When Marcus takes it, I stop myself from pointing out that he is putting ice on the wrong arm. Typical that he can’t be bothered to get his story straight.
“Thanks for everything, Melissa,” Marcus says.
I manage not to roll my eyes when he leaves.
“Zadie, let me get you Advil for your head,” Nurse Diamond says, only too happy to attend to me now that her star patient is gone.
I’ve had a couple of migraines before, and they were so awful I thought I might be dying.
“How’s Jason?” Nurse Diamond asks as she shakes two pills into a small plastic cup. “Marcus was telling me they saw some improvements in his scans.”
“Was he?”
Last I checked, Marcus hasn’t been back to see his cousin since Friday when the whole soccer team was mandated to be there. I’ve been there every day since, and I haven’t seen him once.
As I head over to the vacant bed, I tell her about the small hopeful changes with Jason. It’s the bed Marcus must have just been in. I find myself wondering what he was really doing here. Probably his favorite pastime of getting out of class or hiding from some girl whose heart he broke.
After taking the two pills, I fall asleep.
When I wake up what feels like five minutes later, the room is shadowed and dark, which makes no sense. I groan and turn over, confused and bleary-eyed.
“Good nap?” a voice says.
“Oh my God!” I shriek, shooting up, only to slam my head on the top bunk. “Ouch.”
“Careful. There’s a bed there.”
It’s freaking Marcus again.
I narrow my eyes at him. Look around at the empty infirmary. “What time is it?”
“I’m guessing like five p.m. The infirmary closes at four, but when Melissa tried to wake you, you apparently begged her to let you keep sleeping.”
“I absolutely did not,” I say, on the simple basis that begging doesn’t sound like me. Plus, I only shut my eyes for a few seconds.
“So Nurse Diamond just left?” I ask.
“She had to pick up her kids, so I offered to keep an eye on you.”
“Oh my God,” I say, standing more carefully, smoothing down my skirt. “I don’t need you to babysit me.”
“Well, when you have a head injury and come in complaining of a migraine, you do. Are the doctors sure you don’t have a concussion?” There’s a hint of worry in his voice.
“Yeah, they think I—wait, what do you care?”
Marcus blinks at me. “I don’t.” The split second of hurt I feel is made the tiniest bit better by the nearly imperceptible wince Marcus gives at his own words.
“Whatever. Don’t ever watch me sleep again. It’s creepy.”
“Oh, you wish I was watching you, but alas.” He holds up a thick fantasy novel.
He’s dressed for practice, so I get the feeling that’s where he’s supposed to be.
Marcus Riddick as an avid reader is so inconsistent with all the things most people know about him, which is why he seems to do it only when nobody else is around.
“I hope it has plenty of pictures,” I say, as I head for the door.
Marcus laughs, a deep rumble from his chest. “Good one. Very original.”
Fat headphones now over his ears, he starts to lock up the infirmary. I look over at him with the express purpose of marveling at Nurse Diamond’s bad judgment, leaving a senior who thinks class schedules are a suggestion in charge. But he’s already looking my way, so I quickly glance away.
I actually liked Marcus a lot when we first met.
It was July last year, a month before Dad died, that Penny threw a big start-of-summer party.
Marcus had just moved to town, and I had no idea who he was at the time, but somehow, we spent a whole night talking on the back steps of Penny’s house.
We talked books and our families and expectations and college.
It was also when Marcus first started trying to make This or That happen.
I thought he seemed sweet and funny and genuine.
And it goes without saying that he was not bad on the eyes.
But then his true colors came out. We were barely two weeks into September, barely two weeks into the school year, when I found out what he really thought about me.
I head to my locker, pulling out my backpack and books. The school is deserted. But as I exit the building, Marcus is a mere second behind, both of us deliberately not walking together the whole way to student parking.
The ground makes the occasional crunchy noise under my boots as the first few brown and yellow leaves speckle the lot.
I pick up my pace and have almost reached my car when Marcus calls my name. “Zadie!”
I sigh and turn around. “What, Marcus?”
He closes the distance between us. “Forgot to mention: I hear congratulations are in order.”
I frown. “Congratulations?”
Now that he’s stopped in front of me, I can see that his eyes are dancing.
They are unsettling for how different they are from Jason’s.
I’ve always thought there was one variety of brown eyes.
Jason has beautiful, familiar dark brown eyes.
Warm, steadfast eyes. Marcus’s are a lighter brown with flecks of yellow.
At the look of confusion on my face, he gestures to his ring finger. “It’s so romantic when teenagers take a marriage vow when they can barely vote or see an R-rated movie.”
God. The promise ring.
“Oh, um…”
He’s clearly needling me, but the lack of expression on his face makes me doubt myself.
I stand straighter, feign smugness. “Yeah, well, we’re in love.”
Marcus smirks, like I’ve just told him a good knock-knock joke. “So I’m told.”
He starts to move in the opposite direction, pulling his headphones back over his ears.
“By the way,” he pauses, speaking too loudly because of his music. “How surprised do you think Jay will be to find himself engaged to the girl he broke up with by the time he wakes up?”
I can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t speak.
“Yeah.” Marcus grins. “That’s what I thought.”
And then he crosses the parking lot and is gone.