Anything but Ordinary(46)
“I loved it when I read it for English class. There are supposed to be all these metaphors in it, about politics and stuff. But I just liked it for what it was.”
“That’s strange,” Carter muttered. “His heart rate’s going up.”
Bryce could hear it, too. The beeps went from slow and sleepy to a jumping quick. Bryce looked closer at Sam. His eyelids twitched. Her heartbeat began to match his. Heat shot from her spine into icy-hot streams of pain, but she gripped her chair. She couldn’t feel her hands or feet, but she would not fall over; she knew she was seeing something else.
A riverbank.
Rushing water, two boys in handmade overalls running ragged through the trees in the humid summer air. It was vaguely familiar, but immediately Bryce knew this dream wasn’t hers. Why was she there?
The boys yelled to each other in honey-dripping drawls, the sound cutting in and out like a shortwave radio, something about running from bandits, making an escape on the river.
She smiled at their game. She used to play games like that.
Then she realized, these weren’t her dreams—they were Sam’s dreams. His mischief-making, Huck Finn dreams. The boys tripped to a stop and tumbled down the bank. Their faces turned back up toward Bryce, red-cheeked and beaming and out of breath—the faces belonged to Sam and Carter.
The room returned. Bryce’s heart and head were pounding in pain. Her forehead was beaded with sweat. She felt the blood flow back into her limbs, reviving them.
Carter was looking at his sleeping brother and seeing nothing else, the book open in his hands. Whatever would happen to Sam, Carter was making it better. He was taking Sam on adventures. Tears pricked her eyes.
When they were out of the hospital, the automatic doors barely whisked closed, Bryce wrapped her arms around Carter. And then she lifted her chin up and kissed him, hard.
ryce woke up, and the whole room was full of sunshine. Her clothes from last night lay wrinkled, half off, twisted in the sheets. It was far past morning, probably high noon. Carter’s long-sleeve Vanderbilt University shirt was falling around her like a blanket. She brought a cotton sleeve to her face. It smelled like his Old Spice, and the richer, outside smells—sweat, grass, dirt.
For every day of the exactly fourteen days since she had kissed him, Carter had met her on the curb in front of the Grahams’ big blue house and taken her out to lunch. Bryce knew it had been fourteen days, because each day they had gone to a different restaurant in Nashville. Mexican, fast food, Vietnamese, and even one little place that specialized in different kinds of noodles. The third day in a row he asked her to lunch, Bryce had asked if they were going to do this every day.
“We date now, right?” Carter had asked, wiping hot sauce from his mouth.
“Right,” Bryce said quickly, feeling her face flush.
“This is what dating people do. They go on dates.” He pulled out the pen behind his ear and began calculating the tip.
“Plus I’ve already been to all these places alone, and I want to show the employees that I have a girlfriend. Hear that, Tony?” Carter turned his head to call toward the kitchen. “I have a girlfriend!”
They heard Tony respond, “How much did you pay her?”
Girlfriend. Bryce shivered with pleasure at the word. It had been a while since she had felt like a girlfriend. And because she hadn’t looked back once, hadn’t even spoken Greg’s name since her conversation with Sydney, girlfriend now had a whole new definition. She wasn’t just a girl who rode around in Carter’s car. They weren’t “Carter and Bryce.” When they met people Carter knew around Nashville, he didn’t introduce her as Bryce Graham, the diver, or Bryce Graham, the miracle girl from Vanderbilt Medical, or even Bryce, his girlfriend. Besides the day when he had yelled at Tony, Carter usually left that part up to her.
She gave each of his friends a strong handshake. “I’m Bryce,” she would say. And that was that.
Bryce, a twenty-two-year-old girl who liked to lie in the sun in places where the sound of cars disappeared, who knew every single one of John Wayne’s lines in The Searchers, and who could play a mean game of pretty much anything.
When they ran into people Bryce knew, she showed Carter the same respect. Not her boyfriend, her doctor, her anything. Carter was a dedicated student, brother, food-taster, and an avid organizer of pretty much anything.
Bryce and Carter just happened to like accompanying one another to lunch, and dinner if he had time between summer school classes, and to Bryce’s backyard with a rapidly melting pint of ice cream, like they had done last night.
Bryce’s cell phone buzzed twice on the bedside table.
One text was from Gabby, letting her know she and Mary and Zen needed help deciding what shoes to pair with the bridesmaid dresses. Bryce texted back, saying she would give Gabby a call later. Bryce scrolled to the second text. It was from Carter.
wake up we have business
She smiled and wriggled into a stretch. I’m up I’m up, she typed.
Yesterday they drove way out of the city, past her house, past streets that had names, to dirt roads, through fences around land that belonged to no one. They tramped through weeds, and he helped her up onto branches she could have climbed before, lifting her up.
She read his textbooks aloud to him while he paced around, climbing on rocks and the remains of old walls. She could barely pronounce any of the diseases or body parts in the books, but at least they could pretend he was studying.