The Girl In Between series: Books 1-4

by Laekan Zea Kemp

  I let out a breath, angry. “I didn’t tell anyone, Cassie. And if I did, don’t you think Carlisle would have found out by now?”

  “I don’t know. You know how he likes to screw with people.”

  “Yeah. He’s a real catch. Heard he moved in with you.”

  I didn’t know why I wanted to push her buttons. Maybe because I knew she expected me to. But as soon as I said the words I regretted them.

  “Why do you care?”

  “Why do you?” I asked.

  She looked away. “It’s complicated. You know that.”

  “It wasn’t that complicated when we were in my garage that night.”

  I couldn’t stop myself and not because I still had feelings for her or because I was jealous but because I was confused. By her coming to my house that night, by her dropping by this morning. She wanted something from me and I wanted to know what it was.

  She looked away. “I was…”

  “Drunk?”

  “Confused,” she said. “I still am.”

  “Well, that makes two of us. Cassie…” I lowered my voice. “I don’t get what you want from me.”

  “To see that you were okay.”

  “No. Why did you come here?”

  “Because I…”

  Love. No. That couldn’t have been the word she was searching for.

  “I felt something.”

  When she said it I wasn’t looking at her. I wasn’t thinking about that night in my garage. I was thinking about Bryn.

  “Well, I didn’t.”

  “That’s not true,” she said.

  Maybe it hadn’t been. I couldn’t remember enough about that night to know for sure, but even if I had felt something, I knew I’d never feel it again. Not with Cassie.

  “You have Carlisle,” I said.

  “What if I want you?”

  I wanted to stand up. To walk away. To just get out of that room. But I couldn’t.

  “Not anymore, you don’t. Trust me.”

  “I don’t care.”

  I thought she might cry and I scoured my memory for a touch, a word, some romantic promise of infinity that I couldn’t remember making. Because she was looking at me like I was everything when all she’d ever been to me was Carlisle’s girlfriend.

  The quiet girl in the backseat who paid for his gas and picked him up in the middle of the night when he called her from random payphones. The girl who always smelled like cigarettes and peppermints, tears always smearing her makeup by the end of the night. The girl who didn’t have a name for three months until the four of us ran into someone she knew and I suddenly remembered she was there.

  “Cassie…” I tried to think of something biting that would send her running in the opposite direction but she was looking at me and crying and I couldn’t.

  “I don’t care,” she said again.

  “Well, I do.”

  She finally looked up, wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry I came here like this.” She stood, her voice hard like she’d broken out of some kind of trance. “I’m sorry.” Then she was heading for the door and all I could do was watch her go.

  I lay in bed, trying not to think about the day. About how every single one was the same as the last, stuck on this monotonous loop until something tragic happened. There was either the chaos or the quiet. Me sitting alone or me being confronted by people I didn’t want to see. Me being in control of my body, pushing it as hard as I could, or it pushing back. There was no in-between, no slow climb before everything fell apart, and I was still reeling from Cassie’s words.

  Because as she’d said them, I hadn’t realized how badly I’d needed to hear them. Just not from her.

  I went to bed every night wondering where Bryn was and what she was doing. Tonight was no different. I left the lamplight on, not ready for the dark, and I tried to picture her in her garage working on her sculpture, or out with Dani getting ice cream, or curled up on the couch watching old movies. I wondered if she was alone, if she wished she wasn’t. I wondered if she missed me or if I’d gotten my wish and that sadness had turned to hate over the past few months. I wondered if she was trying to forget me the way she thought I’d forgotten her and for some reason the idea terrified me.

  I knew it was selfish, that what I’d done that day in that hospital room had been selfish too. But I didn’t know what else to do.

  Sometimes I’d pretend she was coming back, that I’d never said those words. I’d picture her downstairs in the kitchen with my nonna or talking with my nonno on the couch. Sometimes I swore I could hear her voice.

  Other times I’d pretend we were somewhere else. Just the two of us. She’d be showing me the trees again in North Carolina or we’d be down on the beach, the two of us curled up in her grandmother’s quilt in front of a fire. I imagined us laughing together, walking, running, and then I had to stop.

  The place we’d met was made for miracles and the fantasy of being able to move freely in Bryn’s memories was so intense that sometimes I could hardly breathe. I thought of going back there almost as much as I thought of her, but surrounded by the faded green walls of my bedroom, two bulbs busted over the bed making the entire room look gray, it was hard to believe that any of it had actually happened.

  The impossibility of it nagged me and drove me out of my mind. But so did the hope…the belief that it was real. That’s what nagged at me most. Knowing that Bryn was real and so was everything else I remembered. But then I’d given it all up in exchange for a fantasy in which I never made it past those first few steps. Because whether I was imagining Bryn and I walking hand in hand down the beach or I was chasing her through those piles of leaves, right in the middle of it all I would force my eyes open, look down at my legs, and stop pretending. Because in that moment I’d remember exactly why I’d lied to her and then I could finally fall asleep.

  But just then I didn’t want to sleep. I didn’t want to stop pretending. I closed my eyes and imagined running my fingers through her hair, curls springing back to her face. I could feel her skin, the edge of her lips, heat slipping through them and brushing my face. She smelled like pine and coffee and then I kissed her. I kissed her and I broke in two.

  I opened my eyes, staring down at my legs, at my useless pathetic legs and I wanted to rip right out of them. I stared down at my kneecaps sharp under my skin, my calves so thin I could lace my fingers around them. My gaze trailed down to my feet and I counted each toe, remembering the way they’d felt in the sand, warm water lapping over them.

  Move.

  I kept staring at them, heat climbing me.

  Move. Move.

  I leaned forward, pushing as hard as I could. My back strained and I took a deep breath. I gripped the sheets, hearing them rip.

  Move. For her. Fucking move.

  And then it was so slight. I blinked, thinking I’d imagined it. But then I looked again, I pushed one more time, and then I saw it. My toe moved.

  17

  Bryn

  We landed in Cologne just before dusk. Sunlight dripped over everything and from my small window on the plane I could barely make out the lines. Everything just looked sweet and sticky and for some reason it made me feel safe. Despite my dad’s face, the death all over it. I tried to bury the thought, imagining the sun outside my window burning it to ash.

  It wasn’t real. I chanted the words even though I knew better. It wasn’t. But what I’d seen had sparked something in me even stronger than feeling. Knowing. I’d seen that place, I’d been there, and whether watching that shadow climb out of him was an old memory or a glimpse of one to come, I couldn’t shake the sense that something terrible was going to happen.

  I pinned my eyes shut, trying not to think about anything other than Germany and the hospital and syringes and capsules and IVs and getting better. When I finally opened my eyes again we were beginning our descent, the sun sinking down along with us and taking the memory with it.

  We took the shuttle to our hotel room, my mom and I both
just sitting in silence, trying to take everything in. It wasn’t until we got to our room and pulled the curtains back to reveal the view that we could finally manage words.

  “It’s…”

  “Like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” my mom said. Immediately I knew she was in heaven.

  From where we stood we could see the shops facing the river Rhine and old churches rising out of the cobblestone and the skyline twisting with new and old architecture, all of it rising like some kind of ancient fingerprint.

  Pathways edged out of the trees, carrying people with shopping bags and couples on tandem bicycles and it looked like a painting. Like we were standing there watching God weave this portrait, every flower and every person placed with divine precision, and it took my breath away.

  My mom placed her hand on my shoulder. “Tired?”

  “No,” I lied.

  I was exhausted but I didn’t want to tear myself away from that view. I knew once I did it wouldn’t be new anymore and after living here for months, going through treatments, and my body learning to associate the beauty of the place with needles and hospitals and people in scrubs, there was no way I’d ever have a moment like this one again. And I wanted this moment—to be here, to pretend just for a little while that this was all I’d come to see.

  My mom pulled two chairs over by the window and after ordering room service we turned off all the lights, eating and watching the people down below. Shop lights poured out onto the street, setting people aglow, and we watched them laugh and talk and walk and live. And I hoped that maybe, just maybe, Dr. Banz would have the answers I needed and, even if it was just for a little while longer, I could learn to live that way too.

  The inside of the hospital looked nothing like the rest of the city. It was all white walls and harsh lights and people in matching lab coats that blended into everything else. Dr. Banz’s office was bigger than Dr. Sabine’s and the entire north wall was covered floor to ceiling in glass. It looked out over the lab, people in gloved hands and goggles shuffling around carrying files and vials and test tubes. It looked like another movie—this one alien and muted and scary.

  “Sleep well?” Dr. Banz asked.

  I knew he wasn’t just asking about the plane ride but I nodded anyway, following his lead not to alarm my mom.

  He stepped to the window. “I know it might be a little overwhelming but don’t worry. You’re surrounded by some of the best minds in medicine, some of the finest equipment. You’re in great hands, Bryn. We’re all here for the same reason.”

  My mom smiled at that, relieved, but doubt still nagged at me. Dr. Sabine had spent the last six years trying to find a way to manage my KLS and nothing had worked. Dr. Banz had experience but he’d also lost a child to the very same symptoms and I couldn’t help but wonder if forty years was long enough to grieve or if maybe he still was.

  I didn’t want to be an experiment or his attempt at redemption. Unless he could somehow cure me. Maybe he could. I stared down at the lab again, at all of those people in motion, letting myself be overwhelmed for the first time by the possibility that Dr. Banz might be the one to fix me.

  I turned to him. “When do we start?”

  “First thing in the morning if you’re feeling up to it. We’ll take things slowly at first. Consider it more of an observation period.”

  I noticed a cage of white rats in the room below us, someone injecting one of them with a thick copper colored liquid.

  “What will you be observing?” I asked.

  “Your symptoms without the influence of medication.” Dr. Banz clasped his hands, feigning a kind of calculated stiffness that seemed to set my mom at ease. “You haven’t re-started your regimen since your last episode, is that correct?”

  I nodded.

  “We just want to see how your KLS progresses for a little while and then how it responds to certain stimuli. We know it can be triggered by stress but we’d like to see if that threshold of tolerance is changing as the disease progresses.”

  I thought about sitting in that chair in Roman’s hospital room, the way all of the air had rushed out of my lungs when he’d asked me who I was. And then nothing. I couldn’t remember anything after that, the onset of the episode blotting out the present. I’d woken up eight weeks later.

  “And if the threshold has changed?” I asked.

  “Then we’ll know to tread carefully.”

  “Carefully?” my mom repeated.

  Dr. Banz offered a bit more explanation but I wasn’t really listening. Part of me wasn’t sure how much of the conversation was just for show in front of my mom. I glanced back down at the lab and wondered how much of the research was actually legitimate and how much of it really had to do with Eve. I wondered if they knew, if his staff was in on it, or if they were all just as oblivious as my mom.

  “Any questions, Bryn?” Dr. Banz asked.

  The truth was I had millions of them and they’d all taken turns keeping me awake on the fifteen-hour plane ride. But I just shook my head as I glanced at my mom and said, “Not right now.”

  “Well then, let me introduce you to one of my interns, Sheila Ward. She’ll be showing you around the rest of the facility, helping you get acquainted, and she’ll also be acting as your translator while you’re here at the hospital.”

  Dr. Banz waved a hand and the short blonde woman stepped through the door.

  “Welcome,” she said. “If you’ll both just follow me we’ll start with the east wing.”

  She led my mom and I through corridor after corridor, introducing us to the nurses who’d be overseeing my daily care.

  “Dr. Banz actually asked me to introduce you to another one of the patients here. She and her mother travelled from Britain. KLS. Her symptoms did start appearing rather early though.” She lowered her voice as we approached a white door. “She’s only eight.” Then she pushed it open. “Sam, we have someone here to meet you.”

  The little girl looked up, doe-eyed and wary.

  “Sam, this is Bryn. She’s just come from the United States. She’s a new patient, just like you.”

  Sam was quiet, as if waiting for the girl with the over-exaggerated smile to go away.

  Sheila nodded to the chair next to Sam. “You’re welcome to sit. Actually, Sam here is about to stay for overnight observation, something you’ll be doing sometime this week. It might be interesting to stay and see how the process works.”

  “Okay.” I sat down, trying not to impose on the girl’s personal space.

  “Ms. Reyes, if you’d like I can introduce you to some of the other people who will be working with Bryn this week. Dr. Banz would also like to go over her itinerary.”

  “Oh.” My mom looked at me. “Will you be okay here, Bryn?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Are you sure because—?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  The truth was I’d been relieved when they hadn’t separated us earlier but Sam was sitting there all alone and I couldn’t let her be the only brave one.

  When they finally left the room Sam turned to me. “Are you sick too?”

  I hesitated. “Yes.”

  “Like me?”

  I nodded.

  “They made me wear this,” she said, holding out her arms so I could see the way the sleeves on her gown hung too loose. “Maybe you’ll get one.”

  “Maybe when I do my overnight observation.”

  “I don’t like sleeping here,” she said.

  I followed her gaze around the room, taking it in for the first time. There was a chair similar to one you’d see in a dentist’s office and a machine next to it that looked like a sound board with rows and rows of outlets, cords snaking up through the back of the chair.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” she said.

  “What?”

  She pointed to the chair.

  “Is that where you sleep?” I asked.

  She nodded. “They tape those to your back and your head.” She scratched at h
er hairline. “They’re cold at first but then they just hum.” She looked down at her feet. “They don’t hurt,” she said again.

  “What does it do?” I wasn’t sure if she’d know the answer to that question but I figured her explanation might be easier to understand than whatever technical one Dr. Banz or Sheila may have had.

  “Mr. Vogle made it. Have you met him?”

  I nodded.

  “It takes pictures.” She pointed to my forehead. “Of your brain when you’re sleeping.”

  “Okay, like a brain scan?”

  “That way they can see where you’ve been.”

  I was still, just looking at her. “What do you mean where you’ve been?”

  “When you’re sleeping.” She started swinging her legs, not divulging any more.

  “Sam.” I dropped my voice, waiting for her to face me. “Do you dream?”

  KLS patients weren’t supposed to dream. It was what made me such an anomaly, the dream-state an even stranger result of my mind’s ability to transcend not only my disease during an episode but also my own consciousness.

  Sam stopped swinging her legs and whispered, “Sometimes.”

  “What about?” I asked.

  She was quiet then, gaze drifting around the room.

  “I dream too,” I offered.

  “Bad dreams?” she asked.

  “I used to. Do you have bad dreams?”

  “They’re going to make them go away,” she said.

  The door swung open, one of the doctors I’d been introduced to earlier stepping inside with a nurse. She was an Asian woman, Dr. Cao, and it looked like Sam was happy to see her.

  “How are you doing tonight, Sam?” Dr. Cao asked.

  “Good.”

  “Feeling sleepy yet?”

  Sam shook her head.

  Dr. Cao laughed. “I didn’t think so.” She spoke to the nurse in German and then said, “A few cartoons before bed shouldn’t hurt.”