Three Day Summer(27)
“Hi, Cora,” Anna says as she walks out of the tent to help someone hobble inside.
“Hi,” I say to her. She smiles at Michael and me as she goes back inside.
“Thanks for helping out,” I say to him.
“Thanks for the apple. And all the food last night.”
“Of course.”
There’s an awkward moment of silence that I finally break with a very smooth “Well . . .”
“Would you be able to come see the concert with me some more today?”
“Oh . . . ,” I say. “Well, I have to work.”
“Right,” Michael says. “Maybe during your lunch break?”
“Um . . . I’m not sure. It seems busy. . . .”
“She has a lunch break at one,” Anna says as she swishes by me again, this time to help one of the other nurses, who is carrying a tray of paper cups filled with water. “And we have extra medical personnel today so no problem if she’s gone for an hour.”
I blush as Anna whizzes back into the tent. The woman gets too much pleasure out of my nonexistent love life. Being in your forties must be really boring.
Michael just looks excited, though. “So, I’ll meet you here at one, then?” he asks.
“Okay,” I say, not sure what excuse I could possibly give now. Although why I would even want to give an excuse, I honestly have no idea. Sometimes, it’s really confusing being me.
“Okay,” he says, and stands there some more.
I’m worried he’ll kiss me again and I don’t think I can handle the whirlpool of crazy that brought on the night before. So I give him what I think is a friendly pat on the shoulder and say, “See you later, then,” before I lift the tent flap and go inside.
It’s busy but Anna is right: There’s a noticeable increase in the doctors and nurses milling about.
“Cute,” Anna says to me, as I find a corner to stash my picnic basket. “Looks a little like one of these rock star guys.” She hands me some Band-Aids and points me in the direction of two mud-spattered girls with cuts on their legs.
“I thought you wanted me and Ned to get back together,” I shoot back.
Anna shrugs. “Nothing wrong with a little friendly competition to get a man to come to his senses.” Then she pauses. “Do you want you and Ned to get back together?”
“No idea,” I mumble before walking over to my new patients.
While I clean up their wounds, the girls tell me about an epic dance party in the mud that apparently led to an equally epic tumble. But it sounds like a few scratches here and there were worth the fun.
“We really need to make an announcement about the brown acid,” I hear from behind me. A guy with dark, curly hair—one of the newer personnel—is flipping through our charts. “There seem to be a lot of incidents with it here.”
“Oooh, yeah. I heard about that,” one of my patients says, and I turn back around to her. “Someone told me it was poison. Like some guy took it last night and then this morning was having convulsions. He almost died!”
“Really?” her friend asks. And then, after a moment, “What did we take?”
“Shrooms. Totally different. We’ll be fine.”
It’s only as I put on the final Band-Aid that I let their words really sink in. As soon as I’m done, I run over to the charts and flip through them too until I find the page with Michael’s name on it.
There, in Anna’s neat penmanship: “tripping out/brown acid.”
chapter 32
Michael
I am going to die.
I don’t remember much about yesterday morning, but that thin piece of film on Evan’s palm, I can suddenly see the color plain as day. The same color as the dirt.
My mind starts to race. Sure, the guy who just told his friend he heard the brown stuff is poison doesn’t look like the world’s foremost medical expert.
But I am definitely sweating now. In a way that seems unhealthy, like I have a fever. And then my right temple starts to throb against my new Hog Farm insignia. Is it possible for my head to just combust, splattering my brains all over the fields of Woodstock?
I feel nauseous. It’s going to happen today. I’ll leave my parents an orphan. Wait . . . no, that’s not how that works. But still, as an only child, I’ll leave my mother childless. She will die of grief. Maybe my father will notice and be upset too.
I feel something on my shoulder and I jump a mile. I turn around, bewildered.
It’s Cora.
“Whoa. It’s okay. Just me,” she says.
I immediately reach out and hug her tightly, partially in relief at seeing her and partially because I don’t want to miss the opportunity in case my skull explodes at any moment.
About two seconds later, I feel pretty awkward about it. Especially when I let go and see that I’ve left streaks of mud all over her orange shirt.
“Sorry!” I say. “It’s just . . . I heard . . . the acid . . .” I can’t seem to get my thoughts together. Surely another precursor to croaking.
“Brown tab?” She finishes my thought.
I nod. Oh, God. She knows I’m going to die and she came out here to tell me in person. She’s even holding my hand to soften the blow.