Tonight? Can be there but it’d be late. Have to take dad to work.
Visiting hours are over at five, but rules are the last thing on my mind when I reply. Tomorrow morning Mom and Dad are coming to help me pack up loose clothes and my toothbrush, all the little things that have become my life. Then we’re going to drive over to the hospital and a doctor is going to slice open my chest and put a machine in my heart. After tomorrow I’ll have a scar between my breasts and a power cord underneath them. I have to see Isaac before then.
Yes. Text me when you get here.
And while I know it’s Shanna’s heart that wants him, it’s my fingers shaking when I hit send.
Layla is stirring her oatmeal with suspicion, as if it might have an ulterior motive, when I sit down next to her at lunch.
“I am so sick of this,” she says, watching a chunk slide off her spoon to plop back into the bowl. “Every night I tell God that if I’m going to go, make it before another bowl of oatmeal, not after.”
“I need to ask you something,” I say, cutting right to the chase.
“Yes, you can have my oatmeal,” she says, shoving the bowl toward me. “Done.”
I push it back. “I want to know how to get out of here after hours.”
Her eyes get big, and she lowers herself to taking a bite of oatmeal in order to buy time before answering. She chews with exaggeration, holding her finger up to let me know to wait.
“Was that good?” I ask, when she finally swallows.
“As an evasive maneuver, maybe. On the acceptable food scale it’s like a two.”
“It’s a bad evasion too,” I tell her. “I’m still here.”
“Uh-huh, I see you.”
“So?”
She takes a drink of milk, eyes on me over the rim of her glass. “So why are you asking me?”
“Because you’ve been here the longest, I know you the best, and you like a good romance story.”
She puts the glass down with a thump. “Oh, you do know me. You want to get out and see a boy before you get your LVAD, don’t you?”
I nod and she glances around the cafeteria. Some of the smaller kids are huddled in a corner peering over one boy’s shoulder at his iPad, but other than that we’re alone.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” she says, leaning in closer. “If all you want to do is get outside, that’s easy enough, because Angela’s the nurse on duty tonight. But I’ll do you one better, since I know where there’s an empty bed maybe you can make good use of. No dirty sheets to explain in your room, right?”
Before Shanna I would’ve told her to shut her dirty mouth, blushed, dropped my eyes, done anything to keep a veneer of cleanliness and respectability about myself. Now I just nod, all pretenses dropped. I want to know where this bed is and how I can get Isaac into it without getting caught.
“So Angela,” Layla goes on. “She’s got a brother who pulls in some decent cash on the side by selling off pills. She gets them to him, he splits the profits with her. This is a fancy place we’re in, but that doesn’t mean the nurses make bank. I heard Karen telling somebody just the other day she could probably make more at McDonald’s if she didn’t mind the grease in her pores, and at least there the teenagers aren’t dying.”
“She said that?” I’m surprised, remembering the hug Karen went in for the second she met me.
“Hell yes, she said that. Sucks to be us, but how would you like to be our nurses? Once we die we’re gone. They’ve got to stay behind and look at the next face, smile at us the whole time until a new one comes in needing to be told everything is going to be okay when everybody knows it isn’t.”
“Point taken,” I say. “So Angela makes cash on the side by selling off our pain pills, and I can bribe her to look the other way. But the only thing I’m on right now is antibiotics and immune-suppressants. I doubt they have a high street value.”
“Got you covered,” Layla says. “I’ll slip you a couple of Oxy, but you’ve got to tell me your love story. And don’t leave the good parts out either.”
“Done.”
The text comes in from Isaac that he’s in the parking lot, and I slip down the hallway to the back exit, shoving a stone in the crack between the double doors so they don’t lock behind me. I’m wearing the best thing I could put together in my limited wardrobe, a pair of pajama pants that hang a little low on the hips and a worn T-shirt thin enough to be kind of sexy. I don’t have real shoes, just the flip-flops Mom gave me for the shower, so I’m smacking my way across the parking lot toward him when he looks up.
He’s leaning against his bike, backlit by a security light and a halo of smoke around his head. He looks like everything I should never want, but somehow I’m walking faster, my mouth splitting into a smile.
“Hey,” I say, as I step into the circle of light he’s parked in.
“Hey,” he says back, his eyes roaming over my face.
I still haven’t looked in the mirror, because if I did I know I would have told him not to come. The nurses keep telling me it’s improving, but I’m nowhere near what I was the last time he saw me. I can part my hair so that the half that’s still growing in isn’t as obvious, but the stitches across my forehead can’t be hidden. So I don’t even try, instead meeting his eyes boldly.
“Shit, lady,” he says, his hands going to my face. He runs his thumb over the stitches softly, and I lean into his touch. “You look badass.”
“Badass, huh?” I say, a tear slipping down one cheek. He wipes it away without comment.
“Thought it’d be worse, after everything I heard.”
“And you still came?” I ask, wondering what he could have imagined that looked worse than I do now, yet still brought him here in the dark of night.
“I’m here, right?” One hand slips under my cascade of hair to feel the bristles underneath. “What’s going on with this?”
“They had to shave a lot of my hair off,” I tell him. “Part of my scalp was just . . .” I stop talking as his thumbs brush against my lips, his forehead touching mine.
“Why’d you go and do that?”
I press back, our faces close. I want to tell him that I didn’t do it, Shanna did. Then I think of our names together at the glyph, my sister nowhere in between them. “I know where there’s an empty room,” I say, tugging on his hand.
He follows, but there’s enough hesitation to make me wonder if he was only being polite about my face. I slip through the door, kicking the rock aside and still holding his hand. We tiptoe through the darkened hallway, and I wave at Angela when she looks up from the station desk.
“Um, is this a good idea?” Isaac whispers.
“It’s okay,” I tell him. “I paid her off with Oxy.”
I find the room number Layla told me would be empty, a transplant patient who had come back to the cardiac center for her recovery time and shipped out before I showed up. We go inside, and I leave the lights off, leading him over to the bed.