Blink Once

by Cylin Busby

  She put a thick black marker into my hand and closed my fingers around it. It instantly dropped onto the floor. Olivia let out a grunt. “Well, you have to hold it,” she scolded. She put it into my hand and closed my fingers around it again, squeezing tight. “Can you hold it?” The way she said it was more like a taunt than a question.

  I sent a message to my hand to close on the pen, but it was hard to feel whether I had it in my fingers—they felt like giant sausages, with layers of something wrapped around them. I squeezed as tight as I could and hoped for the best.

  “YES!” Olivia cheered, then looked to the doorway. “I mean yes,” she whispered more quietly. “You’ve got it.” She held the board next to my hand where I could see it if I turned my head to the side a little. “Okay … go for it.”

  Suddenly, the room got very quiet. I heard her breathing, and the sound of the respirator, the blips of the machines attached to me. I tried to cut everything else out and just focus on moving my hand the way I wanted to. It jerked right, cutting a thick black mark across the board. Olivia moved my hand back into place and positioned the board.

  “Try again,” she said sternly. “I know you can do this.”

  I moved my hand a little less this time, making a smaller black mark—not exactly a line, but a smear. I dropped my hand a little lower and made another. Two lines next to each other. I made a third line. Olivia broke into a huge smile. “You’re doing it!”

  She turned the board around to look at it and nodded. I jerked the pen. “You’re not done?” she asked, and I blinked no. She put the board back next to my pen and I slowly finished what I wanted to do: a line slashed across two of the lines, making a sideways H and a blobby mark over the third line. Done.

  Olivia turned the board around. I could tell she was trying to figure out what I wrote. “Hi,” she read. She closed her eyes for a second, and when she opened them, I saw that watery look again. “Hi to you too,” she finally said. She rubbed her hand over her face and took a deep breath. “Well, this changes everything, huh, stranger?”

  Footsteps outside my door sent her scrambling. “Oh crap, I’m gonna get in so much trouble with Norris!” She grabbed the pen from my hand and quickly attached my straps so clumsily, the nurses were sure to notice. “I was not here, got it?” She tucked the board under her arm and scooted quickly from the room, closing the wall behind her.

  Chapter 4

  The footsteps we heard in the hall didn’t belong to Nurse Norris. I should have known—in their soft shoes, you never heard the nurses coming.

  In the doorway, I saw a flash of bright blue, a mass of curly blond hair.

  It was Allie.

  She looked so good, her cheeks rosy from the cold. She was wearing her winter coat, the puffy ski jacket that matched her eyes. She said it made her look fat and only wore it when it was really cold. I hadn’t realized how much I missed everything about her—even the stuff I always teased her about: her supercurly hair, the splash of teeny freckles over her nose, her funky clogs that she was wearing now. She stood in the doorway for a moment looking at me. She looked so serious, I just wanted to see a smile, so I blinked to let her know I was awake, I was okay. She walked in and sat in the chair next to the bed. “Hi,” she said quietly, looking down.

  Oh shit.

  No eye contact.

  This was bad. The last time she pulled this no-eye-contact thing with me was when we broke up, when that dork from her lit class was asking her out. She met me at the bleachers after school and gave me the news. Looking down at her shoes the whole time, she told me this guy wanted to go out with her, he was writing her poems. God, I wanted to kill that guy so bad. Who does something like that with someone else’s girlfriend? An asshole, that’s who. He deserved to get his ass kicked. But Allie made me swear not to hurt the jerk. She just wanted some time “to think.” To figure out what she really wanted. It was about her, her decision; he didn’t have anything to do with it. That’s what she said anyhow.

  I walked home numb and played Xbox for about three hours with Mike, not talking. She sent me an e-mail that night, but I deleted it before I even read it. I was over it. I had been dumped. She broke my heart. Damn.

  Looking at her now, my heart just squeezed shut. How could she do this to me again—now, while I’m like this?

  “So, um, how are you?” she said awkwardly, still not looking at me. A nurse walked in behind her, startling us both. “Sorry, just here for a quick check, then I’ll leave you two alone.” She adjusted my IV tube and looked at my chart, writing something. “You can hold his hand if you want, you know,” she said to Allie.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” Allie said, too quickly. She kept her hands folded in her lap.

  As soon as the nurse left, Allie cleared her throat. I already knew what was coming next. She finally looked at my face, her blue eyes locking on mine, then she looked down again. “Your mom called me; she wanted me to come and see you again. She said you were doing better, that the doctors say you’re doing better.” She glanced up again at me. “West …” I could see tears on her face, her nose running. She grabbed a tissue from the box next to the bed and rubbed her nose.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been here for a little bit. You know the weather has been really bad, and we’ve got winter finals….” She stopped herself. Yeah, that’s right: We didn’t have winter finals. She did. I suddenly had this horrible vision of her studying with that poem-writing prick at her house, sitting on her bed like we used to do.

  She looked down at her hands in her lap and took a deep breath. “But that’s not why I haven’t been here,” she said quietly. “The truth is, I think about you all the time, West. All the things I want to say to you. But …” She closed her eyes. “Then I get here. And this hospital, this whole place … I don’t know if I can do this, if I can come here anymore.” She put her face into her hands and cried quietly. I wanted to reach out and touch her hair, tell her it would be okay. If she would just hold my hand for a second, I could teach her how I’m blinking for yes and no, and we could talk. I needed to ask for time, a few days to understand what was going on, how bad things really were. I had only been awake for a few days, maybe a week, and here she was, ready to dump me again.

  Allie looked up and I thought for a second that maybe she had heard my thoughts. “I have to go, okay? I’m sorry.” I shut my eyes and hoped for her to touch my hand, my face, my shoulder. I just wanted to feel her; it didn’t have to be a kiss, just anything. But when I opened my eyes, she was gone.

  From what she had said, she’d visited me here before, maybe when I was unconscious. How many times had she been here? I tried to console myself: She didn’t say for sure she wasn’t coming back. It wasn’t over. She didn’t say we were broken up, she just said she couldn’t deal with the hospital, with the way things were now. So there was still a chance.

  I lay there thinking about Allie and replaying how she dumped me before—and how I won her back. It took a long time and a lot of work. I had to show her I was the right guy for her. I listened to her and gave her the space she wanted and it all worked out. But how was I going to do it this time? I watched as the sun went down outside the window. A nurse went down the hall with a cart, and the sounds of the wheels yanked me back into the world of the living just in time for my mom to walk into the room. I had tears on my face that I couldn’t wipe away, but Mom took a tissue and got them for me right away. “Hey, sweetie.” She leaned over me, kissed my forehead. “How are you?” I blinked no for not good.

  “I heard that you had a bad night. Bad dreams again?” I blinked yes and hoped that she could understand the code. She seemed to get it—the nurses must have explained, or maybe I had been communicating like this before, but I just forgot.

  “I’ll tell them it’s okay to give you a sedative for nighttime so that you won’t have any more dreams like that.” I didn’t really want to be all drugged up, because it made the passage of time and everything else so confusing, but I als
o didn’t want to have those nightmares anymore. Maybe it was better to be on the meds, at least until I could get to a place where I knew better what was going on, what was real, and what wasn’t.

  Mom reached through the bars of the bed and held my hand. She smiled, and for a minute, she just looked out the window, at the dusky sky. Then she squeezed my hand. “So Friday’s a big day, you know. We’ve finally got an appointment with Dr. Louis. He’s the one I told you about last week—he’s an expert in your type of injury and he’s going to come examine you. Dad’s going to take the day off, too, so we can both be here. I just know he’s going to have good news for us.”

  I squeezed her hand back to let her know I understood. Maybe she had told me about this doctor before; I didn’t remember, but her plan sounded good. I wanted to know exactly what was wrong with me and how to fix it. Then I could work on getting Allie back, getting to school, everything.

  “Do you want to hear some Harry Potter?” she asked. “Oh, I talked to Allie, she told me they are reading A Separate Peace in English class right now. Should I get a copy of that and read it to you instead? I don’t want you to fall too far behind.”

  I thought about it. I’d rather get lost in the fantasy world of Harry Potter for now, so I blinked no.

  “I thought you’d probably want Harry Potter—I know, I know, you’re too old for it now, but I just remember how much fun we had reading those books when you were younger.” I could hear her voice catch. I remember, too, I wanted to tell her. I remember.

  “Anyhow, the other book is a school assignment, so maybe I’ll pick it up,” Mom said, composing herself. She opened the drawer and took out Harry Potter, starting a chapter later in the book than where Olivia had left off. So now I had two people reading me the same book, but from different sections. Mom was already halfway through—she must have started days or weeks ago? She read a chapter, but to be honest, I was only half listening. My mind was on Allie, this new doctor, and trying to figure out exactly how long I had been here. When she closed the book, it was dark out and she looked tired. “Enough for tonight; more tomorrow, okay, sweetie? And in two days, we’ll see Dr. Louis, and then we’ll know more.” She kissed my forehead and picked up her bag and jacket. “I will see you in the morning,” she promised. “I love you, West,” she said seriously, looking right into my eyes. I could see her memory, then, of sitting on my bed together, reading Harry Potter. Back when I was just a kid, before I even started biking. Before all of this. “You know how much I love you.”

  I just blinked to let her know her message was received. She smiled and walked out the door.

  I looked at the doorway for the longest time, waiting for the nurse or Olivia to come. I guess she had already been by today, and I had a lot of visitors, but I was still looking forward to seeing her. I was hoping she would come and bring the board. I had an important question for her, and I knew only she had the patience to wait for me while I wrote it. After a while, Nurse Norris showed up, and the night shift had begun already.

  “Sorry to do this to you at bedtime, but the doctor says he still wants you rolled,” Norris explained. She secured the strap that ran over my forehead and undid the locks on either side of bed, rotating me so that I was facing the wall. “We won’t have to do this too much longer, okay?” She looked at my face when she talked to me, which I appreciated, especially after what had happened with Allie.

  “What is going on here, mister?” My hand was loose in the binding, where Olivia had not strapped it back in right. “You trying to break out of here? Your mom probably did that to hold your hand.” She secured my hand and then went back to the foot of the bed to check my chart. “Oh boy, they are bringing out the big guns, look at this dosage. Okay, if that’s what the doctor ordered.” She prepared a syringe of something and pumped it into my IV. Again I felt the cold liquid dash though the veins in my arm. Then, after a second, the warm feeling took over, and I felt amazing. Suddenly, I wasn’t worrying about Allie, or anything. Whatever this stuff was, it felt about eight hundred times better than being drunk. I drifted off thinking about the kegger at Mike’s place where I first met Allie, when I first had the balls to talk to her.

  She was sitting up on the kitchen counter and she was sort of dressed up. I had to think of something to say to her, something to start a conversation. I’d been seeing her at drama after school for weeks and trying to find a way to talk to her. We didn’t have any of the same classes. I had no idea who her friends were. It was impossible.

  I just went over and stood sort of close to where she was, hoping something would happen, like osmosis, and somehow we would end up talking. One of her friends was up on the counter with her. Their heads were close together, and they were talking about something. I followed their eyes to the living room, where Mike was standing on the coffee table. He looked like he was pretending to be on a surfboard, except he had a beer in each hand. Allie and her friend did not look amused.

  “If you want a surfing lesson, I think Mike is teaching them for free in the living room,” I said, trying to be funny.

  “We live five hours from the nearest ocean. I think I’ll pass,” her friend snarked back, and Allie laughed. But then she took mercy on me.

  “You’re friends with him, right?” she asked me. “With Mike?”

  “Yeah, we hang out.”

  “But you’re also in drama?” She looked a little confused, like someone who was friends with Mike couldn’t also be into the drama club.

  Her friend slid down off the counter. “It’s too loud in here. I’m going outside, you coming?”

  Allie shook her head, and her friend shrugged and walked off.

  I looked back at Allie and just stood there. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Should I give her a compliment? Tell her she looked pretty tonight? No, that would come out wrong. Like she didn’t usually look pretty. The music suddenly seemed to be louder, more obnoxious.

  “So … ,” I finally said. Then I just stood there, like an idiot, waiting for something cool to come out of my mouth.

  “So, drama?” she asked when it was clear I was totally floundering.

  “Oh, that.” I shook my head. “I built the bike ramp, the one at the park next to school. So Mrs. Herbert asked me to help out with the sets, just building and stuff, you know.” I tried to growl like a caveman and added, “Power tools.”

  Allie smiled. “Don’t put yourself down. I saw the drawings you did for the sets, they’re amazing. You’re really talented. Have you had a lot of art classes?” She met my eyes in a serious way that made me wish I hadn’t had three beers already.

  “Uh, no, I don’t know….” I looked across the room at Mike, who was now standing on one leg, using the beers to help him balance, doing a Karate Kid move. He had a crowd of admirers around him, the usual gang of idiots, cheering him on.

  “How is it that you guys are friends?” Allie asked, and I was glad she changed the subject.

  “That’s a long story.” I didn’t want to get into it. “You ask a lot of questions, you know that?”

  Now it was Allie’s turn to blush. “Do I?” Then she laughed.

  I mocked her high voice, asking, “Do I?”

  She kept laughing at my impression of her, which I took as a good sign that she wasn’t a bitch and didn’t take herself too seriously. “Okay, I guess I do. I’m sorry. Now it’s your turn—ask me anything.”

  I stood next to her, so close I could touch her bare leg if I moved my hand an inch. I met her eyes and leaned in so I wouldn’t have to yell. “Do you have a boyfriend?” I only had the courage to ask because I already knew the answer. I’d done my homework.

  “No.” She didn’t flinch.

  “Can I get you a beer?”

  “That’s two questions,” she said, smiling. “But okay.” The beer made her cheeks turn pink, which was the cutest thing I’d ever seen. After that, we never stopped talking. God, she was so beautiful, I couldn’t even believe she was speaking to me. Tha
t was the night when everything changed. Suddenly, I had a girlfriend. Allie. I wanted her, I went after her, and I got her. I almost couldn’t believe my good luck. I should have known it couldn’t last.

  Chapter 5

  I walk into the school with Allie. It’s winter and it’s cold and she’s got her puffy coat on. I’m trying to squeeze her like a marshmallow and pick her up. “Stop it!” she squeals, slapping my hands away. We go to my locker first, and I see Mike. He’s got a skater hat pulled down over his rowdy red hair, the kind of hat you’re not supposed to wear in school. “Dude, I thought you were in the hospital,” he says, slapping me a high five.

  “Didn’t you hear? The doctors were wrong, he’s totally fine,” Allie says quickly.

  “That is excellent,” Mike says. “But are you ready for midterms?”

  Then it hits me: I totally forgot to study. I open my backpack, but it’s full of hospital stuff: syringes, tubes, bandages, the straps that held me on the bed. “Oh man, I think I brought the wrong bag.”

  Mike’s laughing. “Uh, I hate to say this, but you are gonna fail big time.”

  “Maybe you just go home and pretend you’re sick, you don’t have to take the tests today,” Allie says.

  “Yeah, you’re not really dressed for school,” Mike points out. “Just go to the office. I’ll tell you what’s on the test later.”

  “Mike!” Allie says. “That’s cheating.”

  The bell sounds and they walk away together and leave me standing in the hallway alone. I look down and see that he’s right, I’m not dressed for school. I’m wearing my hospital gown. I still have an IV attached to my hand, there’s blood running down my arm, pooling on the floor.

  I woke up to a nurse taping a new IV down on my hand. She didn’t talk to me or look at me, so I guess she didn’t notice that I was awake. She adjusted the IV bag and left before I was really awake. The drugs they were giving me at night were insane. I had also been rotated again, onto my back, but I didn’t remember who did that, or when. I didn’t mind—the faster time went by, the faster I could get to Friday and see this doctor and hear what was really going on with me.