Her blue eyes study my forehead as she begins to ask me about what kind of music I like. An overwhelming exhaustion tugs at me as I talk about the genius that is Childish Gambino, my words getting harder and harder to say.
I force everything else to go quiet except the doctor. Something about her calmness reassures me in all this chaos. The yelling voice, the beeping, the tearing sound of my clothes being ripped off me, fade. There’s nothing but the ring of burning light encircling her hair. The smile on her face.
I start to smile back, but then I see…
Oh my God.
In her glasses, I see my reflection.
Blood is painted across my nose. A flap of my forehead lies open like an envelope, exposing the white bone underneath. Cracked white bone. My skull. Broken.
I start to panic, the sounds all pouring back as a wave of fear crashes into me. “Is that…? Is—that’s my…?”
“You’re okay,” she says with a smile. I can’t imagine how bone sticking out of my face is okay, but her expression remains as calm as ever. Why is she not freaking out at this? She reaches up toward my face, and it takes me a minute to realize she’s touching my forehead, my jaw, my cheekbones.
“I can’t—I don’t feel that. Am I supposed to feel that?”
I think I see her smile falter for a fraction of a second, but then I’m sure I imagined it because she just continues on, her hands constantly moving.
I’m still trying not to freak the fuck out when the double doors into the emergency room slam open behind Dr. Benefield, and another gurney is wheeled in.
I start to close my eyes, the last of my energy pouring out of me, but then I see it. A shock of blond hair coated in a layer of blood.
No.
No, no, no. It all rushes back to me. The pouring rain. Our fight. The seat belt locking across my chest.
“Kimberly,” I try to scream, but it comes out weak, my eyelids heavy. Everything is so damn heavy.
“Stay with me, Kyle,” the doctor’s voice says. “OR three. Now,” she calls to the other voices in the room.
I fight to keep my eyes open, fight to keep them on Kimberly, but suddenly I’m moving, the fluorescent lights blinding me as they flash overhead, one after another, after another, faster and faster and faster. Flash flash flash flashflashflash…
No! I want to yell. Go back! But I don’t have the strength to form the words and everything around me keeps moving.
I see a doctor carrying a child.
Flash.
An elderly woman getting oxygen.
Flash.
A girl reading a book. She looks up just as we round a corner.
Flash.
Then Dr. Benefield, her white jacket whipping ahead of me, blurring and expanding into a glow that consumes the entire hallway, until there’s nothing left but the blinding white light.
3
“Kyle.”
Images swim before me.
A shattered disco ball.
Sheets of rain.
Kim’s blond hair, matted and bloody.
Then pain. It radiates across my head, through my whole body. I grip the sheets until it recedes enough for me to make out a voice calling my name again, clearer now.
“Kyle?”
Mom.
I try to open my eyes, to focus on her face in front of me. I see her nose, her mouth, but her image is too bright. Blurry. Distorted. Like an overexposed photograph.
“Mom,” I croak out, my throat as dry as sandpaper.
She takes my hand, squeezes.
I feel tired. So tired.
The doctor moves into my field of view. She shines a bright light into my eyes, asking me what I can and can’t feel, then to follow her finger.
I can’t—I don’t feel that. Am I supposed to feel that?
And that’s when the panic rushes back. The bloody, matted hair. The gurney. Kimberly.
“What happened—Kim—is she…?”
She doesn’t say anything, just focuses on something in her hands. A clipboard. A pen clicking. A note on her chart.
“Kyle, do you remember me? I’m Dr. Benefield. You’ve suffered a serious brain—” Her voice is cut off by the blare of a horn, the noise so loud I squeeze my eyes shut, desperate for it to stop.
When I try to open them, there is nothing but pain. Searing pain trying to swallow me whole. So I let it.
* * *
When I wake up again, I have no idea how long it’s been, but everything is clearer. The white tile of the ceiling, the teal hospital walls, a TV in the corner, the flat-screen black.
There’s an ache in my head, and I remember Dr. Benefield’s words. I reach up to feel a bandage on my forehead, and the motion brings the unexpected tug of an IV on my arm. My eyes swing to the jumble of machines next to me and then down to the figure sitting at the edge of my bed.
“Sam,” I manage to get out, and his head whips over to me. His eyes are red and bloodshot, his cheeks wet.
Instantly, dread bubbles through me.
Our entire lives, I’ve only seen Sam cry twice. Once when we were ten and he broke his arm falling off his bike, and then when his family’s golden retriever, Otto, died three summers ago. But this doesn’t feel like either of those times.
It feels worse.
“Sam?”
I can’t ask the question and he doesn’t answer. He just turns his bloodshot eyes out the window, and I see the tears falling faster now.
“Sam,” I say again, desperately struggling to sit up with a body too weak to comply, until my arms give out and I fall back onto the bed. “Sam?”
But still he doesn’t reply.
Kim’s smiling face dances in front of my eyes, and I struggle to breathe, horror and guilt wrapping tightly around my lungs as a bolt of pain ricochets across my head.
She can’t be…
I relive it all. Starting with Berkeley, the fight, and ending with her wide, panicked eyes in the glow of the headlights.
And as the truck makes impact, I feel my entire world shatter, the pain from my head building and building until my entire body explodes into a million pieces, pieces that won’t ever be put back together.
4
I rest my bandaged head against the cool glass of the car window and watch as the droplets of rain catch the shining red of the brake lights in front of us as Mom drives. It’s been two whole weeks and I still can’t believe it.