“Alex,” his mother continued, pulling free of his father’s grasp. “Your grades…”
Leaving it hanging out there, like she didn’t need to say anything more.
“They suck.” His head began to really pound, a pain that radiated all the way down his spine, almost as if it were bouncing off his bones. “But the colleges offering me scholarships don’t care, so why should I? Why should you?”
Now it was his mother taking his father’s arm in both of her hands. He seemed to stiffen under the grasp, never taking his gaze from Alex.
“Because,” his mother started, her voice ringing with conviction, “you should go to a better college, not just one that wants to give you money. The Ivy League, even.”
The doctor cleared his throat, as if to remind them he was still there, but Alex responded anyway.
“The Ivy League? You call that football?” He stopped, the pounding in his head intensifying.
His mother whispered something that made his father stiffen even more.
“We’ll talk about this later.”
“No, we won’t. We don’t need to talk about it. And I’m playing football next week. Do you hear me? I’m playing football next week.”
Alex’s head felt ready to explode, as if someone were taking a brick to it from the inside, trying to crash their way out through his skull.
“My head,” Alex said suddenly, the doctor looking up from a check of the nerve endings on his feet. “Oh man, my head…”
The doctor returned to his side, checking his pulse. “Try to breathe normally.”
“Hitse marwa vesu luvi,” a voice in the room said.
“Alex?” asked his father.
“Hitse marwa vesu luvi.”
Alex heard the voice as if it were someone else’s, the words making no sense to him. Just jibberish, not unlike when his parents spoke Chinese late at night when they were afraid he might overhear whatever they were discussing.
“Hitse marwa vesu luvi!”
The voice louder now, more demanding and demonstrative.
“Son?” came the doctor’s voice. “Can you hear me, son?”
Alex could hear him just fine. But he wasn’t in the exam room. He was somewhere else, somewhere different and dark. Running, bouncing. At least it felt as if he were running, and it was the world that was bouncing around him. He watched it shift and shake, gazing upward toward the sky. Except the sky was a ceiling, and he heard rattling sounds and the desperate wheezing of someone struggling for breath.
Not him. He was breathing just fine, thank you. All that conditioning, all that roadwork. He could run five miles on a cool day while barely breaking a sweat.
How could he be looking straight up? Why did he feel so small, so weak?
“Hitse marwa vesu luvi…”
“Alex?”
A hand squeezed his arm.
“Alex?”
Someone calling his name.
“Open your eyes, Alex. Look at me.”
“Hitse marwa vesu luvi!”
His voice again, the words having no meaning to him.
“Alex!”
His arm was hurting now; someone was squeezing it so tight. Alex opened his eyes.
And saw the sallow-faced man at his bedside. Ridiculously tall, his head almost even with the ceiling, as if he were made of rubber and someone had stretched him out. His thin, knobby, skeletal fingers dug into Alex’s arm until the nails cut through his skin and the fingers sank inward, disappearing.
Alex gasped, a bright flash erupting before his eyes, the monitoring machines hooked up starting to beep and screech.
“Alex!”
When his vision cleared, the tall man had turned to wisps of black air wafting upward, the doctor standing where he’d been, clutching Alex’s arm with all of his fingers still showing. His parents jabbered away in Chinese, their words making no more sense than the strange language he’d heard himself speak.
“Let’s get you that CT scan,” the doctor was saying, his gelled gray hair looking chiseled onto his scalp. “Stat,” he added to a nurse standing nearby.
TWO
VISITORS
There is nothing permanent except change.
—HERACLITUS
12
A SPARK
SAM STEPPED OUT OF the California Pacific Medical Center elevator early Saturday afternoon and nearly collided with Cara, who was in the midst of a text.
“Oh, hey,” she said, barely slowing her thumbs.
“How’s Alex?”
“Great. Fine.” She hit SEND and spoke over the whoosh that followed. “How’s the test coming?”
“About that—”
“Don’t disappoint me, Sam,” Cara said, a sharp edge creeping into her voice. “Don’t disappoint us. I told everyone in the CatPack not to bother studying because I knew you wouldn’t let us down. You’re not going to let us down, are you?”
Sam felt her convictions turn to Jell-O as she stepped out of the elevator. “No.”
Cara hugged Sam lightly. “E-mail me later and tell Alex I said hi.”
“You just saw him yourself.”