“So who’s the oblivious one?” said Lacey. “Do you think these people believe you? The only reason they’re here is because the legendary Aaron Zimmerman is losing his mind, and it’s like watching a house catch on fire. It’s just so horrible and fascinating, you can’t look away. But hey, don’t take my word for it.”
She glanced around the room, meeting everyone’s uneasy gazes.
“Show of hands. How many of you actually believe that Aaron saw God? How many of you? Raise your hand if you think that Aaron is one hundred percent sane.”
Nobody raised their hand right away. I’m sure that’s exactly what Lacey wanted. So without further hesitation, I shot my hand up. I waited for others to join me.
But they didn’t. Mine was the only hand that went up.
“Oh, well, congratulations,” said Lacey. “Neanderthal believes you. I guess that seems fitting.”
I glanced from Noah, who gave a sad shrug, to Jack, who just stared at his shoes, to Tegan, who frowned and mouthed, Sorry.
Aaron’s face was the last I focused on. His mouth was pulled into a feeble line. Every ounce of fight had evacuated the premises. He looked defeated, and sick, and slightly dizzy.
“Why do I even care about your mental health?” said Lacey. “That’s the biggest mystery. God, I almost think I’d be better off if you never woke up from that fucking coma.”
“I’m s…” Aaron stammered, shaking his head. “Lacey, I’m s…I’m sor…Lacey, I’m sor—”
But the words weren’t coming out right. So he kept shaking his head, as if to jar the words loose.
“You know what?” said Lacey. “I hope there is a God—just so you can rot in literal hell.”
Aaron’s head stopped shaking—but not for the right reasons. No, this was very wrong. His arms went limp. His head wobbled.
And then he collapsed.
“Aaron!” I screamed.
That’s when the convulsions started. He was twitching, shaking, jerking uncontrollably. His eyeballs rolled into the back of his head.
There was gasping everywhere. Lacey stood over him, but her arms merely hovered, trembling, immobilized in sheer, untainted terror.
I dropped down, kneeling over him—only to fall into the very same Lacey-paralysis. I wasn’t a doctor! What the hell did I know about seizures?
Finally, logic struck. I shoved my hand into my pocket and pulled out my phone—the phone my best friend bought me—and fumbled to punch three numbers. The phone dialed, and then there was a voice.
“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”
“I need help!” I said. “My friend is shaking on the floor, I think he’s having a seizure, I don’t know what to do, oh my God, please help!”
The Emergency Department waiting room was a well-lit, family-friendly perdition with its freezing tile floor—so glossy clean that every tile was a mirror—and cold blue faux-leather chairs with armrests designed to punish love handles for existing. Even the buzzing light fixtures above us felt chilly, like white, rectangular sheets of ice.
I couldn’t stop staring at Mr. Zimmerman—yes, the Mr. Zimmerman—no longer the zenith of genetic perfection. His face had contorted into this ugly thing as he cried into his wife’s shoulder. Mrs. Zimmerman’s eyes were swollen red puffs as she tried to keep her shit together because someone in the Zimmerman family had to, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be Mr. Zimmerman.
Niko, Jack, and Julian went home after the ambulance picked Aaron up. Lacey, Noah, Tegan, and I—in that exact order—sat adjacent to the Zimmermans. Really, I had no room to talk about Mr. Zimmerman, because even though I had stopped crying, I was still as emotionally wrecked as Lacey, and Lacey was practically choking on her own tears and snot. If she seemed less than human during the seizure, now she was a mere shadow. Noah and Tegan sat between us like the awkward/solemn glue trying to hold our sanity in place.
A doctor entered the waiting room, clipboard in hand, and approached our sad little corner. Everyone whipped straight.
“You’re the Zimmermans?” she asked.
“And friends,” I said.
“I’m Dr. D’Souza. As you may be wondering, we believe Aaron’s seizure is related directly to the boating accident he was in recently.”
My stomach was wrung into a tight-knotted cinnamon twist.
“Now, I’ve looked at the records, and when Aaron awoke from the coma, his MRI didn’t show any sign of cerebral damage. That’s not uncommon with traumatic brain injury. Sometimes, signs of damage aren’t manifested until days, weeks, or even months later. But his doctors were wrong to send him home so early. They should have kept him and monitored his situation. What our CT scans are picking up now is a subarachnoid hemorrhage. Essentially his brain is bleeding inside his skull.”
My stomach plunged into an infinite abyss. I couldn’t even breathe. Lacey gasped into her hands.
“Oh my God,” said Mr. Zimmerman.
“The good news is that he’s currently stable,” said Dr. D’Souza. “We’ve successfully performed what we call a coil embolization—a minimally invasive procedure. We inserted a catheter into his leg and guided it up the brain vasculature to close off the blood vessels. Fortunately, we caught it at a stage where he’s in no real medical danger. If all goes well, he’ll come home with nothing more than a Band-Aid on his leg.”
The tension had been a black, billowing rain cloud, thick and impenetrable. But now it had burst wide open, and relief was pouring like rain. Lacey broke down, crying a small storm into her hands.
“Can we see him?” said Mrs. Zimmerman.
“Of course,” said Dr. D’Souza. “He’s still groggy from the anesthesia, but I’m sure he would love to see your faces.”
Just as soon as Lacey, Noah, Tegan, and I started to stand, Dr. D’Souza stopped us with a gentle hand. “I’m afraid only family is allowed.”
My heart dropped. Lacey’s head dropped. Tegan just gave this sort of pissed-off snort like she was ready to drop the doctor, Compton-style.
The four of us slumped back down. Mr. and Mrs. Zimmerman didn’t look back at us as they followed Dr. D’Souza across the lobby and into the ER corridor. The silence that followed was dark and infinite.
“I should probably go home,” said Noah.
Tegan left shortly after Noah. This was actually my doing. She looked so miserable seeing me miserable, and the only way that was going to change was if she physically couldn’t see me anymore. Of course, that’s not what I told her.
“You need to get something to eat,” I said.
“Me?” said Tegan. “Hell with that. What about you?”
“I couldn’t eat a hamburger if it tried to force its way into my mouth.”
Tegan bit her lip. “I am hungry.”
“Go. Seriously. Do it for me.”
“You gonna be okay?”
“Aaron’s stable,” I said, forcing a smile. “I’ll be okay.”
Tegan nodded hesitantly. She grabbed my face like a basketball and kissed it hard, practically mashing her lips with mine.
“Text me,” she said. “I’ll kick your ass if you don’t.”
And then Tegan was gone. It was just Lacey and me, separated by two empty seats and connected by an emptiness that transcended space-time.
“I’m sorry,” I said, finally—a meager shout into the void. “You were right. Aaron had brain damage, and I’m a piece of shit. I’m so sorry.”
“Cliff …” said Lacey. “You didn’t do this to Aaron.”
“But I did!” I said. “You said he had a concussion. You told me to tell someone. If I’d reported it when you told me to, this wouldn’t have happened!”
“You don’t know that.”
I didn’t. But at the same time, the evidence was so overwhelmingly against me, I felt like I had given Aaron the brain hemorrhage with my own fist.
I didn’t look at the time because I didn’t care. Time didn’t matter, and food didn’t matter—nothing mattered except A
aron making it out of this goddamn hospital alive. I stared at my shoes, but all I could see was Aaron’s face—talking and laughing over lunch, raving about Tarantino movies, defending Superman, and getting so passionate about his godforsaken List. It filled me with dread to realize it was all a delusion.
But Aaron was alive. That was what mattered.
I felt bad for Lacey, though, because the hospital was freezing. Seriously—a couple degrees below Alaska and slightly above hypothermia. It was one thing for someone with enough built-in food storage for a Narnia winter. Another thing entirely for a girl with the body-mass index of a large Chihuahua. She was shivering, her teeth chattering, with her meatless arms wrapped around a meatless torso, like turkey-bacon-wrapped asparagus.
“Would you like my lucky hoodie?” I asked.
Really, I just wanted to get the damn thing off my body. I hadn’t completely dismissed the possibility that the hoodie caused Aaron’s brain to hemorrhage.
“Y-y-y-yes, p-p-p-please,” said Lacey.
I pulled the hoodie off over my head and handed it to her. When she pulled it on, it was like she was wearing the actual Barnum and Bailey circus tent. It nearly reached her knees, and when she extended her arms, the sleeves drooped six inches past her fingertips.
“It’s big,” she said.
“It’s also unlucky,” I said. “Cursed, maybe. So stay warm at your own discretion.”
“Cursed? By who?”
“My guess is either Cthulhu, Pennywise the Clown, or Satan.”
“Oh, I hope it’s not the clown.”
“You think I’m joking, but I’m not. It’s seriously a bad-luck charm. One time I was wearing it, and a bird shit on my head. I panicked, and tripped, and landed in dog shit.”
“Oh my God.”
“It was fresh.”
“That sucks.”
“That’s nothin’. I used to have a pet rat named Dirty Harry—he kind of looked like Clint Eastwood. Anyway, somehow he escaped from his cage. I looked everywhere and couldn’t find him. Then I remembered that he always liked to burrow in my pile of dirty clothes that I left on the ground. Except I didn’t have any clothes on the floor that day because it was laundry day.”
“No.”
“Yes. My mom accidentally washed Dirty Harry in the washing machine. He died. Guess what I was wearing?”
“Oh. My. God.”
“Shane bought me the hoodie for my birthday. Wrapped it up and everything. And then he killed himself—three days before my birthday. I didn’t open it until after his funeral.”
Jesus Hernando Christ! Where was my filter?
Lacey’s mouth was so ajar, I could’ve inserted a Quarter Pounder with Cheese like a quarter in a slot machine.
“Sorry,” I said, avoiding eye contact. “I don’t know why I told you that.”
Lacey managed to close her mouth. That was the closest she came to a response.
“There’s a trick to wearing the lucky hoodie, though,” I said, mostly to change the subject. “If you stick your right hand in the front pocket, you’ll discover a hole. You gotta hook your thumb in that hole.”
Lacey actually stuck her hand in the pocket, digging around for the hole.
“Found it,” she said. “Um…what’s it for?”
“You gotta leave your thumb in there at all times,” I said. “I like to think that it defuses the bad luck. Or at least keeps the misfortune to a minimum.”
“Ah.”
“I’m serious. If Aaron dies because your thumb wasn’t in the hole, it’s all on you.”
If I was weirding Lacey out with the mythology of my hoodie, it didn’t show. Instead, I sensed gratitude—in the lines of her weary face, in her broken smile.
“Thank you for letting me wear your hoodie,” she said. She paused before adding, “Everything’s going to be okay.”
I nodded, mostly as a reflex. “Yeah. Everything’s going to be okay.”
But even as I said it, I knew that I was lying to myself. Everything was not okay. The reasons were a line of dominoes toppling into each other.
The List was bullshit.
Because Aaron didn’t see God.
Because God wasn’t real.
I breathed the truth in—one nihilistic breath at a time.
Aaron is okay, I told myself. That’s all that matters right now.
Aaron is okay.
Lacey and I were never able to see Aaron at the hospital. If we thought the doctors would take pity on a couple of teenagers camping out in the waiting room like Black Friday shoppers in front of Best Buy, we had another think coming. They enforced the “family only” rule with a totalitarian fist. Lacey drove me home. The words we exchanged during that drive were minimal at best.
“Cliff?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“I’m going to hang on to your lucky hoodie. Nonnegotiable.”
I nodded—even though I couldn’t care less. Good riddance! When we arrived at Arcadia Park, we exchanged feeble good-byes, I exited the car, and Lacey drove off.
Going back to school, I felt like I had stepped into an alternate reality. All day, I received looks—weird looks, amused looks, mocking looks, and about two thousand subvarieties of looks in between. These were accompanied by frequent snickers and peanut-gallery commentary like, “Praise the Lord!” or “Yo, dawg, how’s Jesus these days?” or “Neanderthal, God should give you a List of things to do to not be a fucking idiot.”
That last one came from Kyle Dunston.
Now I was more than capable of defending myself against dipshits like Kyle. Obviously. I had a weeklong suspension to prove it.
However, defending yourself is rather unnecessary when you’re dating Tegan Robertson, and she overhears said dipshit as she walks you to class.
Tegan one-eightied like a shark in water. “’Scuse me?”
Kyle’s cocky smile flinched. “You heard me,” he said—although the defiance of his tone kind of nosedived.
It was like the shark had just been challenged by a sea cucumber. Tegan moved in for the kill—strode right up to him, arms swinging, and shoved him hard in the chest. “You got somethin’ to say, you little fuckweasel?”
She shoved him again. “Man, I’ll fold you inside out and wear your inverted corpse as pajamas!”
Shove. “I’ll break you like a Pixy stick and snort your fuckin’ remains!”
At this point, Kyle realized his grave mistake as a sea cucumber. He staggered backward and—when that wasn’t getting him away fast enough—tucked tail and scampered off.
The scene had not gone unnoticed. Tegan had garnered a sizable audience—all cavernous mouths and bloated eyes. So naturally, she paced down the center of the hall, arms tense and ready to draw invisible pistols, like this was the Wild West and she was Clint Eastwood. The only thing missing was a badass poncho and some tumbleweed.
“From now on, I’m Cliff’s personal secretary. You got any questions, comments, or concerns, they come through me.” She jammed a thumb at her chest. “So…does anybody else got some Howdy Doody bullshit they wanna share?”
Everyone shuffled uncomfortably and averted their gazes.
Tegan adjusted her jacket with a rebellious tug. “That’s what I thought.”
Tegan extended a gentlemanly arm to me—which I took, thoroughly floored.
And that was the end of the peanut gallery. I didn’t hear a single joke after that. Not so much as a snicker.
“Aaron’s gonna be okay,” said Tegan, once she got her feng shui together. It took her all of two minutes. It was like her personality had two intensity levels—amphetamine and benzo. It was like a switch. I didn’t know how, but she was totally zenning it now.
When I didn’t respond right away, she continued. “Aaron’s okay. You’re both okay. Everything’s okay.”
I guess you could say I’d been acting not okay lately. I was six feet deep in homework. I hadn’t been sleeping well, evident in my raccoon eyes. I wasn’t even eating we
ll. I looked like a deflating Macy’s balloon. Hence Tegan’s sudden need to lather me in reassurances. Which I appreciated; don’t get me wrong. It’s just that—when you realized my and Aaron’s entire friendship was built on the foundation of a cerebral hemorrhage—the okays felt feeble and inept. Like we were trying to patch up the broken hull of a space shuttle with aluminum foil.
“Have you tried calling Aaron?” said Tegan.
I shook my head.
“Why the hell not? He’s your friend.”
“Is he, though?” I said.
Tegan frowned. I didn’t need to explain myself. She knew damn well what I meant.
“Yeah, it complicates your friendship,” said Tegan. “But it don’t mean he’s not your friend.”
I shrugged. “It doesn’t mean he is, either.”
I entered Arcadia Park, and saw my house nestled among the other mobile homes. I dreaded walking in the door, which wasn’t an unusual feeling, to say the least. The park was in shambles, our trailer was a metaphor for decay, and somehow it was where I belonged. That was the true metaphor—I lived in a shithole because I, Cliff Hubbard, was shit. I deserved this.
That’s how I felt when I saw the black, rectangular object lying in front of my door—like a small, handheld Monolith.
A book?
I approached the front steps and picked it up. No cover illustration. No title. Just a thin black book, like a journal. I turned it in my hands. No distinguishing features at all.
I opened the front cover, and read the first page:
Property of Shane Hubbard
The axis of my world snapped in half.
I whipped around on the front steps, glancing left and right and everywhere, anywhere, for any sign of the person or thing or supernatural phenomenon that dropped this book on my porch.
No one. Nothing.
I glanced back at the book. At the name scribbled on the paper in his characteristically neat handwriting.
I turned the page.
Dear friend,
That’s how I’m going to start this, because someday, maybe a friend WILL read this, and maybe they’ll understand. Either way, I refuse to start off with “Dear journal” and this sure as hell isn’t a diary, so whatever. Anyway, I’m writing because there’s this girl named Hal, and I think I’m in love with her, and I need to tell someone, and I’m living a lie. Even now. Especially now. But it’s the only way I can bring myself to do this. I have to believe there’s somebody out there who will understand. I am filled with so much love, and so much hate, and it’s difficult to draw a line between the two because they blur into each other. And at the center of it all is a time bomb, embedded in the shadow of my soul, ticking down the seconds until I die.
Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe Page 16
