by Suzanne Weyn
Grabbing my backpack from the dressing room, I bolt for the backstage loading dock door. It’s raining, but not hard. The air smells wonderful, but my deep inhale doesn’t help the sensation of suffocation.
Matt stands by the van, which has its rear doors open. “Can you give me a hand with this, Mira?” Matt calls to me.
“Can’t,” I reply turning my face away from him. “I’ve got to go.” I reassure myself that if I was really unable to breathe I wouldn’t have been able to answer him. My chest is so tight. An invisible band tightens around it.
“Mira!” Matt calls as I dash past him around to the side of the building. At the front of the building, I make a left and break into a run. It’s amazing how fast I can go when I run full out. Even weaving through the people traffic on the sidewalk, I’m moving fast. Before I know it, I’ve covered more than twenty blocks.
It’s good to run—I hadn’t even realized how much I’d missed it. The deep breathing is calming me. The rain is picking up, mixing with ice. I slide and realize I’d better slow down.
Ducking into a doorway, I send Niles a message. DON’T WORRY. JUST A LITTLE FREAKED OUT. NEED SOME SPACE TO CLEAR MY HEAD. He’ll definitely relate. TELL THE GUYS TO LEAVE WITHOUT ME.
It’s a full-out ice storm now. The sidewalk is a sea of umbrellas, mostly black. The panic that seized me has abated.
Standing alone among this crowd of people who are completely unaware of me doesn’t do anything for my sense of loneliness, though. Why am I so messed up? I’m not alone. I have Niles, Mom, Zack, Emma, the band, other friends. I know they love me—but I don’t feel their love. I love them back. I know I do. But I don’t feel it.
I’m only another ten blocks or so from Grand Central Terminal. I’ll take the train home. I have enough money for a taxi from the station.
My next train home is on the lower level. I head down the wide stairs, glad to be in a warm, dry place. A loud voice announces delays on certain trains due to ice on the tracks. Mine is one of them. I pause, not sure where to go or what to do.
“Mira!” I turn toward the voice and see a young woman a little older than me. I can’t recall who she is, but part of me knows she wore a ponytail the last time I saw her.
“It’s me, Amy … from the veterans’ group.”
Of course! How could I forget her? She’s the woman who was so friendly to me that day. I glance at her legs. Amy has no shoes on. Two curved metal pieces clink on the marble floor when she shifts position. “Hi! How are you?”
“Fine. Are you heading to the party?” she asks. She studies me more closely. “Boy, you’re soaked. Will you be all right?”
A sudden chill overtakes me. My teeth chatter. Up until that moment I hadn’t known how cold I really was.
“Come with me to the party,” Amy says. “They’ll have something warm for you to drink. First, let’s get you cleaned up a little.”
I leave a trail of water on the station’s floor as we walk toward the bathrooms. “I ran for more than thirty blocks.” I laugh lightly because it sounds so crazy. Then I go on to tell her about how blank and emotionless I’ve been feeling. Something about Amy—maybe it’s her calm, gentle face—makes me feel I can confide in her. “Lately, I can’t feel anything, and then today, when I should have felt happy, I suddenly flipped into a total panic. It doesn’t make sense.”
“It could be PTSD or something like it.” She explains that PTSD stands for “post-traumatic stress disorder.” It happens to soldiers who were in battle. My accident was certainly a huge trauma. I have some of the symptoms.
“You should probably see a therapist, and your doctor, too,” she says. “You need to talk to someone. That’s why I love this group so much.”
Amy and I head to a small restaurant tucked away in a corner of the lower level. A mural of Italy brightens the red walls. Twenty or so people are already there. Everyone knows Amy and they’re happy to see her. I notice the army officer who led the group in the hospital. All kinds of pizza are set out on a table, along with soda and punch. A DJ spins tunes, mostly radio hits.
Soon the guests start dancing. Amy rocks up and down on her two prosthetics with a guy who wears a more traditional fake leg, like the one I used to wear. Others join them on the small dance floor. All combinations of prosthetics are represented: a guy twirling in his wheelchair wears a helmet with wires attached; a young woman with a fake arm and a fake leg, like me, leans on a cane, swaying to the music; another soldier balances on two bright red legs, like the ones Amy wears. Some of the others clap in time to the music. They have one thing in common, something more than prosthetics. They are joyful—happy, laughing, full of life.
I need to have that again. More than rock stardom, more than money or fame. I want to feel joy again. I need to feel again. Period.
It hits me that I might never experience an emotion again. This idea hits me harder than the loss of my leg or my arm ever did. Suddenly, I don’t want to be around these happy, laughing people—not if I can’t share in their pleasure and fun.
As if answering my desperation, a voice comes over the station loudspeaker announcing that the tracks have been cleared and all delayed trains are once again moving. I tell Amy I have to catch my train. But she must see something in my face—I’m so anxious to leave that I’m nearly vibrating with it. We exchange phone numbers and she makes me promise to stay in touch.
Outside, in the station once more, the schedule board lists my train as leaving in twenty minutes. My track is on this lower level, just across the way, so I head for the benches to wait.
Niles sees me at the same moment I notice him sitting there. He stands, propped against his crutches. “Niles!” I cry, surprised.
“You’re here!” His smile is so warm. “I was just about to give up and leave.”
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
“Looking for you. I was worried. I figured you’d have to come through here eventually to get home.”
“You’ve waited all this time?”
He glances at a paperback split open on the bench. “I have a book. I didn’t mind.”
We sit side by side on the bench. “Where’d you go? What happened?” he asks. I tell him that I think I had a panic attack, though it’s only a guess because I’ve never had one before. “Why are you panicking?” Niles asks.
“I don’t know who I am anymore,” I say.
Niles scoffs, smiling. “Who knows who they are? Nobody—at least no one I know. Who you are keeps changing, so how can you keep track of it?”
Niles always seems so calm, sure of his identity. His words surprise me. “You don’t know who you are?” I question.
“I used to be a guy who played guitar with a band. I had a crush on the band’s awesome, funny, kooky lead singer, but she had a joyless boyfriend who was a real drag, so I didn’t stand a chance.”
“I always thought you were nice,” I say.
“Yeah, but that wasn’t enough,” he replies. “It wasn’t the same way I felt about you.” We smile at each other. “Anyway … Then I was somebody who was in a horrific car crash and who was lucky to survive. I became a happy guy because the awesome lead singer, who was also recovering, liked me after she broke up with the idiot boyfriend. I was a guy recovering—and then I was a guy not recovering. I was a depressed guy who shut everybody out. After that, I was a guy who met the awesome lead singer again and began to feel better again. And so on.”
“You’ve been through so many changes, too.” I say.
“Yes and no,” Niles says. “Through it all, I was the same on the inside. I have a center that doesn’t change. I feel the same about you as I always have. Even when I shut you out, I never stopped thinking about you.”
“I need to feel again, Niles. I don’t know if I can go on without feeling love, even pain.”
Niles takes hold of my bionic hand. His touch is so comforting. “Let’s go home, Mira,” he says. “My car is parked outside. I think you need some professional he
lp to sort this out. In the meantime, I’m here.”
Laying my head on his shoulder, I squeeze his hand, careful not to over-squeeze. He squeezes back, then turns his head to kiss me.
Hand in hand we head out of the station. The cold, icy rain is now mixed with snow. The wind has picked up. The snow-ice combination blows against our faces, collecting in our collars.
Niles’s car is parked two blocks down. We’re not dressed for this weather, but we have no choice except to put our heads down and trudge toward it. Niles’s crutch slides in the slippery mix. I’m able to steady him, to keep him from toppling, which I have to do three times.
Fire trucks race somewhere. Their sirens blare. A truck backfires, spraying black soot at us, making me cough. I can’t stop shivering. Finally, I see the Civic. I step between the curb and passenger-side door. Immediately, my bionic foot is in a puddle. I can feel its iciness. My left foot slides on the ice and rocks me backward onto my rear end on the sidewalk.
A blast of nausea hits my stomach. I hear Niles. “Mira!” He’s reaching his hand to me.
It’s the last thing I remember before being swallowed into a black hole of unconsciousness.
My eyes open and my mom’s is the first face I see. She brushes my hair from my forehead. Her eyes are wet with tears, but she’s smiling. “Mira, honey.”
“I told you she’d come out of it,” Dr. Hector says from somewhere behind her.
“You said her chances were good,” Mom corrects him.
Dr. Hector is suddenly on the other side of me. He checks my eyes, ears, mouth, and throat with his penlight. He listens to my heart with his stethoscope. “How do you feel?” he asks.
“My head hurts—a lot,” I reply. It feels like I smashed against a brick wall. My throat is also sore, but I’m not worried about that. I know from all my other surgeries that it’s just from getting my fluids through the intravenous tube I’m hooked to. A monitor beeps, taking my vital signs. Oxygen is pumped up my nostrils by a contraption held in place with a wire. White gauze bandages cover my skull.
He nods and writes on his clipboard. “We’ll get you something for the headache.” He sighs while folding his arms. “Okay, kiddo. Here’s the deal. Your mom already knows all this, but now I’m bringing you up to date. Your super-gorgeous hair, skin, and nails are a thing of the past.”
“What?”
“We’ve changed the copper chip in your head. When your friend brought you in, you had collapsed in the street and you were just starting to come around.”
I have a vague memory of a nurse washing my face with a cloth. I half recall people rushing around, sticking me with needles, rushing up and down hallways while I’m strapped to a gurney. In my mind it’s dreamlike, but apparently it happened.
“This new chip is much less powerful. Your blood isn’t circulating as fast. You won’t be producing so much more of it. The old chip was too much for your bodily systems to handle. It was putting you on overload.”
“Will I be able to feel emotions again?” I ask.
Dr. Hector furrows his brow, confused. I explain the emotional blankness I’ve been experiencing. He nods, taking notes. “This is interesting,” he says. “It’s possible that blood flow was directed away from your limbic system to empower other neural pathways. We know that the limbic system affects emotion, although we can’t exactly pinpoint where in the brain all emotion stems from. Injuries to the frontal lobes of the brain can cause a flattening of affect in patients.”
“Flattening of affect?” I ask.
“A dullness, a lack of emotionality,” Dr. Hector explains.
“Yes! That’s it! Will that go away?”
“I don’t know,” Dr. Hector says. “We’ll watch it carefully, though. Your friend told me you thought you had had a panic attack?”
“It felt like it might be,” I say. “Another friend thought it could be post-traumatic stress.”
“We’ll be watching for that, too.” He writes a script which he hands to Mom. “That’s the name, number, and email of a psychiatrist associated with these medical trials. Set up an appointment for Mira.”
This time I don’t object. When you need help, you need help. People might not change, but they learn.
“And what about the panic attacks or PTSD?” Mom asks.
“It’s related to her brain function and it could be caused by her situation as well,” Dr. Hector says. “Both things are about to change, so we’ll keep an eye on it. There are going to be a lot of changes coming.”
Niles’s old dented Civic pulls into the parking area near the lake. Through the falling snow he walks across the road, bent a little over his cane, his backpack slung over his shoulder. Zack is beside him, his head thrown back to catch the flakes on his tongue. “Let Project Snowman begin,” Niles says when they reach me.
I come in for a kiss with my somewhat chapped lips. My hair has flopped a bit and now my nails crack sometimes. And in the cold, my lips chap. The reduced copper chip inside me still works, but I’m not operating at “ultimate capacity.”
“You two stop that. It’s gross,” Zack says.
Although Zack and I do most of the snow rolling, Niles collects pine branches for arms, rocks for eyes, and he’s brought a carrot for a nose. Before too long we have a lumpy, fat snowman. “He’s not perfect, but he’s ours,” Niles says. He takes a picture of Zack and me with our snowman, and checks the time. “We have to leave for practice in fifteen minutes,” he says. The band is playing smaller venues again, and my swallowed-an-amplifier voice has simmered down. I’ve also had to go back to learn guitar, since my ability to memorize through visualization is mostly gone. Niles is teaching me, which is fun. He’s finally come back to the band, though our dancing days are over—he sits on a stool to play.
Zack sees a friend from school coming down the road pulling a sled and runs off to talk to him.
Niles asks me to get his backpack from the ground, since it’s difficult for him to bend. “I have a present for you.”
“I love presents!”
“Yeah, well, I hope you like this. I made it myself.” My present is wrapped in blue tissue paper.
Niles has taken a photo of the two of us dancing—he’s swinging me into a twirl and our hands are interlocked—and made another statue, scaled down to about eight inches each, of the two of us.
“I love it!” I say honestly.
“It’s how we used to look,” he says. “I’m going to miss that printer when I graduate.”
“While you still have the printer, could you make another figure?” I request.
“Sure. What picture should I use?”
“This one,” I say, tilting my phone to show him. It’s a shot of Niles and me that Emma took during a break at our last practice. We’re seated side by side. Niles’s crutches rest against his knee. In the picture Niles is showing me how to play the bridge in our latest song. We’re intent on what we’re doing, not smiling for the camera.
“Why do you like this picture?” Niles asks. “We’re just sitting there, and we’re never that serious.”
“Because it shows us as we are,” I say. “See how we lean toward each other?”
He nods, looking at me with a smile in his eyes.
Niles takes my bionic hand and pulls me closer for a kiss. I feel such a wash of love—for Niles, for my mom and Zack, for Emma and the band and the snow and the lake—that, for a moment, I’m overwhelmed. So much has changed, and so much is changing, but right now, I know it’s going to be okay. With every particle of myself, bionic and organic, I feel it.
Thanks to my always astute, supportive, and hardworking editor, Erin Black, for all her guidance.
Suzanne Weyn is the acclaimed author of Faces of the Dead, Dr. Frankenstein’s Daughters, Distant Waves, and Reincarnation, as well as The Bar Code Tattoo, The Bar Code Rebellion, and The Bar Code Prophecy. She is also the author of the Haunted Museum series for younger readers. Suzanne lives in upper New York State, and you can v
isit her online at www.suzanneweynbooks.com.
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The Bar Code Prophecy by Suzanne Weyn!
Grace pulled her plastic junior e-card from the front pocket of her metallic silver shorts and handed it to Eric, who was working behind the desk at the rock climbing center. She had been in love with him from afar for years, and now she was up close. Very close.
“In two days I won’t have to carry that card anymore,” she told him, trying to keep her tone casual. “I turn seventeen on Sunday.”
“Happy Birthday,” he said, his dark eyes flashing merrily.
This was more than she’d ever gotten from him at school. It was a huge school — a factory for making students, really — and they didn’t have any of the same classes or friends. She noticed him in the halls, though. She always noticed him in the halls. Even as she felt herself blending into the crowd.
Eric never blended in. Everyone knew him. He was quite literally a rock star — a rock-climbing star, that was. Olympic team bound. Not like her at all.
Although maybe he had noticed her. Because when she’d come here to the indoor rock wall climbing center for the first time, he’d said, “I know you.” And each time after that, she’d wanted him to know more.
“Where are you getting your tattoo done?” he asked.
“Since I have a summer job as a receptionist at GlobalHelix, I can get it done on my lunch break,” she told him. “But I have to wait until Monday.”
She’d never mentioned her job to him before; in the weeks they’d been flirting (well, she at least had been flirting — his intentions were unclear), it hadn’t come up. Now, when she mentioned GlobalHelix, the genetics division of the multinational corporation Global-1, his smile flickered for a second. “After everything that’s happened, how is that company still operating?” he wondered out loud. It wasn’t antagonistic — he wasn’t attacking her. But clearly he wasn’t a Global-1 fan.
