By Your Side(62)

But Dax wasn’t by the buses where I normally saw him in the mornings. And a search of the school hallways produced the same results. I rounded the corner, thinking I’d try looking in his first period class, when I nearly ran over Dallin.

“Autumn,” he said, all business.

“Yes, Dallin?”

“It’s your day today at the hospital. You’re still planning on going, right?”

“Actually today is kind of bad for me. Do you know if anyone might want to switch?”

“Seriously? You hanging out with someone else?” He gave me the same smug look he’d given me in the hospital when he saw me with Dax.

“No, it’s just . . .” That’s exactly what I was planning to do. “Never mind. I’ll go.” I needed to talk to Jeff anyway. I could talk to him first.

“No, if you’re too good to be assigned a day, then I can find someone else.”

“Dallin. Just stop, okay? I’ll go.”

He held up his hands in surrender. “Good. Because despite everything, Jeff seems to like you.”

“You’re kind of a jerk, you know that?”

“Only when I think someone is screwing over my friend.”

I wanted to argue, but I was about to screw over his friend and that made my insides twist with guilt. I had to remind myself that it was my life I had to live. Nobody else’s. I was going to talk to Jeff today.

Jeff and his parents were playing a board game when I walked into the room. I knew Jeff was humoring them by the look on his face. The tray that extended over his bed was too small for the board, but Life was spread out there as well as possible.

“Autumn!” he said, and the little car with its peg people fell onto his lap.

“Hi.”

“Come play with us.” He plopped a little green car onto the board and added a pink person to it. I pulled up a chair and his dad handed me a stack of money and a career card. Teacher, it said. Forty-seven thousand dollars of salary. The structure of the game calmed my nerves a bit, and before long I was laughing with Jeff.

“I want to change careers,” he announced ten minutes later, when he landed on that square.

“But you’re a surgeon and you have the highest salary possible in the game,” I said.

“I do not base my decisions on salary, Autumn. I base them on job satisfaction and I’m unsatisfied. I’m away from my wife and twins too much. I need a change in my life.”

His mom laughed. “You should always be happy in your job choice. What a wise decision.”

“There’s something to be said about security, too,” I said.

“Very true,” Jeff’s dad agreed.

“Do you hear that, parents? Autumn is a gold digger. If I don’t bring her home lots of money, she’ll be unhappy.”

“Sorry, Jeff, but I’m in my own car with my own blue-peg husband, and I bring home a teacher’s salary. Abandoning your surgeon career is not going to affect me.”

He flung the surgeon card at me like a Frisbee. “It’s totally going to affect you.”

“What do you really want to be when you grow up?” I asked, realizing this was something else I didn’t know about him.

“A dirt bike racer.”

“Really?”

“No, but that sounds fun. Maybe I’ll do that on the side.”

“What do you want to do when you grow up?” Mr. Matson asked me.

“I think I want to be a psychologist.” Because that was safe and secure and not risky at all. But it was more than that too. My psychologist had helped me so much over the years that I wanted to help others.

“I didn’t know that,” Jeff said. “I thought you’d do something with photography.”

“Yeah I . . .”

“Psychology is a good choice,” his dad said. “Jeff needs to decide.”

“Oh please, I’m seventeen. I have my whole life in front of me.”

His mom patted his arm. “Yes, you do. We’re lucky.”

Sitting here in the hospital with his family, I couldn’t help but think that he really was lucky that he had survived the car accident and was going to be fine. We were both going to be fine.

A man in a long white coat walked in the room. “It’s time for your daily torture,” he said. “Blood tests and physical therapy.”

“But my girl is here. Can’t it wait?”

His girl? Did he just call me his girl? Surely he hadn’t decided that without talking to me first. Not that it would surprise me. Jeff seemed to do a lot of things without thinking about them first.

“I’ll give you thirty minutes,” he said.

“Thirty minutes. That means all adults out of the room,” Jeff said.

His mom smiled but cleaned up the board and stacked it off to the side, next to the baseball bat from Dallin. And get well cards, and drawings I was just now noticing. I’d never brought him anything. My stomach began tensing up in anticipation of being alone with Jeff and the talk we needed to finally have.

The door clicked behind his exiting parents and I turned to face him.

“How is physical therapy going?”

“I’ve aged sixty years in two weeks. I need a walker and an oxygen tank.”