by Schow, Ryan
Deep inside my gums, I feel the flesh stitching itself together, the tiniest fibers already knitting themselves tight around my tooth. The split in my lip, already the top is closing shut. But my nose is broken. Busted sideways at an awful angle.
“Stop the car,” I say.
Brayden stops the car.
“I need you to put my nose back in place. Fast.”
“But the hospital—”
“No time!”
All the damage in my body is healing fast. Red blood cells are flooding the torn skin and broken bones. They’re scabbing and knitting and pulling things together in a sort of fibrous matrix. White blood cells are attacking germs and pathogens, working in a fever pitch to stop any infections before they start, and it’s all so very hot and torturous.
Brayden looks at me with that look in his eye that says, “What next?”
I turn to him, my naked body soaked with sweat. “Fix it.”
“This is going to hurt,” he says.
“Just do it.”
He places his hands on my face, then securing my nose in between his two thumbs, he pushes the bone and cartilage back in place. The popping and grinding sounds in my nose make me nauseous. Oh dear God, I want to pass out right now! After three painful efforts, Brayden has my nose straight again. Meanwhile, most of my lip is now a closed flap, the line of flesh pulling together and healing at an incredible rate. Brayden stares in disbelief.
“What the hell?”
“My lip?”
“I swear it was split wide open a minute ago.”
I run my tongue over my teeth and they’re solid. Then I run my tongue over my lip and its whole, too, except for the groove running up to my nose, but even that’s closing rapidly. Whatever was in Gerhard’s cocktail is more than amazing.
It’s supernatural.
“Gerhard gave me shots to help me heal. It was after the radiation. I don’t think they’ve stopped working.”
The orbital bones in my left eye are shifting uncomfortably. Like itching, but worse. The swelling is going down. Even my ribs, which were easily broken, are coming together miraculously. Brayden can’t stop blinking.
And I can’t stop sweating. My hair is damp, and hanging heavy on my shoulders. Perspiration mixed with blood is running pink down my chest, over my tightened nipples, into my belly button and vagina. Right now I’m in too much pain to be embarrassed.
He looks down at my body and the landscape of bruising is starting to fade before our very eyes. It’s about that time two things happen: one, my body starts to cool significantly; and two, I’m wishing I hadn’t had my esthetician take so much hair off my lady business. It’s not leaving much to Brayden’s imagination.
“Is it crazy that I’m totally horny right now?” he says.
We both start laughing and then an old man walking by smacks the window hard, startling us. “Perverts!” he shouts, and we start laughing even harder. He has huge glasses and a mole that has like seven huge black hairs coming from it. My laughter turns to tears, and then sobbing.
Brayden puts his hand on my shoulder, and I can tell he’s scared.
While I’m crying, I’m putting on damp clothes (sans my bra and underwear), marveling at how my body doesn’t hurt so much anymore. My insides are scorched, but not so much that I feel permanent damage has been done.
Brayden takes off his black shirt and turns it inside out. He starts wiping away the blood from my face and hair.
“You don’t have to be so gentle,” I tell him with the kind of hiccupping-cry voice you often hear from two year olds.
“It doesn’t hurt?”
“Not like before.”
He cleans most of the blood off my face and arms, at least enough where we can get into the motel room and shower without drawing too much attention to ourselves.
Still, I’m a wreck and an older couple in the motel parking lot levels us with worried eyes. On my shirt, there’s a lot of blood, but I smile so they don’t buckle with concern. Up the stairs, down the hall, inside the room. I flop down on the bed, exhausted.
Brayden tells me about Bryn killing her husband and then herself. I just lay there, absorbing it all. I can’t help feeling a debilitating sadness flowering inside me. As much as I loathe Demetrius for his atrocities, Bryn had to live with him this entire time, only to learn the ugly truth about his infidelity. That she couldn’t take it and chose to kill herself sits like a cold lump of lead in my heart. It pains me even more knowing Brayden will carry that imagery in his head for the rest of his life.
Near the bathroom, in the back of the room where the vanity and mirror sit, I strip off my ruined clothes, not caring that he’s watching. He’s already seen it all, so why strive for modesty now? At least, that’s what I tell myself. My head is still fuzzy. Without a word, I move into the bathroom, turn on the shower and step inside. A moment later, the door opens and Brayden says, “Are you okay?”
I’m glad there’s a plastic curtain between us. But the way I feel, it almost wouldn’t matter if I were in a glass shower.
“Yes.”
“Do you have room for me in there?” he says.
The tiniest bit of surprise sparks inside my mind and this time I say, “Yes.”
When he gets in, I look at his body and marvel at him. I can’t look at him without appraising his nakedness, but the scars catch my eyes, too, and I think of what he endured. What we’ve both endured.
“I’m sorry about this,” he says, looking down at himself.
I’m not sure what to make of his…change of state. He cups his hand over his business, but it doesn’t cover all of it. Which is sort of a good thing. “I won’t apologize for liking the way you look,” he says.
“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “Just keep it to yourself.”
“I will.”
2
I get out of the shower and Brayden stays in. At this point, all I want to do is sleep. I go for a pair of panties, slide them on and crawl into bed. My body is too hot for blankets, so I kick them to the foot of the bed.
God, I feel so…uncomfortable!
No, I feel agitated. We’re talking Defcon 3 agitated. It’s my body I realize; a chemical thing.
Brayden comes out of the bathroom wearing only a towel around his waist. “Will you turn on the air and shut out the lights?” I ask. My voice isn’t exactly pleasant.
“Sure,” he says. He walks across the room and turns the swamp cooler to HIGH. “Better?” he says. I nod. Satisfied, he clicks off the bedside lamp.
A few minutes later, the bathroom door opens and a sliver of light illuminates the backs of my closed eyelids. I feel everything. I hear Brayden in the bathroom. He’s going number one and for some reason this seems more personal than showering with him.
Like I’m invading his privacy with my ears.
I roll over on my side, away from the peeing sounds he’s making. My senses are heightened, over-stimulated. All I want is sleep. If anything, to check out and not have to feel so freaking insane.
Brayden flushes the toilet, then comes and lays on my bed. I feel him scoot toward me, feel his warm, nude body next to mine. I don’t pull away.
“I just want to lay next to you,” he says.
Half of me wants to say something, but I don’t know what to say so I don’t say anything at all. His hand circles my stomach, just below my breasts. He pulls himself closer to me but not in a sexual way. What he’s doing right now, it reminds me of Rebecca. Brings me the same comfort. Which I really need right now.
Letting him stay, it’s not that hard of a decision.
3
When I close my eyes, the nightmares begin.
The way dreams can sometimes mash together with the memories of difficult or traumatic events to create something surreal and disturbing, something so unnerving you feel worse off closing your eyes, it’s baffling.
My tossing and turning puts distance between Brayden and me. Several times I wake up in my sleep, yelling, cursi
ng, kicking at the blankets out of frustration or anger or fear. His body is still in the same queen-sized bed, but he’s sleeping further from me, and much better by the look of it.
Around four in the morning, I’m dreaming Maggie shot Demetrius in the face and he fell on me. The way he landed on my stomach, it’s got my insides lurching and rolling. My head is pressed against the bloodstained fireplace, which is giving me a splitting headache. Inside the fireplace, a fire is roaring and cooking me from the inside, melting me.
That’s when I wake up…feeling scorched inside…with my stomach pitching and wrecked, snared in a tight fist of pain. And my forehead! OMFG, it feels cracked in two, like talons prying it apart.
I race to the bathroom, and miraculously, I don’t trip on anything or stub my toe on the furniture or run my newly healing face into the wall. My hands search around for a light switch, while my eyes scope out the toilet in the darkness. I find the light switch, flick it on. The toilet lid comes up, my knees hit the floor and my stomach comes charging up my throat. For some masochistic reason, I sort of feel like myself again. Go figure.
There’s nothing like the familiarity of the old to put the soul at ease. Except what comes out of my mouth, it scares the absolute bejesus out of me. We’re talking viscous red muck, like sludge, or red pudding. My face is drenched from the effort, my hair draped in my face. Every inch of my body feels slick, wet and agitated.
Two, three, four times my stomach purges itself. My headache becomes a full blown migraine. Then I feel gentle hands taking my hair back from my forehead. Brayden. Oh, thank God. I realize I’m crying again. If only I wasn’t so sick, I’d get pissed at how easily I’m being brought to tears these days!
Two more times my stomach cinches, then purges, then empties out. Then I’m good.
It stops.
“You’re burning up.”
I sit back on my butt, wipe my face, and say, “It was like this when I was going through the first change.” My head is a riot of pain, throbbing like the jaws of life are trying to work it open.
“There’s so much…blood and stuff,” he says. “In the toilet.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Slough off from the healing, I think.”
He sits down and he’s naked with me. We don’t look at each other’s privates, except for a few times when his eyes dip down to my chest and my eyes dip down to his…boy parts.
A few minutes pass and I expect my body to cool, but it doesn’t. And my head, it’s not only splitting open, it’s now pounding with a compressed, targeted pain.
“I need a cold bath,” I hear myself say. My brain is growing fuzz, my equilibrium shifting. The way these changes go, it’s like living with fever dreams.
Any minute and I’m going to start hallucinating.
“Now, please.”
Brayden wraps a towel around himself so I don’t have to look at his butthole while he fills the tub. It’s the sensible thing to do and I remind myself to thank him later. I pull off my underwear and climb in the tub. I’m shivering all over now, my teeth chattering up a ruckus. The way the waves of misery are crashing through me, it has the still cognizant parts of me feeling jumpy, timid.
Sitting down, I pull my knees to my chest and wrap my arms around my legs. The more the tub fills up, the more I want warm water.
“Too cold,” I say.
Brayden puts his hand to my forehead. I’m having an out of body experience right now. What used to make sense doesn’t. Everything is awful. Excruciating. Flat out effing miserable.
“You’re still way too hot,” he says. Already the panic is multiplying behind his eyes. “Is this normal? I mean, for the…transformation, or whatever?”
I chatter out an “Uh-huh.”
“Should I be worried?”
The truth is, I don’t know. I’m worried because this isn’t a transformation. Is this some kind of a purging? The way my head hurts, though, the way my temperature is running way too hot, I’m trying not to totally freak out. I’m kind of thinking I might have to call Gerhard.
That’s when the blood starts running. Out of my nose and my right ear, out of the tiny tear ducts below my eyes. Brayden looks like he’s trying not to lose it. He’s going for toilet paper. Mopping it up in his hands. He’s not saying a word, but his expressions are saying everything.
What hits me next, it’s like the worst period cramps ever, except I’m not due to have my period for two more weeks. The water in between my thighs is clouding red. Everything is bleeding now and Brayden’s saying we have to call an ambulance. Then it stops. Like a faucet that’s been shut off.
It just stops.
“Wait,” I say, my face and chest and stomach streaked with blood. “It’s over. I think.”
He waits.
I wait.
Looking down at the red bathwater, it’s hard not to make the comparison between this and Maggie’s suicide, and that’s when really I feel my face drain of all color.
Brayden takes my hand and says, “Are you feeling physical pain, or is this about Maggie?”
“I love…that you asked me…that you know—” I can’t finish the words, I’m that moved that he seems to know what I’m feeling. But with Brayden, I don’t really need to.
The way he continues to surprise me, the way his stock seems to be soaring lately, there’s a good chance I might fall for him. I almost don’t even care that he hasn’t had Gerhard’s treatment. Maybe it’s better this way. Or maybe this shared trauma will forever bind us. The fact that he’s been with me on two occasions now where people have died, it’s not lost on me. I hold his hand tight. I hold onto it for dear life.
4
The thing about waking up next to your friend, and you’re both naked, is that it’s a bit awkward to say the least. I take an extra long look at Brayden, who’s sleeping peacefully. Part of me is thankful he’s under the blankets, and part of me isn’t.
I can hardly believe we showered together! That we did what we told my father we wouldn’t do, which was sleep together.
Granted we didn’t have sex, and we probably won’t ever have sex, but technically, we are in bed naked together and technically we did sleep under the same blankets last night.
Oh, boy.
Bra, pants and shirt—they all go on fast. Brayden opens his eyes and the smile on my face feels foreign. What is this? Embarrassment? Shame?
“How are you feeling?” he asks.
My face returns to normal. “My head still hurts and my stomach is churning.”
“Yeah, you were farting all night,” he says, yawning. My mouth falls open and when he’s done yawning, he gives me a grin and says, “I’m just kidding, retard, you were quiet all night. I kept waking up just to make sure.”
“Thanks,” I say. More than anything, I’m super relieved he didn’t crack some lame sex joke.
“Do you want to shower and eat,” I ask, “or just get on the road?”
“Get on the road.”
My hair goes into a ponytail, a toothbrush goes into my mouth, and all my extra stuff goes in my overnight bag. I don’t even bother with makeup because, the truth is, I don’t want Brayden thinking I look good so he can talk about yesterday’s nakedness. Later this won’t make sense, but right now, my dumb girl brain thinks it’s completely rational.
We pay cash for the room and get on the road heading west. It’s still early. When we arrive in Santa Barbara, we collect his hearse, return the Charger (with the right license plate back on) and order two Egg McMuffin’s as we’re leaving town. My body still doesn’t feel balanced, so I rest my head on the window and pray for sleep.
It comes easy.
When I wake up, my face is smashed against the hearse’s window at a gas station in Bakersfield. My neck and back ache like a mother-effer, and I’ve got a bit of slobber on my lip. The dashboard clock says I’ve slept for hours, but it only felt like I was out for a minute. Brayden is outside pumping gas and I have to pee. Stretch the muscles, breathe deep, get ou
t of the car.
“You’re awake,” he says with a smile.
Okay, this is not so bad. Subconsciously I think I should be embarrassed about everything that happened, but deep down, there’s some part of me that feels closer to Brayden and it’s a weird feeling because we’ve been friends for awhile now.
The last thing I want to do is sacrifice a friend for a boyfriend. Seeing that I’ve never officially had a boyfriend before (Damien denied ever being my boyfriend—the douchebag), I’m pretty sure I’m going to screw things up and then I’ll be out a friend, too. At least with Jacob, when I screw that up, I won’t be losing anything other than what was really never there in the first place.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” I say. “You want snacks?”
He asks for licorice and a Mountain Dew and some Funions, then he asks me for some sunflower seeds, but I’ll say they’re out of seeds because listening to that cracking, popping and spitting for several hundred miles will definitely make me bat shit freaking crazy. Swear on a stack of Bibles.
The bathroom isn’t horrible, but I wouldn’t eat candy in it either. At least they have seat covers for the toilet.
The way it has worked in the past, my body passes most of the sloughed-off garbage in the first purge, but subsequent purges occur. In this case, there is a little blood in my urine, but not enough to be concerned about. And thank God I don’t have to pop a deuce because, honestly, what right minded girl wants to dump in a gas station shitter anyway?
Not me, that’s who.
5
When we finally roll into town, I start reassembling my cell phone, but Brayden tells me to stop. “Wait a day,” he says. “Detectives build entire cases on cell phone records.”
“You already told me that. I think in those exact words.”
“So listen then, please. It’s how we stay safe.”
“Fine.”
“Good.”
“Just don’t be so bossy,” I say, because I really need to talk to my girlfriends and I hate being told no.
