Anything but Ordinary(29)
He took her hand. She started to shake, thinking of something to say.
But by the time the words came to her, he had pressed his lips to hers. She felt a tingling down her back and the warmth of his arms. Just this once, she told herself, but with her mouth on his, her hands on his neck, moving down to his shoulders, tasting him taste her, her mind became as blank and flat as the sky.
She stopped shaking.
When the caress of Greg’s lips became soft enough for air, Bryce stepped back. His breath was hot on her cheek. Should she kiss him again? She stood on the brink of the next move, like a platform. Feet on stone, skin feeling the endless potential for contact, complete submersion one step away…
Bryce dove back in.
alking was walking. Bryce didn’t even have to think about it anymore. She moved across the rubber floor of the Vanderbilt physical therapy room with all eyes on her.
“Bravo, Bryce!” Jane was loudest of all of them. She stood with a few other nurses Bryce recognized, Dr. Warren, and her parents.
Bryce had walked a straight line back and forth from one end of the room to the other, and then she had walked another line, faster, and another one, faster than that.
“This is truly remarkable, Bryce,” Dr. Warren said kindly.
Jane stepped over to give Bryce an enthusiastic rub on the shoulder. “Do you know how lucky you are, missy?”
“She’s not lucky, she’s a Graham,” her father called from behind the group, and Bryce couldn’t help but roll her eyes.
Dr. Warren smiled politely. “Very impressive.”
“Yeah, so…are all these scans and tests really necessary?” Bryce was pushing now, she knew that.
“I’m afraid so.”
Dr. Warren ushered Bryce to the waiting room. It had one window and smelled like medicine and cleaner, and here she was supposed to wait for a doctor to tell her that she was physically incapable of living a normal life.
She curled up in the chair.
“I heard it was a good show in there.” Carter sat next to her, smelling like clean clothes, holding two smoothies. They hadn’t talked since their trip to Percy Lake, and she felt guilty for ignoring him. “I accidentally bought an extra smoothie, so you can have this one if you want.”
Bryce’s mother looked up from a crossword and smiled at Carter.
Bryce buried herself deeper into the rough fabric of the chairs. “Nobody accidentally buys an extra smoothie.”
“Okay.” Carter looked exasperated. “I bought a smoothie just for you. Do you want it or not?”
Bryce’s dad snorted from behind his ESPN magazine.
“Yes,” Bryce said begrudgingly, and sat up.
But before she could get her lips around the straw, Jane appeared in the waiting room in her Garfield scrubs, her glasses on a chain around her neck. She summoned the Grahams.
“Wipe that look off your face, hon,” she said to Bryce cheerily. “It’s time to get your brain looked at.”
Inside the machine, Bryce could barely hear Dr. Warren’s directions to stay as still as possible. It was like Bryce was underwater and Dr. Warren was calling from above the surface. The problem was that Bryce wasn’t used to keeping still in the water; she was used to moving through it.
The mechanical bed came to a stop in the middle of a wide plastic tube. She was encased. She could barely breathe.
Bryce panicked, her eyes darting around the gray plastic walls surrounding her, inches from her face. There was a stinging heat behind her neck. They said it wouldn’t hurt. Why did it hurt? The pain spread to the familiar spot in her forehead, wrapping around her skull. Oh no.
It hurt worse than before. Her hands went numb. Her feet, too. She should stop the procedure. She tried to lift her head. Hopefully Dr. Warren would notice the movement. But then suddenly she wasn’t in the machine anymore.
A car with no muffler, speeding down the street.
Music with heavy bass was blaring, and a person next to her was laughing, her hair falling around her face. The car was full of people laughing. Something about it was not right. The music was too loud, or the people were too happy, something was off. Everything was sharper than it should be.
They stopped at a light, and Bryce had a terrible sinking feeling.
She tried to get the attention of the dark-haired person next to her, who was whipping her head to the beat, leaning and rocking to the bass. “Something’s wrong—” Bryce shouted, but her voice didn’t exist. She didn’t exist. It was as if she was pressed against glass, a one-way mirror where nobody could see her.
The scene froze, and Bryce watched the laughing faces as lightning seared across her skull again.
She saw red, red, and nothing but red.
When the lightning stopped, Bryce opened her eyes. She was awake on the vinyl bed, the scanner pushed back, and her mother, father, and Dr. Warren surrounded her, making sounds she couldn’t make out.
“I’m okay,” she said immediately, making sure to keep her eyes ahead. The pain was leaving, the heat was leaving, and in its place was the same strange clarity that filtered her vision when she first woke up.
“Sorry, I fell asleep. I think I had a nightmare.” She waited for the numbness to fade.
Her parents nodded with knit brows as Bryce slowly sat up, but Dr. Warren tried to ease her gently down.
She looked more flustered than Bryce had ever seen her. “Just, just one second, here, Bryce. Let me see if we can get any results, and we’ll go back to my office.”