CHAPTER FOUR
I was lying awake that Tuesday night, tossing and turning. Nothing seemed to lull me to sleep. I tried turning on white noise (it was supposed to sound like beluga whales under water, but it skewed more toward creepy and I turned it off), rereading a boring book, and suffocating my face a little bit with a pillow in hopes that I would pass out. I finally caved and texted Beck.
Abby : Are you awake?
I didn’t think to check the time until after I sent the message. It was two-thirty in the morning. Whoops. My phone vibrated in my hand and I thought he had texted back, but when I looked down my eyes practically bulged out of my face. He was calling me, like a real person would do. I played with the idea of ignoring it, but curiosity won out.
“ Hello?” I croaked, apparently my vocal cords weren’t aware that they were still needed for the day.
“ Abby.” I could hear his smile through the phone. I had forgotten the way my name sounded on his lips.
“ Hi,” I chirped for lack of any better conversational skills.
“ Hi.”
“ What are you doing up so late?” I asked.
He cleared his throat and then I heard rustling in the background. Was he on his bed? An image of him in boxers instantly flitted through my mind.
“ Watching The Walking Dead .”
Ten points for Beckindor. I loved that show. “Isn’t it a little late for that?” I asked, trying to sound aloof.
“ I usually have a hard time getting to sleep.”
“ Maybe it’s because you’re watching zombies,” I suggested.
He chuckled. “Correction: people killing zombies.”
“ I used to watch that show, but the medical inaccuracies pissed me off.” This aloof thing wasn’t really working. I just sounded bitchy and constipated.
“ Yeah, I watch zombie shows because of their strict adherence to reality, too.”
Even I had to laugh at that.
“ I get your point, but c’mon. Not even in a TV show can you have zombie guts spread all over your face and NOT get the virus. If someone coughs two apartments down from me, I catch a cold.”
He laughed then, and I smiled wide into the darkness of my room. It felt important that he thought I was funny, or at least interesting. He seemed like the coolest person ever to grace my life and I didn’t want to be a disappointment to him.
“ Why are you awake, Abby?”
“ For reasons unexplained. My brain doesn’t want to shut off,” I said.
“ I wish I could help you,” he said, and my heart leapt.
“ You are…sort of,” I admitted, only because his voice sounded so sincere.
“ Did you know that no one knows why our bodies demand sleep?” he offered, and I sat up against my pillows.
“ What? I thought that was decided ages ago?”
“ Nope. There’s a ton of stuff that happens while we sleep, but there’s not one main reason.”
“ What if it’s for some really strange reason?”
“ Like what?” he asked with amusement.
Silence hung on the phone line, amplifying each of our shallow breaths until I finally cut it off.
“ Like… I don’t know.” I tried really hard to come up with a reason, but I couldn’t because I was already wondering about something else. “What if you could pick what would happen to you while you slept? Like if you had a really bad day, you could erase it. Or if you had cancer, you could ask your body to get rid of it. Or if you were really fat, you could wake up skinny.”
Beck was quiet after that, and I thought for a moment he had fallen asleep.
“ I don’t think we should erase the bad days,” he finally announced.
“ Hmm.”
“ What if the only way it worked is if you transferred those things— your shitty day or cancer— to other people while you slept?” he asked.
“ Conservation of energy. Or maybe collectivism in practice,” I said.
“ Exactly,” he said.
I rolled over to face my window so I could look out into the wild nature surrounding me. No, that’s not true. I stared outside and my view was cut off by the apartment building that sat three feet from mine. I could see a sloping brown roof and layers of white siding.
“ When you point it out like that, I don’t have an answer. But I do know that we do things everyday that affect people almost as implicitly as what you’re suggesting. I’ve caused people to have bad days. I’m a bitchy teenager to my parents 50% of the time. Companies that make junk-food aid in America’s quest to be the fattest-country-ever, while their CEOs stay skinny and rich.” I was sort of rambling. The topic was interesting and Beck was easy to talk to.
“ Nah, I bet they’re fat, too,” he laughed.
I smiled. “Me too.”
“ Fat cats ,” he quipped.
“ Fat cats ,” I repeated for emphasis.
“ So, what about when you cause people to have good days?” Beck mentioned.
I nodded into the darkness and thought about that idea for a little while.
“ One time, when I was young, I was in the hospital for some check-up or something. I was walking down the hallway with a teddy bear in my arm that was pretty much my best friend and sole confidant at that age.”
I made sure to leave out any details about my old disease while describing my visit.
“ Seems like a respectable type of bear,” he said.
“ He was. The best kind,” I said. “Anyway, I was in the hospital and a little girl was being carted down the hallway next to me on a hospital bed that swallowed her up— it was so big. I thought she was the same age as me because she looked about my size. I didn’t know where they were taking her, but for this really long expanse of hallway, our eyes locked and we just stared at each other. I can’t remember what I saw in her eyes, but even as a kid I knew she had it worse than I did. I was walking, holding onto my teddy bear and my mom’s hand, and she was being carted by some nurse to god knows where.”
“ You gave her that bear didn’t you?”
“ Yes. Right before she was pushed into the elevator. I remember sort of half tossing, half tripping in my journey to get to her.”
“ Were you sad that you gave up your best friend? Or just happy that you made someone’s day less worse?”
“ Probably neither. I was too young to even realize what I was actually doing.”
“ I wonder what that bear is doing now...”
“ He’s probably a fat cat,” I quipped.
He laughed a deep rumbling laugh that was too good for this earth.
“ What’s your full name, Abby?” he asked out of the blue.
“ Abby Mae McAllister.”
“ Well Abby Mae… it’s now 3:08 in the morning.”
“ That’s late,” I said.
“ Early,” he corrected.
“ What’s yours?”
“ Beckham Dilan Prescott.”
What a fancy name. Much better than Abby Mae.
“ Well Beck ham , we should go to bed,” I declared, because it seemed like he wanted to hang up. I could’ve talked for the rest of my life.
“ You’re right. Morning, Abby.”
I smiled at his joke. “Morning, Beck.”
After I’d hung up, I stared at the phone screen in a daze. Beckham Dilan Prescott , I repeated out loud.
…
Caroline was still in the hospital on Wednesday, which rendered our coffee shop idea null and void. Instead, I picked up two hot chocolates and a piece of lemon pound cake from Starbucks on my way to the hospital. It seemed like a shitty alternative, but at least it was something .
Caroline deserved a freaking normal Starbucks experience.
On a whim, I drove past the hospital and headed toward the mall to find one of those candle stores. I hadn’t actually been to the mall in years, it always seemed like too much of an undertaking, but there I was, meandering through housewives and pushy sales people. No, I don’t want to try your hand cream or hair straightener, I just want to get my cancerific friend a candle.
I could only find one candle that was even remotely close to the trademark coffee scent. It was called Donut Shop. Donut Shop actually smelled nothing like coffee, but I was betting on the fact that maybe Caroline was too hopped up on drugs to notice.
You should know that I also stopped to get her an actual donut after that. I realized that if she could in fact still smell, and I arrived with a donut candle sans donut, then it would make me the shittiest friend ever.
She didn’t quite understand any of this by the time I got to the hospital and explained it to her.
“ Thanks for the donut,” she said smiling as I stuffed the candle back into my purse. Note to anyone that cares: they don’t actually let you light candles in hospitals due to the whole fire hazard thing… not even if you promise to be really careful.
“ How has life in prison been?”
“ Can we not talk about it? Don’t you have any juicy stories yet? You’ve been living on your own for a while now… I need to hear about something other than my illness for like five minutes. The other day you mentioned you were working on meeting guys? Any luck?”
I nodded and broke off a piece of the lemon pound cake. I hadn’t actually told anyone about Beck yet. To be honest, at that point I still wondered if maybe I had a brain tumor like that doctor did on Grey’s Anatomy and Beck wasn’t actually real at all. Wait, was Denny real? I couldn’t remember.
I went out on a limb and told her about Beck anyway.
“ He just walked up to you at a funeral home?” she asked, thoroughly confused.
“ Yeah, it was really weird.”
The sunlight streaming in through the window highlighted her dark brown hair and hollowed cheekbones. I hadn’t remembered her looking so pale the week before.
“ But you said he was really hot?” She arched her eyebrows suspiciously.
“ Yes, much too good-looking for normal girls.”
“ Maybe he’s a prostitute,” she offered.
“ Maybe he’s a Russian spy,” I said, my eyes growing wide with wonder.
“ Maybe he’s a neo-Nazi,” she replied with a grin.
“ Oh! Maybe he’s the Zodiac killer,” I said, thinking I’d most likely nailed it.
She laughed and tipped back a sip of her hot chocolate. “I thought they caught that guy in like the 80’s.”
“ No. The person they suspected it to be passed away and then the strange calls and killings stopped happening, so they just figured it was him.”
“ I doubt Hot Guy is a crazy person. You should have faith in people.”
I rolled my eyes and shot her a you-know-better-than-that stare. “You sound like him.”
“ Huh,” she smirked. “I like him already.”
“ I’m thinking about letting him come on the road trip with me…” I all but whispered, scared of what her reaction would be. Ninety-nine percent of me assumed she would throw the rest of her donut at my head as an attempt to knock some sense into me.
“ You should. If I weren’t about to freaking DIE, I would go on a road trip with a random hot guy. What do you possibly have to lose?”
I flashed her a pointed stare. “Uh, my life...my virginity…my freedom…my parent’s trust.”
“ So nothing of importance?” she laughed, smoothing her hair back into a ponytail. Her arms were so small, skin and bone, if that.
I smiled at her and shook my head.
“ It doesn’t matter. I’m not sure I should go at all anymore,” I muttered.
“ Why!?”
I didn’t answer because the reason was staring me in the face and she wouldn’t take too kindly to my response.
“ It better not be because of me!” she bellowed with a hard stare.
I blanched. “I can go on a road trip anytime. You’re really sick, Caroline.”
I thought I could see black plumes of smoke shooting out of her ears in that moment. “Abby. If you do not go on that road trip in a few days, I’ll forbid the hospital from letting you in. I’ll tell them that you mentioned bringing a bomb in and I’ll make them put you on their watch list.”
“ Wow,” I mouthed, trying to hold back my laughter. Caroline was so ridiculous, but I half believed her.
“ Yeah, I’m that serious.”
“ Okay, psychopath. Jeez, I can’t imagine what you would be like if you weren’t strapped down by ten machines right now.”
“ A real force of nature,” she replied proudly.
“ Exactly.”
“ So you’ll go?” she asked, hope dancing in her hollowed eyes.
“ Yes,” I answered, even though the guilt was hard to push through.
“ With him?”
“ We’ll see…”