Anything but Ordinary(20)

Bryce smiled back. “Is that what they call it these days?”

Carter blushed. “It means you’ll have to stay in one place for ten minutes. Can you do that?”

“I can try,” Bryce said with mock exasperation, and sat gingerly on a pool chair while Carter removed a stethoscope from his shoulder bag.

He kneeled next to her and put the cold disc to her chest. Bryce felt an electric jolt with his hand near her skin. He stared in concentration, his mouth turned down at the corners.

“A little fast, but consistent,” he said after a minute, looking at his watch.

He recorded the number on her chart. Bryce could see somebody had typed her name incorrectly on the top of the paper; BRICE GRAHAM, it read. Carter had crossed out the i and replaced it with a y in his own scratchy writing. He took her blood pressure and temperature, staying quiet all the while.

“Well.” He stood up.

For some reason the motion was too fast for Bryce.

A small fire seemed to travel up the base of her neck, to her skull, behind her eyes. At first, Bryce just thought she was blushing, but no, this was a real fire. Pain branded the top of her spine and traveled in shots of heat to her forehead. This again. She looked down, trying to get control.

“Wait,” she tried to say.

But the cement by the pool turned on its side. Again, she fell. It was almost as if Bryce moved forward right into it, like a wall.

A spring day.

She was looking through a crack in the hospital curtain. A young man in a white shirt was facing away from her, bending over a bed. There lay Bryce’s body in a light-blue gown.

The young man pulled the covers closer to her face as a cool breeze came through the open window, washing away the hospital smell. He sat down on one of the empty chairs and cracked open a book with a gold cover and a deep red spine.

The sound was clear. No crackling or buzzing, just the sweet song of birds from outside. He began to speak.

“I, uh. I heard you like Westerns.” He cleared his throat. “This is a biography of Wyatt Earp. Ahem. Sheriff Wyatt Earp was a man of swift and decisive action.…”

The poolside cement appeared again, like it was knocking her over, and she was tipped back to the chair. Her head jerked back.

The hot pain flashed once again, then faded into cool relief. She blinked, situated herself, and shook her hands out of the numb feeling.

“Yeah? Do you need something?” Carter was saying, standing over her. “Bryce?”

Bryce shook the vision away. “Huh?” she said, pulling her mother’s tunic around her legs. She bit her lip. “No.”

“All right, then,” he said, putting his bag over his shoulder. “Stay healthy.” He looked at Bryce. “I mean that.” He turned away from her, heading up the hill.

“Carter, wait.” Bryce blinked slowly.

Flashes of what she had just seen would not leave her. The person by the bed. The way his voice sounded. There was something connecting them to the reality of Carter next to her, right then. Something had just fallen into place.

Carter stopped.

“You spent a lot of time with me when I was asleep, didn’t you?” she asked. “You were there.”

Carter found Bryce’s eyes and held them there for a second. A long second, puzzling. “Almost every day.”

And with that, Carter continued up the hill. Bryce watched his figure as he disappeared around the house. He was a person from her strange dreams, but she didn’t know him before her accident. She had known he was with her while she slept—before anyone told her.

Which meant that the visions from her bedside were not just visions. They were real.

Bryce leaned against the chair, her stomach in knots. Gray clouds were collecting over the sun, fading the blue sky like a sheet washed too many times. Little laps of the now darkening pool water spilled over the sides—the wind had picked up this afternoon.

She closed her eyes, trying to bring up the scenes like the one she had just been inside of. Tipping back and forth from her hospital room, her body behind the blue curtain; Sydney as a child; her parents drifting around her like they barely knew each other; Greg in the barn; Carter sitting, reading on a spring day she had never known. They were all looped in her mind now, somehow.

Something had gone too far when her brain reignited. She could be in a time where she wasn’t supposed to be, she could see what she wasn’t supposed to see. Colors seemed to fall on her like overturned buckets of paint, and each sound was its own little orchestra. Her senses were wide open now, and they would stay that way, wider than she could have ever imagined.

As heavy drops began to fall, Bryce couldn’t help but raise her hand to her head. She almost expected it to shock her. But it felt just like it always had.

“Bryce, get inside!” Her mother called from the sliding door. “There’s going to be lightning.”

Carter knew that I liked Westerns. She would see him again soon, and again the day after that. At the thought of that, she smiled.

Sun, exercise, clothes. Bryce went over her list again as she reentered through the French doors. And friends.

The emptiness she’d felt wasn’t emptiness anymore. It was space to be filled.





he air wrapped Bryce in a blanket of moisture. The leaves on the oak tree in the Grahams’ front yard stood still, waxy and green. There was no breeze. The lawn was thriving like a football field, so bright it almost looked fake. Bryce wished she could suck up water from the humidity like the plants could. She had stepped outside to wait for Gabby five minutes ago, and she could already use a tall glass of something.