But then a second thought occurred to me.
“No. If your professor is right, I don’t need to get out of this hospital, I just need to get out of this body. I don’t need him for that—you and I can do it ourselves. Just like last time.”
“No,” Daniel said. “Absolutely not.”
“Why?” I couldn’t believe he didn’t see the brilliance of that solution.
“Because it would be just like the last time,” he said. “We’re not alone here. Someone could come in at any moment, and then...no, Audie, we can’t risk it. Not again.”
I could feel my stress rise. Could imagine the spikes on my graph. Could picture exactly what Daniel was afraid of, the pain shooting through me again, Halli’s head feeling like it had split wide open —
“Then what?” I said. I had run out of ideas.
Just then Laura came in. Daniel let go of my hand. He gave me a look that said, See?
Laura caught the movement. “Oh, don’t mind me, luv!” she told Daniel. “Be out in a flash.”
I’ll have to admit my heart sank. Daniel was right: even a small interruption like this one could ruin everything. I’d feel the ripping, the agony, then all those drugs would flood into my system and I’d be out of it again for days...
Unless —
“Laura, can you send for Dr. Rios?”
Daniel gave me a quizzical look. I ignored him for the moment.
“Trouble, luv?” she asked. “Everything all right?” She leaned over me to check.
“I’m fine,” I said, “but if you could find her right away, I really need her. Please, Laura. Right away.”
She nodded and hurried out.
I turned to Daniel. “We’re going to talk to her, you and me. And we’re going to lie.”
45
“Dr. Rios, this is Daniel Everett.”
“I remember,” she said, coming toward us with a look of great concern. “What is it?” she asked me. “Are you in pain?”
“Not yet,” I said, “but it’s coming. I can feel it.”
Dr. Rios quickly whipped her tablet out of her pocket and called up the graph of my vitals. All three of us looked at the various spikes and valleys from the past hour. My stress level had just peaked again about five minutes before.
It was one of the reasons I wanted Dr. Rios to come so quickly. Because I knew that the drugs in my system were already sensing trouble, and were seeping into my blood.
“I need you to take these out,” I told the doctor, pointing to the tubes in my arm. “If I’m ever going to learn to control this on my own, I have to do it when I’m under stress. And Daniel just told me something about one of our friends that has me very distressed. So now seems like a very good time to use meditation.”
Dr. Rios looked very skeptical. “If you need pain medication, you should have it.”
“I need to try, Dr. Rios. That’s why Daniel’s here—remember? He’s the one who was leading me through a meditation before all this happened, and I know it was working. But then those people interrupted us, and that’s how I ended up here.”
Dr. Rios shook her head. “I don’t want to risk it.”
“Think about my life,” I told her. “I will always be under constant stress. I live dangerously. I like it that way. I can’t spend my life in this hospital being drugged day and night. You have to let me try to manage it on my own.”
Before she could argue, I added, “And this is the perfect setting. You can monitor my graph every minute and make sure I’m safe. But I need you to order everyone to stay out of here for as long as it takes. It might be an hour, it might even be more. Please, Dr. Rios, I can feel the drugs. I don’t want them anymore!”
I was close to tears, and I wasn’t faking. Dr. Rios looked from the graph, to my face, back to the graph.
“One hour,” she finally agreed. “But only if you’re stable for that hour. If I see anything that concerns me—”
“One hour,” I repeated, feeling my heart still racing. I wondered how I was ever going to calm down enough to make good use of the time. It might take me an hour alone just to bring my mind to some kind of peaceful condition.
But if that was all I had, it was all I had, and at least it was a start.
Daniel hadn’t spoken the whole time, but now he piped up. “If there’s any problem, I’ll alert you. I care about her as much as you do—more.”
He squeezed my hand, and boy, did I want that right then. I forced myself to breathe slowly. I needed to start calming down right away.
Dr. Rios moved behind my bed and shut off whatever switches or buttons or valves controlled the drugs moving into my veins. Then she picked up her tablet from on top of my bed, but she didn’t shut it off. She carried it with her, the graphs still rising above it in their vivid blues and greens and reds.
“One hour, Miss Markham, Mr. Everett. You have it, beginning now.”
46
I did what I knew how to do. Calmed my mind, calmed my breath, pictured myself flying over the vast sea of vibration, feeling for any kind of sign of Halli, some hint of energy, a tug, a ripple, anything to tell me she was there.
Nothing. She was lost to me. As lost as I was to her.
It didn’t matter that I had one hour of complete peace. Didn’t matter that Daniel lowered the lights, that Red soothed me with his steady snores, that Daniel held my hand when I asked him to and sat there beside me protecting me and making me feel safe. I did everything I could think of, but still none of it worked. I couldn’t make the connection no matter what I tried.
Finally I had to admit defeat.
Daniel turned up the lights again, then came back to sit at my bedside. We didn’t need to speak. We both looked at each other with the same kind of grim expression.
“I think I need to talk to your professor,” I said.
Daniel nodded.
I pressed the button above my bed. “So get ready to lie again.”
47
When Halli walked in on Thursday night, my mom was already home from work.
“Audie! Where have you been? I’ve been calling you for the last two hours!”
“I was at yoga with Lydia.”
“Well you could have told me!” my mom said. “I’ve been worried sick! How long would it have taken you to simply call me and say where you were?”
Halli’s expression darkened. My mom could have no idea the effect of her words. They reminded Halli too much of her own mother.
I’d witnessed a few of the comm calls between Halli and Regina. Halli was always tense, snappish, quick to end the call. And with good reason: after ignoring her for sixteen years, suddenly Halli’s mother started checking up on her all the time, asking her where she was, what she was doing. It drove Halli crazy. She’d never had to answer to her parents before, and she had no intention of starting.
Her answer to her own mother had been a cold, “Watch my dot.” Then she’d ended the call. Once I learned about the microchip and the ability of parents to track their children, I understood what Halli meant.
But this was my mother she was speaking to, not hers, and so she forced herself to remain pleasant.
“I’m here now,” she said. “Shall I make us some dinner?”
“I’ve been waiting to order us Chinese,” my mom said. “It’s almost time for our show. Or don’t you care about that anymore, either?”
From her tone, it seemed like my mother was looking for another fight, but Halli didn’t take the bait. She couldn’t endure another night of my mother crying and asking her what was going on.
But Halli also had no intention of doing what my mother wanted, which was sitting on the couch eating Chinese takeout and watching some stupid sit-com that my mom and I happen to love. The week before, back when she was trying to be a better sport, Halli had given up at least ten minutes of her precious time to watch what we consider entertainment. After that, she pretended she was still feeling sick, and escaped to my room.
Now that
I’ve seen what passes for entertainment in Halli’s world, I can understand her reaction. She had no experience with sit-coms or mystery shows or dramas or anything like that. Not even reality shows, the way we’re used to them. Her “reality” shows are actual pieces of history: events filmed while they’re going on or reenactments of the past. So it’s no wonder Halli had no patience for the exaggerated acting and fake laugh track of the show my mom and I like to watch. She wasn’t about to give up another minute to nonsense like that.
“You go in the other room and relax,” Halli told my mother. “I’ll make us some pasta. It won’t take long.”
“You sure you don’t want to order Chinese?”
“Not tonight,” Halli answered with her insincere smile. “Maybe next time.”
She could hear the TV blaring from the living room while she chopped up tomatoes and zucchini and garlic to make a sauce. But the noise didn’t distract her. She was very, very focused on something else.
There was no tracking in my world.
She knew that, of course—I’d told her—but she hadn’t really thought about what it meant to her.
What it meant was freedom.
My mother had just proven that: She’d never know where Halli was if Halli didn’t call. Sure, my mom could have taken certain steps—called the police, called Elena, driven around the neighborhood looking for me—but she couldn’t do what Halli’s parents could by just accessing some real-time map showing exactly where Halli was on the planet.
It was glorious. It was sublime. Halli felt lighter than she had in days.
She boiled some pasta, drained it and tossed it with the cooked vegetables, then brought a bowl of it out to my mother.
My mom patted the couch beside her. “I’m recording it. We can start it from the beginning.”
“I have to work,” Halli told her. “But you enjoy it. I hope you like the pasta.” Then, ignoring the hurt look on my mom’s face, Halli picked up her own bowl and headed for my room.
She was just closing the door to my bedroom when she heard my mother call out.
“Audie, please...”
Halli closed her eyes and waited a few seconds before answering. She needed to sound sincere.
“Next time, all right?” she called, knowing that if everything went the way she hoped, she would be out of that house before the show ever came on again.
My mother waited a moment before answering, too. And it sounded like she, too, was trying to appear nice. “Sure, honey. Next week will be fine.”
Halli escaped into my room and shut the door behind her.
She booted up my laptop. No surprise, there were three messages from Professor Whitfield.
She called him back and kept her voice quiet.
“Audie’s mother is in the next room, so we have to keep this short.”
“Have you talked to her about coming here?” Professor Whitfield asked. “I can get tickets for you for next weekend.”
“I haven’t told her yet. I’ll do it tonight.”
“Good,” he said. “And I’ve arranged to have someone escort her around campus all day so we have plenty of time together.”
“Right,” Halli said. But she was distracted. “Listen, Professor, I’ve been thinking about what you said before—about me having to attend classes there until Audie can take over again. But I have to know: what if? What if we can’t get her back?”
“I can’t let us think like that,” Professor Whitfield answered.
“I understand,” Halli said, trying to keep the irritation from her voice. She hated when people wouldn’t face facts—wouldn’t prepare for disaster when disaster was just around the corner. “But I need to know. What will happen to me if we can’t reverse this?”
“What do you mean, what will happen to you?”
“Financially, for one thing,” she said. “How long until I’d lose whatever money your college will give me?”
“If you at least tried,” he said, “went to classes, tried to do the work, we could probably stretch it out for the first semester.”
“Which is how long?” Halli asked.
“Middle of May if you start here in January.”
“And what about if I come there now?”
“Then maybe...December, depending on how well you can fake it.”
Halli sat for a moment, silently absorbing the information.
“So it will only be for a few months, no matter what I do.”
“Yes,” the professor admitted.
That was all Halli had to hear. Because that answer, too, was freeing. She didn’t have to worry about losing the college’s money, because she was going to lose it anyway. Which meant she didn’t have to try to play by their rules.
Halli heard the sound of the toilet flushing. “I should go. I hear her mother. She might come in.”
“Okay, but ask her about the trip next weekend—”
There was a knock on my door. Halli’s instinct had been right. She snapped my laptop closed and called for my mom to come in.
My mother stood in the doorway and looked around. “I still can’t get used to how clean your room is.”
Halli smiled politely.
My mom seemed nervous and shy. Halli didn’t care, but it would have made me sad to see my mother acting that way around me.
My mom cleared her throat. “Did I hear you talking to someone?”
Halli thought quickly—lie or don’t lie? Might as well get it over with.
“That was Professor Whitfield,” she said. “He said he can fly us up to Colorado next weekend, if you want to go.” She studied my mom’s reaction. “Do you?”
My mom tried to look very brave. But anyone who was her daughter could have seen her heart was breaking. She smiled as best she could. “Sure! Fine. That’s a good idea. When did you say?” Her voice was abnormally high. Clearly she didn’t want to deal with any of this.
“Next Friday.”
“And miss school?” my mom said.
“If everything goes well, I’ll be finished anyway,” Halli said. “I plan to take the algebra test next week.”
My mom’s eyes welled up with grief. “Next...week? Already?”
“I’ll be ready to leave by the end of the month,” Halli told her. “You should be ready for that, too.”
48
“No, I’m sorry,” Dr. Rios said. “I won’t allow it.”
We’d been going around and around the subject for the past fifteen minutes. But the doctor wouldn’t budge.
She pointed to the graph again. To the rise and fall of the spikes. They were small, but they were there. Despite what I thought, I hadn’t been perfectly calm over the previous hour. I’d had moments of it, moments when my graph leveled out and my pulse and breathing looked perfectly mellow, but then the lines would rise again—probably every time I wondered, “Why isn’t Halli here? Why isn’t this working? Why can’t I find her?”
“It’s the hospital,” I tried to explain again. I remembered seeing some news report once about how some people’s blood pressure goes up whenever they have to have their blood pressure checked in a doctor’s office. It’s called the White Coat Syndrome or something.
But apparently Dr. Rios had never heard of it.
“You are my patient,” she said for what seemed like the hundredth time. “My duty is to protect you.”
Daniel squeezed my hand, probably trying to send me some signal to give up already. But I had to try at least one more thing.
“Maybe like a day pass?” I asked. “Just let me go somewhere with Daniel for the day, and I swear I’ll come back that night.”
“And what if you die?” Dr. Rios said. She hadn’t used the D word before, but maybe she was as frustrated with me as I was with her. “Do you think I can console your parents with the knowledge that you were out of my care for only one day?” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Miss Markham.” She was back to calling me Miss Markham—that wasn’t good. “I will not discharge you until you
are well.”
“Can we try another meditation?” Daniel asked quietly. I think he was concerned about how heated the conversation had gotten. He didn’t want to see those spikes on my graph, either.
Dr. Rios considered that for a moment. “I don’t see any harm,” she said. “So yes. I will agree to that.”
So at least that was something.
“But allow some time,” she said. “Obviously Miss Markham has become agitated again.”
“Which means I should do it right now,” I said. “Isn’t that the point?”
“Not today,” Dr. Rios said with a note of finality in her voice. “You need rest. Your visitors are restricted for a reason—” And before I could complain about Halli’s parents and their stupid list, she continued, “—and that reason is your safety. I have no objection to Mr. Everett visiting you again tomorrow, but for now, you need rest and quiet.”
Considering the pain creeping into my head, I couldn’t exactly disagree. Dr. Rios hadn’t flipped the switches or valves or whatever they were to turn the pain medication back on, so I was going to have to deal with my headache myself.
My eyes widened with the realization.
No pain medication.
“You’re probably right,” I told the doctor. “I should rest now. But Daniel can come back tomorrow?”
He gave me a strange look. He probably wondered why I was giving up so easily all of the sudden.
“He can come again tomorrow,” Dr. Rios confirmed. “For a short visit. I have no objection to that.”
“Okay, good,” I said. “So I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said to Daniel, trying to signal him with my eyes that everything was okay, I had a plan, and he should leave.
I’m not sure I got all of that across, but Daniel still took the hint.
“Tomorrow, then.” He patted Red, then pried the reluctant dog off my bed.
He was about to leave when he turned back. Came over to me and leaned down for a hug.
“You’re all right?” he whispered so softly I was sure Dr. Rios couldn’t hear him.
I shifted the hug so that my mouth was right next to his ear. “No drugs. She forgot. I’m going to try again.”
Parallelogram Omnibus Edition Page 63
