Crazy in Love (Matt & Anna Book 1)

by Annabelle Costa

  Shit. Now I’m really getting myself freaked out.

  I’m probably fine. I still think it’s just my Achilles. How could my ankles bothering me be a brain tumor anyway?

  I make it all the way to my car when I realize I forgot my phone at my desk. Lately, it seems like I’d forget my balls if they weren’t inside my scrotum. Of course, maybe the forgetfulness has something to do with what’s wrong with me. Maybe it’s another sign of cancer.

  Fuck.

  Anyway, I’m not going anywhere without my phone. So I have to go all the way back upstairs to get my goddamn phone. At least everyone is mostly gone for the day, so the elevators are empty. I don’t feel like making small talk. I just want to get my phone and get the hell out of here.

  Except when I get to my cubicle, I get a surprise: Anna is there.

  She’s standing in the middle of my cubicle, holding a bottle of Lysol. The Lysol part isn’t surprising because she is freaking always holding Lysol. Anna is famous for her Lysol. I think it’s surgically attached. There have been at least a dozen times I’ve caught her spraying down her own cubicle or the break room. I know most people think it’s nuts, but I actually find it cute.

  But what I don’t expect to see is that her finger is touching a photo of my parents I’ve got tacked on the wall of my cubicle.

  And it’s not cute right now. It’s not cute that she’s in my space, messing with my stuff when she thinks I’m gone. Especially when I’m about to take a test that may or may not show a big ass tumor in my brain.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I snap at her.

  Obviously, she had no idea I was standing there. She backs up so abruptly she nearly trips over my chair. She stares at me with those huge blue eyes and some of my anger fades.

  “Oh,” she says. She’s gripping the Lysol bottle so hard, her knuckles are white. “I just… I wasn’t… see, I was straightening your photos.”

  “Straightening my photos?” She’s out of her mind. She’s really, truly crazy.

  Anna raises her slightly pointed chin. “Yes. They were crooked. So I, um, fixed them for you.”

  It takes all my self-restraint not to say something mean. I want to tell her that she’s nuts and that she needs to seek counseling or some shit like that, but I’m sure it’s something she’s heard a million times before. Anna’s got plenty of problems already.

  “Okay, fine,” I mutter. “Whatever.”

  A worried crease remains between Anna’s pale eyebrows. “I could put them back the way they were?” she offers.

  I shake my head. Does she really think I care if my photos are tilted fifteen degrees clockwise? But obviously, she cares. She probably thought she was helping me. “No, that’s okay. Do what you need to do. Just… try not to leave any streaks on my monitor.”

  Her shoulders relax and she rewards me with a smile. It must be exhausting to be Anna Flint. I mean, Christ, she couldn’t even manage to get out of the supermarket with her groceries the other day. When she raced off, I quickly mumbled to the irate cashier that the two of us were together, then shelled out nearly a hundred bucks for her stuff. I couldn’t let her leave without her groceries. I had to help her.

  I reach into the drawer of my desk and pull out the phone I left behind, before I forget yet again. Anna just stands there with her Lysol bottle, waiting for me to be done. Oh well. There are worse things than having my workstation cleaned for me. Maybe she’ll get out that coffee ring I left behind from the morning.

  I make my way down the aisle for the second time today. Christ, I hate carpeting. At the end of the day, it’s like walking through molasses. Kelly’s supposed to get me my AFO tomorrow, and I’m actually looking forward to that extra support. I don’t have time for this shit. I’m already late as it is. I’ve got fifteen minutes to get out of here and drive across town. The people who scheduled the MRI told me to show up twenty minutes early, but that’s clearly a lost cause.

  I speed up a bit, but that ends up being a huge mistake. My right foot snags on the carpet, and before I know it, I’ve face-planted on the ground.

  Well, this sucks.

  I sit on the floor for a minute, stunned by the fall. Despite the fact that it’s been happening to me with more frequency lately, it always knocks the wind out of me when I find myself on the ground. I rest my face in my palms, taking a few deep breaths to calm myself down.

  “Are you okay, Matt? What happened?”

  It’s Anna. She’s standing over me, staring. Glad the girl I’m into got to see me fall on my ass. That’s just perfect. This absolutely could not have happened at a better time.

  “Nothing happened,” I snap at her. “I tripped. That’s all.”

  “Oh.” Anna just stands there. “Um. Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” I mumble. “Completely fine.”

  A normal human being, at this point, might have offered me her hand to help me get back on my feet. Not Anna. Anna doesn’t touch other people. That’s common knowledge here. Calvin actually had this game where he’d try to stand close to her and she’d back away, and he’d get close again, and so forth. I made him quit doing it because it was mean and really immature, but the fact remains: Anna doesn’t touch people and she doesn’t want to be touched. Which is just another reason why my fantasies about her are just plain stupid.

  So it’s up to me to get off the floor on my own. Which unfortunately, isn’t the easiest thing in the world when I’ve got a bum ankle. I support myself on my left ankle and lean against the side of the nearest cubicle, hoping my weight doesn’t knock it down. It takes me several minutes, and Anna is staring at me the whole time. I don’t entirely blame her.

  “I hurt my Achilles,” I explain to her. “A while ago. It’s still bothering me.”

  She nods. “That can take a while to heal.”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  Then I think of my MRI again and I get this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. The truth is that I know it’s not really my Achilles. I know it’s something more than that. I know that there’s something really wrong with me. After all, normal, healthy guys in their twenties don’t just suddenly fall while walking.

  But I try not to think about that as I make my way carefully through the carpeted office, holding on to the furniture as I walk so that I don’t fall again.

  Chapter 13: Anna

  Even after Matt leaves, I keep thinking about the way he fell.

  It was strange. Very strange. Matt is athletic—I know that based on his physique and the conversations he has with Calvin Fitzgerald about their basketball games. I know he goes to the gym with some frequency. So for him to fall while walking down a carpeted hallway seems incredibly odd.

  Yet the fact remains: Matt fell.

  And while he did seem shaken by the whole thing, he didn’t seem entirely surprised. And that was the oddest thing of all.

  Although looking back, the worst part was that while Matt was lying sprawled on the ground, I didn’t offer him my hand. That’s what any normal human being would have done—I recognize that. And it’s not like I didn’t want to offer him my hand. I wanted to. More than he ever could have realized.

  But all I could think about was the fact that he was on the dirty, sticky, disgusting, contaminated floor, which meant that his hands were on the dirty, sticky, disgusting, contaminated floor. For goodness sake, I can’t touch the floor. The floor is literally one of the more horrible things I can imagine touching. People walk on the floor in their dirty shoes that have tracked in all the dirt from the ground outside.

  I did try. I at least tried to try. I walked over to where Matt was sprawled out on the ground with the intention of trying to help him get up. I said to myself: Anna, give him your hand.

  Help him, Anna!

  In the end, I couldn’t do it. I just stood there, like an insensitive clod, while Matt glared up at me. Usually when I have a close call like that where I feel obligated to touch someone but don’t, I feel nothing but relief. Bu
t as Matt made his way out of the office, I felt horrible. I was worried that he hated me, but also, I couldn’t stop thinking about what his hand might have felt like in my own. I bet it would have felt warm and large.

  Also, he looked like he could really use some help.

  That was odd too.

  I’m still thinking about the whole thing while I pull out of my spot in the parking garage for our office building. In general, I’m an incredibly cautious driver, but at this moment, I’m not entirely focused on the mirrors, and that’s when I hear the noise:

  A thump.

  My heart stops in my chest. Literally. It pauses beating for about three seconds, then resumes a slightly less regular thumping. That happens to me sometimes. It’s the sort of thing that I definitely would have liked to go to a doctor for, except when I looked it up, it sounded like occasionally irregular heartbeats are not unusual in young people. So I still become frightened when that happens, but it’s not nearly as frightening as that thump.

  I immediately put the car in park, afraid that if I pull back into my parking spot, I might run over again whatever (or whoever) it was that I ran over in the first place. I jump out of my car and look under the wheels.

  Nothing is there.

  No people. No animals. No garbage. Nothing.

  It was all just my imagination. Thank goodness.

  I get back in my car and pull out of the spot entirely. I drive down the row of cars, but I still can’t shake the bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I heard a thump. That was obviously something. Or someone.

  I hit someone. I’m certain of it. I must have been unable to see them because it was too dark under my car.

  Oh my God, I have to get them help. What if someone is lying on the floor, bleeding internally, clinging to life by a thread, waiting for someone to stop and help them? I can’t just leave a human being lying there to die. That would make me a murderess.

  I circle back around to the spot where I had parked. Okay, there are no dead or bleeding bodies lying on the pavement. I breathe a sigh of relief. Maybe I didn’t hit anyone. Maybe I can leave.

  Again, I make my way out of the lot. But I haven’t quite gotten my car out when it occurs to me that maybe when I hit the person, their body rolled under another car. And that’s why I didn’t see them.

  I have to check.

  I circle around again, and drive back to where I had been parked. Of course, I’m one of the last people to leave, so the lot is fairly empty. But who knows how far the body might have rolled? I have to check under every remaining car. I can’t risk having hit someone who might need medical attention.

  I’m in the process of checking under a third car when I hear a voice calling to me: “You okay over there, Miss?”

  I straighten up and see the parking garage attendant, Kenny, is jogging towards me. His jog slows to a walk when he sees my face.

  “Oh,” he says. “I didn’t realize it was you, Miss Flint.”

  “Kenny,” I gasp. I look down at my hands and see that they’re shaking. I squeeze them into fists to try to get them to stop. I need to remain calm. “I need your help! I think I may have accidentally hit someone with my car!”

  Kenny is a big guy with a shaved head, dark skin, and eyes that look very white in the dim light of the parking garage. He frowns and a deep groove forms between his eyebrows.

  “Miss Flint,” he says in a heavy voice. “I really don’t think you hit anyone.”

  Is he serious? I just confessed to him that I committed vehicular manslaughter and he’s blowing me off? That must be a crime in itself. If I went to jail, he’d be charged as my accomplice.

  “I did!” I cry. “I’m sure of it! I just have to find them. Maybe we can get them to a hospital in time to save them.”

  “Miss Flint,” he says again, shaking his bald head. “If you hit someone, we’d see them, wouldn’t we? They’d be lying on the ground, all bloody and stuff.”

  I put my hands on my hips. “Not necessarily. Not if they rolled under one of the cars.”

  “I don’t think so,” is all Kenny says to that.

  “Please help me look,” I say. I’m biting my lip to keep from crying.

  “I can’t do this with you every week.” He lets out a long sigh. “You need to go on home, Miss Flint.”

  A tear escapes from my left eye and I swipe at it furiously. “I can’t!”

  Kenny sighs again. “Okay, then.”

  He ambles away, while I continue looking under all the cars. I just need to check and make sure there are no injured pedestrians under the cars. Once I check under every single car, I’ll know for sure I didn’t hit anyone. Then I can go home.

  Chapter 14: Matt

  Once again, I’m sitting in the office of Dr. Dunne. I’ve gotten to know him pretty good in the last couple of months. He and I are great buddies now. You get close to someone real quick when they stick a giant needle in your spine.

  That happened a week ago. I had something called a lumbar puncture, in which I lay down on my side on a table while he removed some of my spinal fluid with a needle. The needle sliding into my lower back was less painful than it was slightly dizzying and sickening. As I left his office, I had a throbbing headache over my left eye that lasted until the next morning.

  Dr. Dunne still hasn’t given me any real answers. I was stuck in the donut hole of an MRI machine for over an hour to get a test that he informed me was “inconclusive,” so that’s why I had to have the lumbar puncture. All this for an ankle injury. I really have to question the state of medicine in this country.

  Today I’m supposed to get some answers. I better, in any case. I’m not going through one more test until Dr. Dunne tells me what the hell he thinks is wrong with me.

  I’m sitting on his examining table, fully dressed. I didn’t even take off my shoes, because I need them to hold in place my right ankle-foot orthosis. AFO, for short. It’s a black plastic brace that cups my calf and then snakes down into my shoe to support the entirety of my foot. I love it, actually. I was resistant at first, but I’m walking so much better now—I haven’t fallen once or even close since I started using it. I’m almost tempted to try basketball again, but I’ll wait a bit. Not that I want to wear the AFO forever, but it really isn’t bad at all. Just until I heal.

  Dr. Dunne walks into the examining room after his usual single knock. He’s not smiling, but that’s par for the course with this guy. Dr. Dunne never smiles—at least not around me. I bet he’s fun at parties.

  “Hi, Matt,” he says. I gave him permission to call me by my first name. I got sick of the Mr. Harper shit. Mr. Harper is my father, etc. etc.

  “Hi, Dr. Dunne,” I say. He has not given me permission to call him by his first name.

  “So you know I called you here to talk about the results of your tests,” he begins.

  My stomach clenches up. As much as I wanted to know what’s going on, the thought of finding out the truth makes me physically ill. And it’s clear from the doctor’s face that he doesn’t have any good news to deliver.

  “Is it a brain tumor?” I blurt out.

  He gives me a funny look. “I told you that the MRI wasn’t indicative of a tumor, didn’t I, Matt?”

  “No, you said it was inconclusive.”

  He nods. “Yes, that’s true. And I can’t give you a definitive diagnosis today either.” I barely have time to feel relieved when he adds, “But all the diagnostic testing and your examination findings point to a diagnosis of primary progressive multiple sclerosis.”

  “What?” I say. That’s another thing about Dr. Dunne—he likes the medical mumbo jumbo. But whatever he said sounds frightening.

  Dr. Dunne looks me straight in the eyes. “You most likely have multiple sclerosis.”

  I will remember this moment forever. Sitting in Dr. Dunne’s office, feeling completely healthy except for my stupid ankle, and having him tell me he thinks I have multiple sclerosis. I mean, multiple sclerosis? Is he kidding me? Those
people are crippled. In wheelchairs. I’m fine. How could he think I have that? What kind of doctor is this guy? I would believe a brain tumor before I’d believe that.

  “Do you know what multiple sclerosis is?” he asks me.

  “Yeah,” I say. “But I don’t have that.”

  “Well,” he says thoughtfully, “you can’t receive a diagnosis yet, because your symptoms need to be present for an entire year. But everything else points to that diagnosis. At this point, I’d say I’m about 98% sure.” He folds his arms across his chest. “You most likely have a variant on the disease that’s less common than the typical relapsing remitting form of the disease.”

  “Is that… better?” I ask.

  He hesitates before answering. “The typical presentation of multiple sclerosis is to have lesions in the spinal cord and brain that cause symptoms that are bothersome for a short time but then improve. Your symptoms have not improved and the lesions on your MRI were all in your spinal cord, which points to a primary progressive variant of the disease that progresses over time and affects the spinal cord preferentially.”

  “Okay…” I look down at my right ankle, hanging innocuously off the side of the examining table. Maybe multiple sclerosis isn’t as bad as the things I’ve heard. Maybe some people get crippled by it but others just have bum ankles. “So does this mean my ankle won’t get better?”

  “Mr. Harper,” Dr. Dunne says. Uh oh, we’re back to Mr. Harper. “If this diagnosis is accurate, I’d expect that your symptoms will not only not improve, but will continue to progress. I would expect that you’re going to have increasing difficulty walking over the next several years.”