Three Day Summer(52)

“Oh my God. Cora, are you okay?” Anna asks.

I make the mistake of trying to talk again, and bleat one more time. Then I make the mistake of trying to apologize for my bleat, with the undesired result of a loud honk. I shut my mouth and clasp my hands over it.

Anna has never seen me cry and she looks understandably horrified.

She takes the chart away from me and hands it to Ned. “Okay, you can’t work like this right now. Let’s start by breathing deeply.”

I shake my head, not wanting to open my mouth again. My whole body is racked by sobs.

“Yes, you have to breathe,” she says. “Here, put your head between your legs.”

She helps me bend from the waist as I make gasping noises.

“Cora.” I hear Ned’s panicked voice and I shake my head violently. Funnily enough, he has never seen me cry before either. The night we broke up, only the hens were around for the result.

“Ned, please attend to the patient,” blessed Anna says before turning back to me.

She strokes my back and gently helps me to stand tall again. She looks me in the eye with a small frown. “Cora,” she says quietly. “I have to ask you. Did you take anything?”

I shake my head no before being racked by another hiccup.

“Okay, then what . . .” Anna looks at me and tilts her head. And in that moment, I think she understands. I suddenly appreciate that she was once a seventeen-year-old girl too. “You figured out what you want,” she declares.

I take my hands slowly away from my mouth and open it cautiously, to make sure no strange noises escape. “I . . . think so.” My voice comes out as a croak. “I think I have to go.” I hear the scratching of Ned’s pen stop. He’s staring at me too.

“Of course you do,” Anna says.

“I’m sorry to leave. I’ve been no help at all this weekend,” I babble as I untie my candy striper apron. “I’m sorry.”

Anna just smiles at me. “There’ll be plenty for you to do at the hospital later.”

Ned doesn’t take his eyes off me as I leave the tent, but I barely notice. I feel a heady combination of foolish and giddy; I feel invincible and simultaneously fit to burst with emotion, like I’m one pinprick away from becoming unbound.

Outside, I search in the immediate vicinity of the tent but Michael and his friends are gone. I head in the direction of the stage, knowing that I have to find him.





chapter 60


Michael


Joe Cocker’s gritty voice is pouring sand into my wounded soul.

We’re not too close to the stage; we’re near the top of the hill, in fact. But the day is clear and I can see him pretty well, a thin man in striped blue pants roaring into the microphone with the most gorgeous primal scream I’ve ever heard.

I should be reveling in it. Instead, I’m thinking of everything that hurts, starting with my eye. Deserved pain, really. And it feels better than my insides right now, anyway, so I keep focusing on it.

Amanda has continued to pretend that we never started a conversation in the woods. She is talking excitedly about Cocker, how he’s palpitating energy. How it’s radiating up the hill and through all our fellow festivalgoers, who sway and twirl with him. She’s right. But I can’t feel it myself. Everything looks duller. It might be my eye. But I doubt it.

Amanda loves Joe Cocker. She loves a lot of the same music I love. I used to think it was a miracle. And now it’s starting to dawn on me that it doesn’t really matter, does it? That just because we like some of the same things, or just because I think she’s so beautiful, it’s not enough to keep us together. Or it shouldn’t be at any rate. Because that’s not really what all these love songs, some of my very favorite ones, are actually about. They’re about how someone makes you feel. Maybe, I’d even go so far as to say, they’re about how someone makes you feel about yourself.

I have to finish what I started, even if it seems pointless. Even if I never see Cora again. I just can’t keep up the charade of something, not when I’ve experienced the real version of it. It’s disrespectful to everything I feel.

I move closer to Amanda and say her name softly. She pretends she doesn’t hear me, continues to stare down at the stage in rapture.

“Amanda,” I say again, more firmly. “Please. I need to talk to you.”

She turns to me then, her gaze steady, her neck high, as if her perfect face is daring me to go through with it. “What is it, Michael?”

“What we were talking about before . . . before . . . you know.” I gesture to my eye.

She continues to gaze at me, her expression blank. Does she really have no idea what I’m talking about? Do I have to start all over? I clear my throat. “I think, sometimes, two people aren’t really meant to be together, you know?”

“Happier,” she says slowly, out of nowhere.

“What?” I ask, bewildered.

“Before, you said we should be happier.” So she does remember. “You meant happier. As in, with other people,” she says.

“Well, yeah . . . ,” I say, though I don’t think I like where this is going. Amanda is getting a black pinprick in the center of her eye. I recognize it; it comes along like the wick attached to dynamite.

“And by other people. You, of course, mean that bitch in the stripes.”