Just then something behind me crashes through the bushes, and my heart jumps so far up in my throat, I nearly lose my balance.
When I look behind me, I don’t see anything, but just in case, I pull out my key chain and open the scissors on my Swiss Army knife, the one my dad gave me for Christmas last year, holding the tiny blades extended at my side and feeling marginally more prepared to defend myself against whatever huge ravenous bear or murderous yeti is stalking me.
I walk for a few more minutes, just starting to feel okay again, but then a stick cracks over my right shoulder, and without thinking about poison ivy, I immediately run through the brush on my left, dodging branches and roots. It’s a miracle I don’t trip.
I run and run until I reach the road.
I bend over to catch my breath. It’s longer this way, but at least I’ll be on the road, where there are occasional cars and streetlights, and hopefully, no monsters.
I start the long walk home.
Fourteen
BY THE TIME I reach the covered pedestrian bridge that crosses Fosters Road, I’ve missed my curfew by almost an hour, a first for me. I must have run farther south than I thought.
I don’t mind, though. I love the bridge. The way the arches curve and the spire reaches toward the sky . . .
I squint, wondering if I’m dreaming it or if there really are spray-painted words across the arch. THOMAS: CALL YOUR WIFE PLEAS.
It’s just like the tin-can message, the one about the stars.
“Spider-Man,” I say under my breath.
And then I hear it, a hiss coming from above me, over my right shoulder, a tense “Shhh.”
I grip my tiny scissors tighter and look up.
A few feet into the bridge rafters—a boy: legs hooked around a beam, knuckle-clenching a spray paint can with one hand, his face hidden in the shadow of his sweatshirt hood and the eaves of the bridge.
He raises a finger sternly toward the direction of his lips, then points ominously toward my feet.
There, sniffing around and looking like it is in no hurry at all, is a big-ass skunk.
I suck in my breath and take a step back. The skunk jerks its head toward me, black beady eyes watching, tail twitching.
When I was in eighth grade, a skunk died under our front porch and it took three weeks for the smell to fade—you’d smell it when you opened drawers, turned on the AC, opened your backpack at school. Even our food tasted like skunk.
This is so not good.
“Don’t move,” Spider-Man whispers.
I look up, but he’s pressed himself farther into the dark, making it even harder to see his face.
I slide my pocketknife back in my bag. Maybe if I back up slowly.
As soon as I move, the skunk hisses, a noise full of irrational hurt feelings and potential mouth-frothing rabies, and I jerk to the side, banging my knee on the edge of the bridge in the process and stifling a yelp.
“I told you not to move!” the boy says in a loud whisper.
Jerk.
“I hit my leg,” I say as I ease back carefully against the bridge. My whole shin is throbbing, and when I look down, blood is welling up around the tender spot where I slammed it on the bridge.
I wonder how long it takes for tetanus to set in.
The skunk continues to nose along the base of the bridge path, but the boy and I are still, the only other noise an overly optimistic summer tree frog singing away.
Either ten minutes or two hours or eight hundred forty thousand years pass.
And then I feel it building in my left elbow, a right rib, both pinky toes: My body inexplicably wants to jangle and shake itself in a frenzy.
The longer I stand there, the more I need to move.
I press my nails into my palm.
I force myself to count backward from seventeen, then figure out multiples of twelve until I get to 372 and it gets too boring.
I weigh the merits of being able to disappear or run away at the speed of light.
I am just starting to wonder if my parents have sent out the police yet, if Charlie made it home already, when I hear a soft humming from above me, something familiar.
My mind tries to place it.
“Um, what are you humming?” I ask, my voice quiet.
The humming stops. “What?”
“You were humming something. It sounds like that new Taylor Swift song.”
“No,” he mutters.
“No, it isn’t Taylor Swift, or no, you’re not humming?”
“Crap,” the boy says in a loud whisper. “Just let it go.”
I frown. “Bully,” I mutter under my breath.
The skunk, sensing the boy’s sulkiness, settles itself down in the middle of the path, clearly not planning to go anywhere in the next five minutes, let alone five hours.
A few billion stars burn into existence and blink themselves out again.
“I’m not a bully,” the boy finally says.
I feel a little bad that he heard me, but not enough to apologize.
I start to think about Charlie’s words, but I can’t go there.
Instead, I wonder what Taylor Swift is up to right now.
I contemplate the merits of tetanus.
Inside my head, I sing all the lyrics to the song the boy was humming.
I wonder what gymnastic maneuvering he had to utilize to get up on this bridge, if he knows how to rock climb.
I can’t believe I thought he was Spider-Man.
If Spider-Man were real, he’d be way nicer.
I tell myself I’ll count to one hundred and when I do the skunk will be gone.
I do, and it’s not.
My mind goes back to Charlie—what it might have felt like swinging out over the river, what it might have felt like the moment the vine snapped.
My palms start to sweat.
What if he had landed in shallow water or hit his head on a rock?
What if he cut open his leg, and it gets infected?
Even though I’m standing up, there’s a pressure pushing on my heart, like someone is sitting on me, like there’s a family on top of me, a whole city, an entire world.
I wipe my forehead.
What if Charlie gets sick again?
What if Charlie and I are broken for good?
My legs start to go all pins and needles, and I grab the beam next to me.
The skunk stops moving, staring warily in my direction.
“Are you okay?” the boy asks.
“No,” I say, bending over, my breath starting to hitch.
Charlie got sick and Charlie got better and Em and Matty are going to see Paris and in less than forty-eight hours I will be on my way back to my internship.
And then, in eleven weeks, I will leave for Harvard.
In four years, I will graduate from undergrad.
In eight years, I will graduate from med school.
In eleven years, I will finish a pediatric residency.
In fourteen years, I will finish a pediatric hematology or oncology fellowship.
In fourteen years, when I pass my board certifications, I will be a doctor.
I will be thirty-two.
I let out a strangled gasp.
The skunk stamps a foot, its tail poofing out.
“Parker, take it easy,” the boy says from above, and a distant part of me wonders how he knows my name, but I push it aside, trying to breathe.
My body is sweating and pulsing, and my mind flashes to my first dissection in biology class freshman year, how the scalpel sliced through tissue-thin frog skin but not as easily as I’d thought, and how in med school you cut open people, and how the human body is so crowded inside it makes me claustrophobic—organs packed thick in muscles and tissue and fat.
“Oh my God,” I say, conscious it’s too loud, but I can’t stop, my breath running itself in and out in sharp takes.
I hear the boy say “Hey, hey, now,” note the quiet panic underneath the gruffness, but I’m thinking about how after our mom got her gallbladder removed, we’d catch her absentmindedly rubbing the incision site, like she was trying to reassure herself she was here, that not everything was gone.
I’m thinking about the poster on the wall of my dermatologist’s office, the ABCDs of melanoma—asymmetry, border, color, diameter—the pictures of cells run wild.
I’m thinking about when Charlie barfed in the backseat after one of his first chemo treatments, how what came out of him was chartreuse and chemical-smelling, how I threw up next to him and our mom pulled over as quick as she could, all three of us crying then.