Anything but Ordinary
Lara Avery
To my brother Wyatt
Farewell, hello, farewell, hello.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
ost divers forget to see the space, the air. You focus on your body—how to make it into a thin board, or curl it up like a piece of spaghetti and flatten it back out. You lift off and you barely have time to think before you hit the water.
But Bryce, she would never forget where she was going when she was about to jump. She would never forget the small eternity between the stone platform and the deep blue below.
“Bryce Graham,” reporters asked her, “only seventeen. What’s your secret?”
She would usually say something easy, something written on an inspirational T-shirt. “Concentration,” she would say. “Focus.” Things that should be said into microphones. But never: “Fear, Ted. Fear.”
That day, Bryce was carried up the stairs by the noise of the crowd. They yelled louder for her than for anyone else. This was her home, after all. Those were people from her high school in the stands, though she didn’t know most of them. The Tennessee fans wore little clothing and were red in the face, yelling and yelling. The out-of-towners wore Olympic Trials T-shirts and fanned their pale faces with programs. One of them had become as red as anyone in Nashville, on account of the heat. He had gone to the concession stand for a soda, a Coke in a sweating plastic bottle.
He watched from his spot at the back of the building, propping the exit door open with his foot. He sipped his Coke, and a cicada landed on the bleachers. The crowd went silent as Bryce crouched at the end of the platform, like a cicada herself.
Bryce jumped. She was bending, coiled, and the insect rubbed its legs together, calling out to any other cicada that might be nearby.
She was bending, coiled, and the man from out of town felt the breeze on his face.
She was bending, coiled, in the small eternity between block and blue.
She was only seventeen. What was her secret?
Space, Bryce answered, but there was less than she thought, and her tight twist was an inch longer than it should have been, and the inch happened to be on the curve of her lovely head. Her skull jutted over the cement platform, and the weight of her body went falling, falling into the empty Tennessee air.
If you asked Bryce’s mama how long was a cicada, she would answer, “About one inch,” and if you asked her daddy, it’d be the same answer. Bryce Graham’s sister, too, and her friends. Nashville people.
If you asked that man from out of town, he wouldn’t know, but he could hear it calling out into the air, the moment before a plume of blood colored the pool dark red.
eartbeat has been generally faster.”
Who said that? Match sound with image. Lights and metal and movement. A woman’s hands untying something. Sounds but no image. Try again.
“Get her records,” a voice said. “She’s coming—” Before the sound cut out again, the light pooled, brighter and brighter.
This was a game Bryce played. How long would it take for the endless exhaustion to set in? Sometimes she bothered to open her eyes, but it was difficult enough just to remember that she had been around once, being and talking. The very idea made her retreat back into the dark. It hurt to be alive.
But she had been playing sound-plus-image for a while now. Five days? Five hours? Even if it was five minutes, the sensation was a strong one.
Someone’s breath was on Bryce’s face. “Get her parents on the phone.”
Bryce’s parents. She had heard their voices in the darkness, but she could never make out their words. They had touched her shoulder, rubbed her forehead. But Bryce was too tired. I can’t, she tried to say. I can’t move.
“Bryce.”
Bryce could tell by her tone the woman was trying to speak softly, but she wanted to put her hands over her ears. Her fingers twitched at her sides. She opened her eyes. Light flooded into her skull. Colors became shapes, shapes became people.
The smells and sounds switched on like a machine. The acidy scent of cleaner, mechanized humming, metal creaking. A gray-haired woman leaned over her with a stethoscope, blocking the fluorescent lights.
She was awake.
“I’m hungry,” Bryce had breathed, though it was a pain to talk. The room was silent, save for the beeping of machines and the slurping of liquid Jell-O from a straw. She moved her tongue through the sweet substance, relearning the motions of every swallow. The movements were blurry, but everything else came at her with an edge. The hospital room was the beige color of pale skin and seemed to throb. Her mother sat near the bed in an electric-pink bathrobe. Her father stood next to her mother, in his same old gold-and-black Vanderbilt sweat suit, COACH emblazoned on the chest. Their faces erupted in teary smiles as her gaze hit them.
It was all different. Her mother’s hair was shorter, for one. And her dad had lost some weight. They had been waiting for a long time. What had happened?
“Bryce.” The voice from earlier, now softer, came from a short-haired woman in a white coat. “My name is Dr. Warren. Do you know where you are?”
“Hospital,” Bryce said in a dull monotone that didn’t sound like her voice. She cleared her throat. “Hospital,” Bryce repeated in a higher, lighter tone, looking at her parents.