Anything but Ordinary(62)

He unclipped it and threw it across the room.



In the morning, Bryce’s floating mood was punctured by the sight of Sydney in her same spot at the kitchen table, head slumped in her arms. Her shoulders shook with sobs.

Under her folded arms was the local paper.

THREE KILLED IN DRUNK DRIVING ACCIDENT, the headline screamed. Underneath it, among the three school photos, was Sydney’s friend Jack. Bryce drew in a breath.

Her vision had been real. She was right to keep Sydney out of that car. She swallowed, relief mingled with sadness washing over her.

Bryce put a hand on her sister’s shoulder. Sydney grabbed it and squeezed. Bryce didn’t need much else. She had kept her alive, and that was enough.

She helped Sydney back to bed, and then Carter came over. Though it was sprinkling lightly, they sat outside, the mist coating their warm skin. Bryce wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his shirt.

“So tell me,” he whispered.

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me how you knew to keep Sydney out of that car.”

The wind swept through, and droplets of water landed in her eyes. She huddled further into him, not answering.

“Or you could tell me how you knew I sat with you while you were sleeping,” he said, his fingers under her chin, bringing her out of the folds of his arms. “Or why the CAT scan broke.”

Bryce sighed. Don’t tell Dr. Warren sounded too much like Don’t tell Mom. She sat up as he narrowed his eyes at her.

“My family doesn’t need any more trouble,” she said.

“I know,” he said.

“Good.” They were clear.

Bryce started at the beginning, from the moment she woke up. The sharp filter on the world, the strange sights, the feeling that things weren’t quite right. She told him everything. Every little detail, from the heated pain to the visions moving her forward and backward in time, putting her in places she’d never been before. When she finished, she felt like seven layers of heavy skin were peeled off her body. She was bare, yes, but she was free.

“So tell me,” Bryce echoed, willing with every ounce of her that he wouldn’t pick her up right then and carry her back to the hospital for another CAT scan. “What does it mean?”

But Carter was lost in thought. “So that’s why your brain activity spiked so rapidly.”

He grasped the sides of Bryce’s head suddenly, looking back and forth between her eyes. His intensity made her laugh. But she was curious.

“Is there an answer?”

“No,” he said, letting go, brushing her hair from her face. “Neuroscience has always said the human brain is hardwired, permanent by the time we’re adults. But there are also studies that say the brain has the ability to change structure and function in response to experience. When the brain suffers trauma it has the ability to rezone itself.”

Carter paused, taking in her confused expression. “It’s like after your accident, your brain was a puzzle, adjusting the shape of its pieces and how they fit together, but creating the same overall picture.”

“Oh,” Bryce said.

He was getting excited. “Experiences could be registered more or less intensely, with different emotional and even sensory reactions. Memories could be stored differently, released differently. Understanding changes, perception changes. Your perception could have been replaced by what you imagined others to see.”

He stood up, pacing around the blue rectangle of the pool.

“Everyone’s brain is trained to think linearly in time, but yours could have been rewired to understand time in a webbed or networked fashion, moments becoming linked less by cause and effect, and more by objects, words, other emotional triggers.”

Bryce sat on the pool chair, her apparently miraculous head resting in her hands. Dried leaves skittered across the tarp. Carter had paced all the way to the other end, standing near the unused diving board.

“But what’s the point of all this if I’m going to die?” Bryce called.

His face looked pained, but his body remained stiff, upright. He slowly made his way back to her, sitting in a neighboring pool chair, his legs stretched in front of him.

“Maybe you won’t die,” he said lightly.

“You said my brain wouldn’t survive the swelling,” she said.

He looked away.

Bryce had had plenty of time to come to terms with this fact. She had hit out her doom with a hammer, cut it away with a saw, walked with it past the Grahams’ property until her legs were too weak to stand. Carter had not.

He looked back at her, squinting. “You remember things from when you were asleep?”

Bryce nodded.

“Tell me about one of the articles I read to you. The one about insects.”

“I can’t just pull things out of my head,” she said.

“Try. It was in one of those nature magazines for kids. It was all there was around to read that day because I read you everything else.”

Bryce closed her eyes. She thought about her hospital room, the blue curtain, the white ceiling, the circular lights. With a quick streak of pain, Carter was next to her, his face fuller than it was now, younger, wearing a T-shirt and shorts because the room was sweltering on a sticky summer day.

“Uhh…” he was saying, flipping through a faded magazine. “Let’s see.”