Chapter 4
Tucker
I paced my hospital room, sometimes stepping into the hall as far as the wires would go.
Gram sat on the sofa bed by the window, knitting a Pokémon hat. A Squirtle. She started making them when I was six and never stopped, even though I quit playing Pokémon years ago.
“You’re going to wear a hole in the floor.” She held up the pale-blue Squirtle. Its round head and big eyes looked amazingly like her, even without her mass of gray curls. “Am I getting it right?”
I coughed to cover my laugh. “It’s great.”
“Is all this wandering about that girl?”
I didn’t have to answer. She could read my damn mind. Of course she could. It had been nothing but the two of us since I was twelve. Since my life caved in after the accident.
This hospital visit was supposed to change everything. I’d have a seizure while wired to the gizmos, and they’d figure out the problem and fix it. We’d hinged all our hopes on it.
I would graduate high school in June. How long could I live with my gram? I wanted a real life. To drive a car more than a few months here and there when my seizures were under control. To get a job. And college. I wanted to go. I had Mom and Dad’s life insurance money set aside for it.
But how could I do any of that if I couldn’t beat this thing? Sometimes I spent weeks lying in bed because sitting up for too long gave me muscle tremors. Then came the migraines.
It was no life at all.
This week was supposed to make things happen for me. Only we were on day four—and nothing.
At least right now I could walk around. For five hours a day I was stuck sitting in bed next to a dude holding a syringe. He had to be ready to pump his radioactive sauce into my veins the minute a seizure started. Surely he was tired of me. My failure. My nothing.
The only thing that had been worth it was that girl.
I plunked down on a chair.
“What was her name?” Gram asked.
“Ava.”
“That’s a nice name. I knew an Ava once. She married a young man named Horace.”
I loved Gram, but I did not want to hear about Ava and Horace. I wanted to find my Ava. I had to know she was all right.
A nurse popped into the room. She was cute, but like most of the staff, she treated me like I was ten. “Quick vitals check!” She tugged a blood pressure cuff from the stand.
“Were you able to find out anything about Ava?” I’d asked all the night nurses since the disco room incident, but nobody would tell me anything. I was hoping the morning ones would tell me something. At least that she was alive.
“We’ve been talking about you two. Hold on.” She held up a finger until the cuff deflated.
My heart sped up. Maybe I would get some answers. “How is she?”
She pulled the stethoscope from her ears. “I think it’s cute you talked to her.”
“Not cute enough to tell me if she’s okay? She wasn’t breathing.”
The nurse glanced over at Gram and leaned in close to remove the cuff. “She’s okay,” she said softly. “She’s in her room.”
Relief flooded through me. “I don’t guess you’d tell me which one.”
She flashed me a look of pure don’t push your luck. “You want to try the disco room again tonight?”
“Will she be there?”
“I doubt it.” The nurse hesitated, as if she might say something more. But she only repeated, “I doubt it.”
“Then, no.”
“Okay, we’ll do the strobes in here. They’re going to order sleep deprivation for you tonight,” she said. “And I’m thinking they’ll make you ride a recumbent bike around two in the morning.”
Gram stood up at that. “Ride a bike? In the middle of the night?”
The nurse nodded. “Exhaustion. Trying to induce that seizure.”
“Great,” I said.
“Sorry. Anything else?” She headed toward the door, pausing a moment to see if I would answer. I shook my head and she disappeared.
Gram walked over and rubbed my shoulder. “Don’t be blue. The seizure will happen.”
“All this time we hoped it wouldn’t, and now we’re hoping it will.” I flopped back on the bed.
“I tell you what,” Gram said. “When the nuclear person arrives, I’ll take a little walk. See if I can nose around for this Ava.”
“You’d do that?”
“Of course. Anything you want me to tell her?”
I couldn’t imagine what Gram might say. Would you like some tea with my grandson?
“No, Gram. Just tell me how she is. Remember, long brown hair. Shirt with pink flowers. Maybe. She might have changed.”
“I’ll find her,” Gram assures me. “Old ladies can walk in anywhere and act all confused while they perform their covert ops.”
I had to laugh. Gram loved spy movies.
The nuclear medicine tech, a lanky man with a bald head and lumberjack beard, arrived a while later. Gram told him she’d take a break in the cafeteria since he was there. Seizure patients weren’t allowed to be alone.
An alarm sounded in the room next door. Lucky duck. All around me, other kids had their seizures, got their scans, and went home. I was stuck.
Although Ava had gone through a seizure and was still here.
“You have anybody else taking as long as me?” I asked the technician.
He checked my IV port, rearranging the line. “It happens. The worst is when you get to the end of the week with nothing, check out, and then have one in the parking lot.”
Great. That better not happen to me.
“Have you been in a room with a girl named Ava? She’s a friend of mine.”
“Nope, just you this week, buddy.”
“I’m your full-time job?”
“Right now you are. Other than writing reports and looking over records.”
I stared up at the ceiling. The black bubble over the video camera displayed my warped reflection.
When Gram returned a half-hour later, I could tell instantly that she had news. Her face had bloomed pink.
“What did you find?” I asked.
“Two things that are going to make your day. One is a cupcake.” She set a plastic container on my tray. It held a chocolate cupcake the size of my face.
I wasted no time opening it. “What’s the other?”
“The girl is still on the ward. Room 205.”
I wanted to kiss her.
“How do I see her?” I asked. “I’m all wired.”
“You could go back to the disco room,” she said.
“But she won’t be there. The nurse said so.”
Gram sat back down on the sofa. “Surely there is some other activity you can do. At least to allow you to walk by her room.”
The tech gave me a knowing smile. “A girl, huh? There’s a support group they let teens go to.”
“Will she be there?”
He shrugged. “No way to know, but at least it would get you back in the mobile unit.” He picked up the wires leading to the wall. “You’d have to be moved to a backpack and escorted, same as for the disco room. That has to be arranged in advance. But it’s doable once I’m gone.”
I turned to Gram. “Let’s call the nurse. I’m ready for a second shot.”
The hours with the nuclear medicine tech felt like a year.
I watched TV and played Scrabble with Gram.
I tried on her Squirtle hat over my gauze, much to the amusement of the tech guy.
He ended up taking the hat home for one of his kids.
This lit a fire under Gram, who decided she needed to make them for all the nurses.
Finally, the EEG tech arrived to rewire me from the wall to the backpack. I practiced all my opening lines.
So, you decided blue wasn’t your color?
No, no, no. She might be self-conscious about going unconscious.
Not the first time I’ve made a lady swoon.
Okay, that was worse.
DeShawn popped in to say he was coming on shift in five minutes. He’d been the one pushing me to talk to Ava last night, so I waited for him to walk me down. When he finally came to fetch me, Gram looked up from her newest creation, a Charmander.
“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” Gram said with a wink.
The moment we were out in the hall, I scanned the nearby room numbers. The epilepsy ward was a long hall lined with circular wards. In each section, all the doors faced a nurses’ desk in the center.
Ava’s 205 opened directly across the circle from me. Technically, I could stand at my door and she could stand at hers and we could wave to each other without ever leaving our rooms.
Not that I intended to do that. Best-case scenario was that I’d be able to get her phone number and we could text each other. But an occasional visual from across a crowded nursing station worked, too.
DeShawn tried to take me the wrong way around the circle, the direction that wouldn’t pass her room. But I didn’t follow him.
My heart beat ninety-to-nothing as I approached 205. What was I going to say? Would it be any better than the last thing I’d said? I didn’t have AC/DC to help me this time.
I spotted her right away through the half-open door. She was sitting on her bed, holding a giant textbook.
My shoulders relaxed. For the first time in my life, someone had recovered from the blue-gray skin of death.
DeShawn came up behind me. “Oh, I get it.”
Ava still wore the button-down shirt with pink flowers. But she looked perfect. They must’ve adjusted her head gauze at some point because I distinctly remembered her tape last night being pink, and now it was yellow.
I wasn’t sure if I should knock or clear my throat or hope the laser beams of my eyes would make her look up. I couldn’t see much of the room, just the slice that had her in it.
But she was oblivious to me.
I waited another beat, then I couldn’t stand it. “Ava. Hey.”
Her head popped up, her gaze meeting mine.
“I’m so glad you’re all right.” Everything about her was exactly as I remembered. Those bright eyes. Long legs in denim shorts. Instead of shoes, she wore the hospital-issue nubby-footed socks.
As her head tilted, surveying me in her doorway, my knees went liquid. I wanted her to be happy to see me.
But her words dashed my hopes.
“Do I know you?”
Crap. She didn’t remember me. That sometimes happened. I often lost the ten or fifteen minutes right before a seizure. We’d barely met before she went down.