by Rae, Nikki
“What is this?” Jade asks. I can’t say I wasn’t expecting that question. “Did you do this?”
Another question I was ready for. He knows these marks are somehow different from the ones all over my body right now.
I nod. The water splashes in the bath.
“I knew it.” This is something I was not prepared for. It comes out so soft, so ghost-like, that I’m not even sure he’s said it.
“What?” I whisper back.
Jade leaves my pajama bottoms around my ankles and grabs a hold of my hand. “I just…knew. I knew that there was something wrong. I was just too afraid to ask.” His eyes are welling and if the tears start falling, I may just lose it.
“I don’t do it anymore, Jade,” leaves my mouth because it has to. I can’t stay silent while my brother blames himself for something out of his control.
Jade sniffs one last time, then continues to take off my pants.
“No more secrets,” he says, folding those now. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
That’s it.
No yelling, no crying. But there’s also no indifference, like there was when Mom found out. There’s worry and anxiety but it’s hidden well on Jade’s concentrated face.
Adjusting the towel around myself one last time, Jade wraps his arms around me and we’re moving toward the shower. Without any more talking, The towel’s taken away and he lowers me into the water in just my underwear. It’s freezing cold and I begin shaking. Jade closes the shower curtain a little, giving me some privacy while still being able to see his face when he sits down on the closed toilet seat. I lean my head back on the hard fiberglass, because the faint throbbing in my skull is better than the ache in my neck from trying to hold it up.
“I was so scared,” Jade says softly. “When the marks started forming on your skin, when those marks became blisters and then you started throwing up and got a really high fever.”
The water seeps into my wounds. I can feel it in my back, arms, and legs. Particularly my shin, where there’s a gaping red hole that I have to tear my gaze away from.
I close my eyes, trying to concentrate more on his words than my shivering and pain.
“And Mom and Adam were on some island somewhere, so I couldn’t get in touch with them until later that night, and they only told me that nothing really could be done except to wait,” Jade continues. “But then I remembered from one time, that they made you take a cold bath. Do you remember that?” he asks.
I shrug.
“I made it cool, but not freezing. It felt just like pool water to me, but it made you shake and shiver like there were ice cubes in it.”
I smile a little; that’s exactly what it feels like now.
“And then, after a few hours, the fever went down. Eventually, it disappeared.”
“How old were you?” I ask, my voice scratchy.
“Seventeen. I was seventeen years old.”
Even then he was taking care of me.
It’s quiet for the longest time.
“I called you the day Stevie died because he opened his eyes,” Jade says, almost piercing the silence with the sentence, even though his voice isn’t above more than a whisper. “He opened his eyes for a minute, looked at me, and then he closed them.” He takes in a sharp breath.
“I want you to know,” he says, tears forming and this time, he doesn’t bother wiping them away. “I never wanted to send you away. I just…didn’t know how to deal with it.” He looks up to the ceiling like he’s looking for more words. “I still don’t know how to deal with it. Or this.”
“I’m sorry, Jade.” I have to close my eyes tight to keep my own tears from forming, and that only works for a fraction of a second. “I’m sorry about everything.”
I can’t imagine what he’s going through right now. Losing Stevie and now . . . Now his sister is dying too.
“There’s nothing to be sorry about.” When I open my eyes to look at him, he’s balancing on the edge of the tub.
“I’m your big brother. I’m supposed to look out for you.” He’s talking about the sun-poisoning incident again, and he’s wiped the tears away.
“You do.”
“Not well enough.”
Then there’s a knock at the door and Myles’ voice comes through, “You can get out now.”
Jade nods before swooping his arms into the slightly pink water, not caring that he’s getting soaked, to help me get out of the bathtub. He helps me sit on the toilet again, wrapping the same towel around me as he hands me clean underwear that I throw on quickly when he turns away. He threads my arms through a tank top, then helps me stand so I can put on a new pair of baggy sweatpants.
When I’m sitting down again, Jade helps me dry my hair the best that he can. The towel then lingers at my arms, where there’s fresh blood mixing with the water from my body, causing it to run down in small separate streams from each bite mark, only joining together again at other wounds. He tries wiping it away, but it’s no use. Only more appears.
“Does it hurt?” Jade asks.
I shake my head. “Not right now.”
His eyes linger for another moment or two on my arms before letting them go. There’s another knock on the door, and Myles is asking if he can come in.
I nod at Jade, who goes to get the door. Myles walks inside with the supplies I’ve become accustomed to seeing lately: disinfectant, rubber gloves, Band-Aids, gauze.
Without saying anything to each other, Myles sets to work with bandaging up the marks that will only need new bandages in a few hours.
I say: “I’m tired.”
And Myles says: “I know.”
Jade says: “We’re wasting time.”
And I think we all agree.
Jade lays me back down on the bed, covering me with a clean white sheet. I’m partly awake because I’m cold, clammy, and uncomfortable.
“Now what?” he asks Myles once my head touches the pillow.
“We have to wait.” Myles’ voice is close, like he’s watching me, but my eyes are closed.
“Wait?” Jade sounds uneasy. “Wait for what?”
“I told you,” Myles says calmly. “If we try anything before the fever goes down, we’ll cause more damage. She could go into shock or die.”
There’s a pause. A really long, really tense pause.
“I need some air,” Jade finally says. I hear the bedroom door open and then close.
Myles takes in a deep breath then lets it out slowly. I open my eyes a crack to peek at him, and he’s looking right at me.
“Sorry I can’t give you another blanket,” he says softly, adjusting the sheet around me.
“You were right,” I say through a shiver, waiting for it to pass before I continue. “He’s scared.”
Cautiously, Myles sits near my legs, facing me. “I didn’t do this to make things better between us. I want you to know that.”
“I know that. You did it so I would stop wasting time.”
He smiles to himself, but there isn’t any happiness behind it. “I thought about what I would want if I were in the same situation,” he says. “I wanted to do the right thing.”
I swallow. “Does it make me a terrible person if I don’t care that Jade’s scared?” I whisper. “That I only care that he’s here with me?”
Myles takes my hand in his. “No. I think it makes you scared.”
I close my eyes again, nodding.
His hand is on my face, in my damp hair. “Just rest, Sophie. It’s going to be okay.”
This time when he says it, I almost believe him.
Get Well Soon
Chapter 18
“I'm hovering throughout time, I crumble in these days.”—AFI
It can’t be more than a few hours when I’m being woken up again. This time, it’s not pain jolting me out of sleep. It’s Myles.
His hand is in mine, the same as it was when I fell asleep, and he’s wearing the same clothes. This, along with the fading light in
the window confirms the idea that a new day hasn’t begun since I last closed my eyes.
I want to ask why he woke me up, but Jade does all the work for me.
“What are we doing?” he says to Myles.
Myles doesn’t take his eyes away from me. “Remember last time?” he asks. “Last time Michael’s blood was in your body?”
I squeeze my eyes shut. Oh God no. I don’t know why I’m surprised. We had to go through the list of options eventually. Between Myles biting me and becoming infected, turning into a vampire, and this, I guess this is the least traumatic choice.
I nod when I open my eyes again.
“What?” Jade asks, coming closer and standing on the other side of the bed.
Myles stands now, turning toward Jade. “If I told you, you wouldn’t like hearing what I have to do.”
Jade glances at me.
“You don’t have to stay,” I tell him.
“I’m not leaving.”
“Okay,” Myles says. “But you can’t interrupt. Do you understand?”
Now Jade looks like he’s not sure. He’s going to freak out if it’s anything like the last time. I know it. ”Yeah,” he says anyway.
“You’ll hurt her more if you do,” Myles adds.
“Yeah,” and I can tell Jade is trying really hard to keep his tone calm. “I get it. Just do it.”
Myles seems to understand, either from Jade’s tone or what’s going on in his head because he says, “I’ll be right back.” He turns to me once more. “Then we’ll start. Okay?”
I nod, but Myles is gone before he can see it.
“He should have started a long time ago,” Jade says under his breath.
“He didn’t want to do anything against my will,” I say, but it comes out broken just like everything else. “It’s my fault, Jade. Not his.”
“Not this again,” Jade says. “Don’t you dare take the blame.”
I can’t do this right now. One horrible-life-changing-crisis at a time, damn it.
Myles comes back with the same red medical bag from before and my stomach lurches at the thought of what could possibly be inside and why he needs it.
“What should I do?” Jade asks.
Myles comes closer, setting the bag down and sitting down next to me.
“We can’t do anything until it comes back to the surface,” he answers.
“What exactly are you going to do?” Jade asks again.
Myles glances at me like he’s not sure he should tell him. I nod. He has a right to know.
He motions for Jade to come to his side of the bed. Then, as he’s walking over, Myles gestures to my shirt. “May I?”
Lift up my shirt? Sure, why not? It’s not like anything can get any more uncomfortable or anything. I help him pull up the t-shirt so that the lower half of my stomach is showing, where all of the marks are re-appearing.
“I think this is probably where it’s going to come up again,” Myles says, as both of them study my skin. “When it does, I’m going to cut my wrist, then cut wherever the pain is most on Sophie.”
Myles only pauses long enough to take a breath and I’m too fixated on the brown, red, and purple blooms on my pale skin to look for Jade’s reaction.
“Then,” Myles says. “I’m going to press the two wounds together. The infected blood will flow into me, and if it works, the pain will go away.”
Jade swallows hard. He takes in a deep breath. He stares at me. “You’re okay with this?”
I nod. I have to be okay with it.
“Alright,” he says. “But if this blood is so powerful and horrible, won’t it hurt you too?” he asks Myles.
Myles shakes his head, and that seems to be enough of an explanation.
As if on cue, my right hip starts to throb, but I manage to hide it well enough. No pain yet, so no need to worry about cutting me open and all that jazz, right?
They don’t seem to be paying attention to me anymore anyway.
Myles is saying something about how Jade should hold me down and stuff when it happens and I really just want to tune that part out anyway, so I’m not sure if I should be grateful that I can see a new bright red, worm-like line work its way from under the waistband of my sweat pants to the middle of my abdomen.
“Fuck,” I gasp out a minute later, when the pain hits me like a two ton sac of bricks.
That gets their attention, and I don’t have to tell them where it hurts the most, because they can see it spreading along with me. The red line fans out into a firework shape, turning the skin around it an angry pink and the rest of the design dark red and then purple.
And I hear another, more emphatic, “Fuck” come out of my brother’s mouth.
Next, I’m on my back, the sheet is thrown off of my legs, Jade is holding onto my shoulders a little too strongly, making my skin ache, but it’s nothing compared to the scalpel running across my skin.
Of course, that part can’t hold a candle to what goes on when Myles holds his open wrist to it. My body takes over then, no room for any coherent thoughts except curses and run-on gibberish spewing out of my mouth as my legs thrash, my pulse pounds, and my stomach turns.
I can’t keep track of how long I’m in and out. It’s like I’m trying to keep my head above water and keep getting pulled under as soon as I can breathe.
But the pain is gone sometime between floating and breathing, and Myles is slowly pulling his arm away and replacing it with gauze.
“Are you okay?” Jade asks. He’s still holding onto my shoulders, loosening his grip after a few seconds of calm.
“Yeah,” I say, and my throat hurts. “I’m okay.”
Myles is taping the gauze down, and I notice that his hands are shaking. He smiles for a second when he sees me staring down at him. He stands, wobbles, then regains his balance.
I’m not aware that Evan is back in the room until he’s standing next to Myles, steadying him.
“Are you okay?” I finally ask Myles. I wouldn’t be as worried if he wasn’t grabbing onto Evan’s arm like he’s about to fall over.
He seems to take a long time to swallow, like he’s in pain, pressing another wad of gauze to his wrist as he tries to lean away from Evan. Then he nods.
“You should lie down,” Evan says to him, but it sounds like more of a gentle suggestion rather than an order.
Myles’ bright blue eyes are rimmed in red when he opens them, making them appear to pop out. But that must be because of the dark circles he has under his eyes now that weren’t there a few minutes ago.
“We’ll stay with her,” Evan says, and his tone sounds like Myles said something to him that only he could hear.
As if to prove that he’s not going anywhere, Myles takes a step forward and squeezes my hand again, he’s looking everywhere but my face.
“You should go, Myles,” I say to encourage him.
He licks his lips. “You’re not in pain?” His voice is raw.
I shake my head.
“It’s okay,” Jade interjects, yet I notice that he’s staring at me too. His eyes don’t move away. I feel like a bomb everyone’s waiting to either disengage or detonate.
Myles sniffs and lets go of my hand. He leans down and I pretend I don’t see the tremor that runs through him when he kneels, like his legs are going to give out.
He kisses my forehead. “I won’t be gone long,” he whispers.
When he’s standing again, Evan steadies him and they both walk slowly out of the room. Jade takes the place where Myles was sitting.
“I hope he’s okay,” I say.
Jade peels off the rubber gloves, throwing them in the trashcan at the end of the bed. “He’ll be fine.”
My head starts to spin, and along with it, the image of Jade leaning over me as he holds onto my hand. “How you doing, Sunshine?” he asks half-heartedly.
I swallow. The spinning stops. “Okay.”
I lightly place a hand on my stomach and it’s a little sore under the bandage, bu
t other than that and the general exhaustion that hasn’t left me for days, I feel alright.
“Did the pain stop?” Jade asks.
“It did,” I tell him. “I feel a lot better.” I pause a second. “So wait,” I say, trying to sit up, but my arms are shaking too much so giving up. “Is it gone?”
Jade shrugs. “I think,” he says. “I mean. If you’re feeling okay, I guess. They didn’t really tell me.”
I could worry about it. Sure. But right now, all I’m going to worry about is how much I have to pee and how hungry I am. “Can you help me to the bathroom?” I ask.
His expression slightly changes. “Are you going to throw up?”
“No.” I laugh softly. “I have to pee really bad.”
He smiles a tiny bit. “Oh.”
Jade comes closer, scooping his arm behind my neck and under my legs. I notice now that while the IV is still taped to my arm, it’s still not connected to anything, making it easier to leave the bed.
He helps me stand once we’re in the bathroom, and I’m surprised that my shin doesn’t collapse under my weight anymore. When he turns on the lights, they don’t hurt my eyes as much as they did before. He leaves me alone to do my business, then comes back when I’m done to help me to the bed again.
The short trip took a lot out of me and I didn’t even do much.
“Can I get you anything else?” Jade asks as he replaces the sheet over my legs.
“You think I can eat something?”
Jade seems really pleased by this, smiling widely. “Your stomach doesn’t hurt?”
I shake my head.
He heads into the kitchen area, opening cabinets and the fridge.
Jade comes back in with packages of junk under each arm and some kind of sandwich on a paper plate.
“Thanks,” I say when I take it from him. Jade watches me wolf it down, then chug two glasses of water. “God,” I say when I’m done. “I haven’t eaten anything in like, four days.”
“You must have been hungry,” Jade says, taking the food wrappers and paper plate into the kitchen. He comes back in and sits in the chair near me. “You still feel okay?”
