I gape at the ON AIR sign above our heads. I’m heady with the excitement of being here. Please, please, please let me get this internship. Even if I’m walking through these halls for long shifts and doing nothing but making copies or picking up lunch, it will be a dream come true.
Ms. Jackson pushes a door open and we enter the studio. There’s a glass window separating us from the broadcast area. I try not to gawk as I watch the DJs. The four of them sit around the table, computer screens and microphones in front of each one, bulky headphones resting on their ears. They interact seamlessly, volleying conversation around the table as if they’re a family having dinner.
So unbelievably cool.
“And behind us,” Ms. Jackson is saying. “These are the sound engineers and producers.” I turn around and wave to the few guys at computers in the room with us.
“This is amazing,” I say, feeling like a cartoon character with stars swirling out of my eyes.
“Thanks,” she says. “We’re proud of our little family here. Come on, let’s head back.”
Little family. Wow. She really is modest.
I walk next to Ms. Jackson on the way back to her office. Ms. Hudson hangs back, letting us talk. When we get back to the office, Ms. Jackson goes over my resume and listens to the clips we brought from the last few weeks of morning shows.
“Your interview skills are solid.” She nods as she backs the recording up to hear another segment again. After a few minutes, she looks at me and smiles. “You obviously have the knack and hard work ethic for radio. Your themed segments are really great, and as you can see, listeners respond well to you.”
“Thanks,” I answer coolly. Coolly! As if I wasn’t just complimented by one of the most powerful women in radio in one of the leading radio cities in the world.
About that trifecta of stuff going well? Yeah. Life is good.
“So you know this internship doesn’t allow any on air time, right? I’m sure Ms. Hudson has explained that to you? Our college interns are a little more involved in the recording room than the high school interns, but even those are not on the air.”
“Yeah, er, yes. She has. I know I’d be working in a supportive role to everyone here at WYN60. I’m more than happy to do whatever you and everyone else here needs.”
I don’t say what I’m really thinking, that I’d lick the dirt off her shoes for a job here.
She nods. “At this point, we have the candidates narrowed down to four finalists.”
Four others? Gulp. I begin to deflate.
“You understand this is a very competitive business and many, many high school students applied for this one spot.”
“Yes, I can imagine how many applicants you had to screen.” I try to keep the warble from my voice.
“We had more than two thousand applicants for the high school intern spot.”
Double gulp.
“Your clips are very good and as I said, you have some very solid skills. The other applicants, however, are also very talented.”
Fully deflated now. I knew I didn’t have a chance. Who did I think I was fooling?
Of course the other applicants are very talented. Way more than me, I’m sure. I probably only got this interview because of Ms. Hudson, anyway. My clips are probably one of the worst Ms. Jackson has ever heard, but she feels obligated to say nice things to me.
I clear my throat to bite back my embarrassment.
She sits back in her chair, holding my transcripts and resume up again. “Any idea where you’ll be applying to schools next year?”
“None yet. But I’ve been compiling a list of schools with good communications programs.”
Again I don’t say what I’m really thinking. I’m compiling a list of schools I can’t afford and hoping for a miracle to land in my lap.
“As well you should.” She smiles and drops the papers on her desk and hits a button on her phone. “Mark?” she calls into the speaker.
“Yes, Roberta?” A friendly voice answers.
“Can you bring me a welcome kit, please?”
A welcome kit.
A welcome kit!
Wait.
I don’t even want to think it. That can’t have anything to do with me. Can it? It can’t be for me? I mean, it obviously, has to be. But it can’t be.
“Give me two minutes,” Mark answers.
Roberta presses a button and looks up at me with a smile. “Welcome to WYN60, Ms. Torres. We are looking forward to having you on board as one of our summer interns.”
My cool mask of fake composure slips. “Oh my God! I mean, thank you so much!” I can feel the tears pooling in my eyes.
Great Jasmine; nice way to hang on to that air of professionalism.
But Ms. Jackson is smiling and when her assistant, Mark comes into the room, she passes the Get up and Go tote bag to me.
“Welcome,” she says. “Once again. Mark, this is Jasmine Torres, one of our new summer interns. Can you ask H.R. to bring over the paperwork? She can bring it home and fill it out with her parents over the weekend.”
“Hey Jasmine!” Mark, a pudgy guy with glasses and a cool style, wearing a bolero hat and striped vest, gives me a small wave. “I’ll get that paperwork right over.”
And then Mark is gone, and Ms. Jackson and Ms. Hudson are reminiscing about college and I just sit here, holding a bag chock full of goodies like tee shirts and notepads and pens from my absolute favorite radio show and station which happens to be (gasp!) the new place I work.
What is life?
We leave about twenty minutes later, with the human resources (which is apparently what H.R. stands for) paperwork. Ms. Jackson shakes my hand when we leave and I take a look around the WYN60 office, knowing (and hardly believing!) this will be my new surroundings three days each week this summer. I’ll even earn a small stipend—enough pay for my commute and lunches and hopefully some left over to help out at home.
As soon as we get out onto the sidewalk, I squeal, jumping up and down.
Ms. Hudson high-fives me. She slides her sunglasses on, but not before I notice tears in her eyes. “I’m so proud of you!” She says. “You didn’t even need me here. That was a home run, Jasmine, from the minute you walked in the door.”
I bite my lip. “It was, wasn’t it? I was in some kind of weird robot mode. I didn’t want to look like a dork, but I was so excited!”
“You worked so hard for this. It’s well deserved.” She squeezes my arm. “Now let’s get some lunch.”
We choose a small café with sidewalk seating. We look over the menu and I decide on a veggie burger and sweet potato fries. All the energy expended on this morning’s meeting has left me exhausted and absolutely starving.
“I’m going to text my friend and tell him what happened,” I say, slipping my phone from my bag.
“Friend?” Ms. Hudson asks, a small smile playing on her lips.
I shrug and laugh. “It’s complicated.”
Two missed calls from Wes? That’s weird. He knows where I am today. And a voicemail? I press the phone to my ear, confused.
“Hi Jasmine, this is Lynette, Wesley’s mom. There’s been an accident. I know he would want me to call you.”
She pauses, her breath hitching, and my stomach drops like I’m doing a freefall right off the side of the earth.
When she speaks again, her words are muddied with tears. “We’re at St. Bonaventure. Room 356 in ICU. I wanted to let you know. You meant a lot to Wes. Mean a lot, I mean. I know he’d want me to tell you.”
The message clicks off and she’s gone.
“What’s wrong?” Ms. Hudson’s voice shows only a fraction of the alarm I feel. “Is it your brother?”
I shake my head slowly, forcing words from sticking in the arid desert my mouth has become. “We have to go,” I manage.
24
MY MOM ANSWERS on the third ring.
“Mom!”
“Jasmine, hi! How did it go?”
“What?” My mi
nd darts all around. Frantic thoughts on top of frantic thoughts, chasing more frantic thoughts.
“The interview. How was it?”
“Oh. It was great. I got the internship, but—”
“Congratulations! I knew you could do it. We have to celebrate.”
“No. Mom. That’s not why I’m calling. Wes is in the hospital.”
“Who?”
I huff. “Wes, Mom! My friend Wes. The boy from last night. With the Bortans. The headphones? The guy with the present!”
“Oh, him! Is he okay?”
“I don’t know. His mom left a message for me. She said there was an accident. But she said he would want her to call. Would want. That doesn’t sound good.” A sob works its way out of me.
“Oh honey.”
“Anyway, Ms. Hudson is going to drop me off at the hospital. Is that okay? Are you home for Danny after school?”
“Yeah, of course. Sure. Want me to come to the hospital?”
I squeeze my eyes shut and shake my head. “No, that’s okay. But thanks. I’ll call you when I know something.”
THE INTENSIVE CARE floor is way quieter than pediatrics ever is, and when I get off the elevator the hush falls around me like the loudest thing ever. The waiting room is smaller, too, and has none of the fish tanks or toy centers that the pediatric floor has. It’s tiny, really, with about ten ugly paisley chairs and three scarred up wood end tables. Wes’s mom paces there, whispering into her cell phone, the lines on her face deeper than I remember. She wears cotton shorts and a tee shirt and no makeup.
I glance at the nurse’s station and decide to wait for Lynette to end her call. I’m not sure if I’ll even be allowed to see him, but if I don’t at least find out soon what happened, I’m going to lose it. I take deep breaths and shove my shaking hands in my pockets as I pace the short hallway. It takes serious mental strength to keep my mind from landing on every bad memory of Danny’s visits in this place.
Her words are too low for me to hear and her back is to me, but I watch as she reaches up to wipe tears away.
An accident? I don’t even understand how that happened. He should have been at school today so what was he doing driving?
When she finally hangs up, she sees me and gives me a small smile. She crosses the room on big steps and pulls me into a tight hug.
“Thanks for coming, darlin’.”
“Of course! What happened? Can I see him?”
She glances toward the hallway beyond the nurse’s station. “He looks terrible, I don’t want it to scare you. Let’s go walk. We’ll get a coffee real quick and talk for a few minutes.”
“Okay.” My heart is racing. I want to cry or scream or do something that makes her tell me what’s going on, but of course I have to bite my lip and wait patiently. “He’s okay, though. Right?” My voice goes up an octave and my eyes search hers.
She hooks her arm through mine and leads me toward the elevator. “I don’t know,” she says with a catch in her voice.
The elevator is crowded so it’s not until we’re in the coffee shop that Wes’s mom opens up. I stir my drink and wince at the memory of when I met Wes over my spilled cup of hot coffee.
“He had a seizure this morning.”
No.
I close my eyes and picture Wes’s face. Perfectly healthy, seizure-free Wes.
She takes a deep breath, obviously gearing up for a story she’s probably told a million times today. “He’s been doing so well. You know, he hasn’t had a seizure in years. Years! But this was a bad one. And he was at the top of the stairs. He fell all the way down and broke his nose, wrist and ankle. But he also hit his head very hard and has a concussion. Concussions are dangerous enough for healthy people, but for those with epilepsy, they can be detrimental, as can any change in the brain. Anyway, he was still seizing when I came home from the grocery store. They are trying to pinpoint the timeline now, but the cuts he got in the fall were already starting to congeal and scab and the way the fluid gathered at the breaks in his bones, suggests he was on the floor for quite some time, maybe even close to an hour.”
“Oh my God.” I stop walking.
She nods. “I know. And I wasn’t gone much longer than that, so it must have happened right when I left.”
“How is he now? Is he coherent?”
Tears spill down her cheeks as she shakes her head. “He is totally out. Heavily sedated. They used the diastat to stop the seizure, which worked for a while…” she shakes her head and takes a deep breath. “But when we got here he had another small seizure and then an hour later, another, a worse one. They gave him IV meds and upped them to the point of him being almost catatonic. They had to slow everything down in there.” She taps her temple.
We step onto the elevator, which is thankfully empty.
“He has regular EEGs so we know his epilepsy hasn’t been getting worse. I am praying this is a fluke breakthrough seizure and not his epilepsy getting bad again. Or something worse.”
I close my eyes and lean back against the elevator wall. “Has he had an MRI?”
“Going in for it in an hour.”
I exhale and think about the odds. Abnormalities in the brain, like growths and tumors, are common causes of seizures. But Wes already has epilepsy, so I’m hoping the odds of having both are slim. But still.
“I better get back in his room. A volunteer was sitting with him while I made calls and got coffee. But I need to be in there. Wes’s father is flying home from a business trip. But he’s in Asia, so it’ll be quite a while yet until he gets here.”
I swallow the now massive lump in my throat. “Let me come with you,” I say. “I’ve been through this so many times with my brother. I know how hard it is to sit there alone, and besides, I really want to see him.”
Wes’s mom considers me for a minute and then nods. “Come on,” she says. “Just be warned. He’s pretty banged up.”
SHE WASN’T KIDDING.
Wes has a cast on his ankle and another on his wrist. Tape stretches across his nose and cheeks, his face swollen and bloated, his skin scraped and marred and tender-looking. He looks like a stranger. His eyes are closed, but bruised a deep, deep purple beneath them. My fingers tremble, wanting to touch his cheeks. Wanting to make him better. His head is covered with the electric EEG nodes and wires and cap of course. An IV needle is taped to his arm and two bags hang next to his bed. Wires snake beneath his shirt too, monitoring his heart. His arms are scraped up, as are his legs.
“Oh, Wes,” I whisper. My breath catches in my chest like a wild bird beating its wings to escape. I watch the waves on the monitor that spits out information on what his brain is doing. Impossible for regular people to read, even after a million hospital visits watching those screens for some type of answer. Some type of small clue.
I drop into the chair next to his bed, his mom sitting on his other side. I scoot the chair closer and gently take his fingers in mine. I remember only last week when he cupped his hand over mine while I worried about Danny in Dr. Bee’s waiting room. I stare at his face, trying not to wince at how mangled he is. I will him to open his eyes, to laugh and joke around with me.
Please be okay.
I’d been worried about Wes having seizures again. That I wouldn’t be able to handle it, to deal with someone else in my life who suffered this way. But this sitting here and hoping he’s going to be okay is worse. So much worse.
Just please, please be okay. Please don’t let it be too late.
We sit there for hours. Watching his face, the monitors. Nothing changes. I wait in the room with Wes’s mom when they take him for the MRI. They wheel his bed back in, but still nothing changes.
Mom calls me around ten. She’s insistent I come home and I know she’s right. As much as I’d love to sit at Wes’s side all night, I know I can’t. Lynette promises to call me as soon as there is any information or change. I leave with a promise to be back in the morning.
Mom picks me up with Danny asleep in the
backseat. She smiles sadly and pulls me into an awkward hug across the console. She smells like peach shampoo and sugar, as if she was baking. I pull back and look at her. Her eyes are totally clear. She’s sober.
I burst into tears and hug her again.
25
AFTER A RESTLESS night, I take my nervous energy into the kitchen before dawn, looking for something distracting. Everything is sparkling clean. Huh. The counter is even completely cleared off, not a bottle of anything in the way of my making breakfast. I look in the cabinets, in Mom’s normal alcohol spots, and see nothing. It appears she has cleared out all the booze.
I pop an English muffin in the toaster and pace by the counter, sipping coffee. I nearly choke when I see Dad’s old stereo sitting by the back door with the cord wrapped around it tightly. Wow.
I have no missed calls or texts, which means there was no change with Wes last night.
I text Frankie and tell her what’s going on. I hate missing school yet again, especially considering I am almost at the allotted days off, but there’s no way I’m not going to the hospital as soon as I can.
I mean I have to, right? Bile creeps up my throat, picturing Wes in that hospital bed. I’m sure he’ll be okay. But he looked so…
I take a deep breath and grip the edge of the counter. The cheap Formica digs into my palms. My reflection stares back at me in the window over the sink. It’s muted, the green grass and pebbly walkway drowning out my face as if I’m a faded water-color painting.
What if I don’t go? Wes’s mom can update me, I’m sure. I mean, maybe I really shouldn’t miss school again.
Or maybe I can’t handle this.
I jump back from the sink, turning quickly away. My hands shake as I carry my breakfast to the table and sit. How could I think such a thing? I care about Wes. So much. I’m not a heartless, cruel person.
Am I?
I sit in the silence, nibbling on the cold English muffin while I stare at the blank white fridge door, studying the chips and dents in the surface, dents I’ve never even noticed.
This Ordinary Life Page 18
