“I can’t catch you,” Brandy says. “But I’ve got a good arm, a decent aim, and this foot pops off pretty quick.”
I can’t help it, I snort into my orange juice, which is a mistake. Nadine looks over Brandy’s shoulder to lock eyes with me.
“And you, Frankenstein,” she says. “I don’t care how good you are on that flute—”
“It’s a clarinet,” I correct her without thinking, and Layla covers a smile.
Nadine is shaking now, and we’ve drawn the attention of some of the ladies behind the lunch counter. I see one hurry off in the direction of the nurses’ desk. Apparently they don’t make enough to break up girl fights.
“I don’t care how good you are on that clarinet,” Nadine tries again. “You’re a whack job and everyone knows it. You should be in a mental ward, not here.”
“Whack job, I hear you’re good at those,” Layla says.
“She’s fucking crazy!” Nadine lashes out, pushing aside Brandy to stick a finger in my face. “I was outside your room the other day when you got into it with that douche face. That bullshit story about your sister’s heart? That’s not how absorbing your twin even works, dumbass. I googled it.”
Everyone is quiet, the entire cafeteria standing to get a better look at what’s turning into the best entertainment of the day. And as I take in the silence, I realize something other than the hum of voices is missing. My own heartbeat.
I focus on Nadine’s finger, the tip of it shaking inches from my nose. It’s vibrating with her anger, a steady jazz beat rippling off the end of her nail. I can’t follow it, can’t ask my lungs or my heart to maintain that pace.
“Shut up,” I say, wanting only silence, something I can recalibrate in.
“You call me on out on my shit, I call you out on yours,” Nadine says, but her voice is hollow, like someone yelling into the wrong end of a tuba.
Layla’s hand is on my arm, dark on pale, like a clarinet in reverse. I want to tell her that, but there’s no breath inside of me, nothing to push out and no need to pull in. My LVAD gives a pump, a tiny current in a sluggish river, and I hit the floor. I hear some of the smaller kids crying, feel a cold river of orange juice flowing down from the table to land in the middle of my back, but all I can think about as I lose consciousness is Brandy’s prosthetic right foot in front of my face, and how nice the toes look.
It’s a fresh coat, so slick I can see shadows dancing off them as nurses run to me. They roll me over, but there’s only darkness in my vision as everything else fades out. Everything except Brandy’s fake toes, bright and beautiful, perfectly painted because she doesn’t have to do it upside down or at a weird angle. She can take her foot off and fix it any way she wants.
She’s definitely onto something.
thirty-one
From Isaac
U ok?
Answr me.
There’s no “I” in T-E-A-M but there’s a “win” in T-W-I-N
U – ME =
There is a small gathering of people in the hall outside my room. I hear Mom and Dad, their voices low and muted. Amanda is out there too, her voice slightly higher in pitch so that it carries. I can pick out a few of her words, little accents to follow the low rumble of Dad’s voice. She’s saying things like anxiety and panic attack, and I imagine the other girls in their rooms, ears pressed against their doors, sucking up the drama along with my diagnosis.
Nurse Karen is with me, recording my pulse, monitoring my heart rate, taking my temperature. “How you doing, honey?”
“You tell me,” I say, watching her face as she types my data into the laptop she carries with her.
“Your temp is a little elevated,” she says. “The doctor will probably order some blood work, see if we can find out why.”
“Like an infection?”
I think of Shanna, curled inside of me, surrounded by metal, pockets of pus forming around her.
“Could be,” she sets the laptop aside, reaches out to pat my hand. “Could be just a bug in your system.”
“I need to get it out,” I tell her. “I’ve got to be healthy if a negative Rh heart becomes available.”
“One will, Sasha. I just know it,” Karen insists, her optimism contrary to countless bar graphs and data tables. Karen’s pie chart would be a happy face, a bright shining zero on the pain scale, defying reality on a daily basis.
There’s a hesitant knock on my door and Mom pokes her head in. I get a glimpse of Dad in the hall, the knot on his tie pulled loose. Amanda stands beside him, spinning her car keys on her index finger. Everyone has dropped what they were doing and come here to support me, a girl full of metal and pus and infection and another girl.
“Hey, honey,” Mom whispers, as if my eardrums were the problem and not my heart. “How are you feeling?”
The truth is that I feel empty, all the fullness of the altercation at lunch having overflowed and left me with nothing. I think the only thing inside me right now is an LVAD, pumping nothing into a void.
“I’m fine,” I say. And I absolutely have to be. If I’ve been exposed to any pathogens or show signs of an illness when a heart with my blood type becomes available it’ll go to the next person on the list. Nurse Karen pats Mom on her way out, and all the muscles in my face slide downward.
“It’s all right,” Mom says, which is a dumb thing to say because it’s definitely not. My face screws up into a convulsion I hate, as uncontrollable as Shanna when she’s made a decision. I’m crying against my will, dashing tears from my face and trying to avoid Mom’s hug as delicately as possible because if I’m sick I could get her sick too. Never mind if it’s a flu bug or the void inside me. If it makes the jump to her, Dad will never look at me again.
“I’ve got a fever; you probably shouldn’t touch me,” I say, so she settles for wetting a washcloth in the bathroom and wiping my face.
“Want to talk about what happened?”
“Some of the other girls got into it,” I say. “Stupid stuff. I tried to stay out of it, but Nadine said that I’m crazy and Shanna didn’t like that.”
Mom’s face stays neutral, but I feel the tiniest tremor through the washcloth as she pulls it away from my face. “Uh-huh,” she says in a tight, controlled tone.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” I ask, my voice cracking on believe. It’s like practice sessions from when I was a sixth grader, but now it’s my vocal cords, not my clarinet, that squeak because I don’t know how to handle them.
Mom folds the washcloth into a square, as if having some form of geometric shape in this room can alleviate the situation.
“Honey, I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist, and Dr. Zhang thinks—”
But she doesn’t get to tell me what Dr. Zhang thinks because there’s an all-encompassing sound in the room, the moan of the low end of the B flat scale and it’s spiraling upward, not missing a note. It’s coming from deep inside of me, my own body the instrument and despair the musician. My own mother does not believe me anymore.
Our mother.