Don’t touch me! Get away from me!
Alex tried to cry out but couldn’t find the breath he needed. The machines were everywhere, just like in the pictures he drew in his sketchbook, currently tucked between the mattress and box spring in his bedroom, its pages full of black ink and pencil drawings of things his mind showed him. Alex never knew when one of the spells would overtake him. Usually it was when he was listening to music or trying to do homework. He’d go into a weird state that felt like daydreaming and when he snapped alert again, another page had somehow been filled by hands so lacking in talent that he’d nearly failed art.
“The hospital’s been alerted to have a neuro team standing by,” he heard a voice he didn’t recognize say.
The field, the stands, and everything else were back, the machines gone.
“Can you hear me, son? Just nod if you can.”
Alex could but didn’t. The activity around him settled into a restive frenzy, teammates kneeling in a semicircle with some praying, the world gone hazy and captured in soft focus in the spill of the bright light pouring downward. He felt himself being strapped to a board, then lifted onto a gurney and hoisted into the ambulance’s rear.
Alex felt a clog in his throat and for a moment, just a moment, thought his breath was being choked off for good this time. Then he realized it was fear, a cold dread arising from the reality just beginning to dawn on him through the haze.
Alex started to choke up, felt the tears first welling in his eyes and then spilling downward. From the ambulance’s rear, his gaze locked on the scoreboard, frozen with two seconds left in the game, the Cats with the ball and just one victory-formation kneel-down from winning the Central Coast sectionals. And they’d be moving on to the Division 3 state championship round after an undefeated season, thanks to their All-American quarterback, now lying broken in the back of an ambulance.
Just before the ambulance doors closed, Alex spotted Cara Clarkson, his girlfriend—most of the time, anyway—standing frozen on the Wildcat head emblazoned on the fifty-yard line. She used the sleeve of her cheerleader uniform to wipe away her tears, her pom-poms shed halfway between the sideline and midfield.
Alex, she mouthed. Alex …
“My parents,” Alex heard himself say, as the ambulance tore off with siren wailing once it reached the street fronting the high school.
“Take it easy, son,” a paramedic said, hooking up an intravenous line to his arm.
“My parents,” he repeated, thinking how they’d never wanted him to play football in the first place, how he’d started practice freshman year without telling them, that work parlayed now into a host of scholarship offers.
And suddenly that’s what Alex was thinking about—all those scholarship offers, including the one he’d settled upon. Alex’s father, Li Chin, taught mathematics at San Francisco City College, where he’d recently been awarded tenure. His mom, An, had some fancy title but was little more than a glorified cleaning lady where she worked. Money was tight and had only gotten tighter in the wake of the economic downturn that had seen both of them suffer, first, wage freezes and then a modest reduction. Alex needed football to pay for college, and now who knew if football would still be there for him?
That thought started the tears flowing again, his stomach twisting into knots. Alex couldn’t just lie here helpless. He had to know, had to try.
He willed life into his feet, pictured them moving. At first it felt like his brain was disconnected from his body but then he felt them wiggling. Imagined he knew the feeling a baby gets when it takes its first step.
Recharged, he willed the same life into his fingers, then his hands. Watched them spasm briefly before beginning to obey his commands.
“Easy there, son,” the paramedic warned. “Stay still now.”
But he could move. He wasn’t paralyzed.
“Alex Chin,” the paramedic was saying now, reading off a clipboard as if surprised by what it said.
I’m adopted, you idiot, Alex almost said, used to the double takes people gave him when they saw his name before they saw him.
*