Anything but Ordinary (20 page)

Bryce tried to take another step, but she was no longer in Lounge 2.

A loud car, the engine thundering.

It was the same car they were in tonight, and they were speeding along the streets of Nashville. The bass was bumping. The wheels swerved between the yellow lines, barely screeching to a stop at a red light. The driver, one of the tattooed James Deans, turned to the passengers, asking for directions to McDonald’s. He tripped over his words, giggling, and the whole car stank of a bottle of vodka spilled on the floor of the backseat.

The laughing faces looked familiar. Bryce drew in breath in horror; she had seen this vision before. The dark-haired person next to her—

Sydney.

Sydney laughed at her friend driving, telling him to watch the road. At least that was what Bryce thought she was saying. Every second, the bass rattled her chest, and there were no other sounds. Sydney was laughing. The laughter like broken glass. Glass, shattering. And there, just as it had come to her in the CAT scan, was a sharp, sinking feeling that everything here was wrong.

Sydney had to get out of the car.
She had to.

Bryce tried to pull her away, to open the door, to yell, but she was only half there. Another nauseous wave and Bryce pounded on the invisible barrier between Sydney and herself.

“Get out! Stop the car!” Bryce screamed.

But she didn’t hear her. No one did.

The car lurched into motion and the vision snapped away. Bryce was lying on the sticky floor of Lounge 2, a circle of figures bent over her, shaking her shoulders, calling things she couldn’t make out.

“I’m all right,” she said. “I’m all right.”

She stood up, and the crowd of people dispersed, dissolving into the music. Her head felt heavy with heat and pain, and the sight of the swerving car came to her in a flash of hot pain. Was it real? How much time had passed? Was it already happening?

Where was her sister?

“Do you know Sydney?” Bryce turned to the first person near her, a short girl with bleached-blond hair.

“No, honey, but are you okay? Your nose is bleedin’.…”

Bryce put her tongue up to lick away the blood. It tasted like sticky, salty metal. She wiped the rest away. There was a lot of it.

“Where’s my sister?” Bryce yelled over the girl, turning to anyone else who would listen. “Does anyone know if Sydney left?”

Bryce pushed through the bodies to the door, her feet returning in pinpricks of feeling. The bearded, large bouncer sat on a stool, counting money. “Did you see if Sydney left?”

He didn’t look up. He pointed outside.

She pushed open the heavy metal slats and looked wildly around. The air felt like it had gotten frigid, and for some reason smelled like snow. Bryce licked away more blood. A door slammed down the street. It was the B60.

“SYDNEY!” Bryce screamed. Her sister’s name echoed down the row of empty buildings. Bryce started hobbling toward the car in her heels. She didn’t care how she looked. “Sydney, stop!”

Sydney stood up from the backseat, her arm draped over the door. “Bryce, Jesus. What?”

Bryce leaned on the car, wheezing. “Don’t get in.”

Her eyes darted to the driver. Sydney glanced, too. He looked calm, sober. When Sydney looked away, though, he brought a hand up to his mouth, burping. He was clearly amused with himself.

“Did you run into something? Go inside and wash your face.”

“No!” Bryce shook her head. “I won’t. You come with me.” She sounded like a stubborn kid, but she couldn’t get out much more. Her thoughts were trudging through the alcohol.

Sydney rolled her eyes. “Bryce, I’ll be five minutes. We’re just going to get some fries.”

But Bryce couldn’t forget the feeling, the incredible urge to get Sydney out, out, out. Pounding on the glass. The terrible lurch forward. Glass, and red. How could she explain?

Sydney sat in the backseat, pulling the door gently away from Bryce. She wasn’t coming. Bryce would stand in front of the car if she had to.

“You have to take me home!” Bryce blurted out. “I’m sick. I’ve got a bloody nose. Please. I’m not feeling well.”

Sydney sighed. “You can’t wait five minutes?”

“No, now.” Bryce grabbed her arm and yanked her from her seat. Sydney’s foot kicked an open bottle and vodka sloshed out all over the floor. Bryce gripped Sydney tighter.

Bryce was panting, her makeup running in sweat down her face. Sydney shrugged at the driver.

“I guess I’ll see you later, Jack.”

The engine revved and the little blue car streaked down the street, the other backseat passenger slamming the door as it sped away.

Bryce’s muscles relaxed. She let go of Sydney’s hand. Warmth was creeping back into her limbs.

“Now what?” Sydney turned to Bryce. “You want to go home? I don’t suppose you’ve acquired a car in the hour we were here.”

Bryce clutched for her purse, but it wasn’t there. She looked at Sydney, whose phone was tucked in her leggings.

Bryce called 411 on Sydney’s phone as her sister looked at her and smoked a cigarette, puzzling.

“City and state?”

“Nashville, Tennessee.”

I do my best studying in the middle of the night,
he told her once when they were entwined in the grass.
When nothing is awake
but my brain.

“What listing?”

“Vanderbilt Medical Center.”

After speaking with the front desk and the confused night nurse at the neurology wing, Bryce got connected to Sam’s room. The line rang and rang. Her heart sank. He wasn’t there. But then, a click.

“Hello?” Carter whispered.

Bryce felt a smile growing wide on her face. “I had a feeling you were there.”

Sydney cleared her throat, making a “get on with it” motion with her hands.

“Can you pick us up?” She told him where they were, and that it was an emergency. She hung up and they waited.

But it wasn’t an emergency anymore. Sydney was there, next to her. That’s what she was telling herself, trying to slow her frantic heart as the heat crept up her spine again, dotting her vision in black. She tried to breathe normally.

“Bryce?”

She held on to Sydney’s arm, trying to keep her balance. She lost her sight, her feeling, no longer sure if she was vertical. In a blur, the pavement swerved toward her.

on’t ever do that to me again.”

Sydney, Carter, and Bryce sat at the Grahams’ kitchen table. They’d had a quiet car ride home.

“I thought you were about to go into another coma.” Sydney was drinking tea, her pale hands wrapped tightly around her mug. She kept sneaking glances at Bryce when she thought her sister wasn’t looking.

“I’m sorry,” Bryce said. She couldn’t say it enough. She shouldn’t have gone out, she shouldn’t have drank, she shouldn’t have gotten herself worked up enough to pass out on the sidewalk.

As soon as Bryce had hit pavement, she was awake. The first words out of her mouth were, “Don’t take me to the hospital.”

Maybe it was the way Bryce had clutched her, or that Carter had pulled up seconds later, but Sydney had listened. Now she finished her tea and went to bed without a word.

Carter looked at Bryce, his eyes searching. He scooted his chair close to Bryce’s, and laid his hands on its surface, waiting.

“I’m sorry to you, too,” Bryce said.

“For what?” Carter said simply, his palms turned up briefly.

Bryce put her hand in his.

For the first time in what seemed like forever, she saw his smile. His blue-gray eyes were bright. With his other hand he reached toward his pocket, where he kept his Vanderbilt Medical ID card clipped to the fabric.

He unclipped it and threw it across the room.

In the morning, Bryce’s floating mood was punctured by the sight of Sydney in her same spot at the kitchen table, head slumped in her arms. Her shoulders shook with sobs.

Under her folded arms was the local paper.

THREE KILLED IN DRUNK DRIVING ACCIDENT
, the headline screamed. Underneath it, among the three school photos, was Sydney’s friend Jack. Bryce drew in a breath.

Her vision had been real. She was right to keep Sydney out of that car. She swallowed, relief mingled with sadness washing over her.

Bryce put a hand on her sister’s shoulder. Sydney grabbed it and squeezed. Bryce didn’t need much else. She had kept her alive, and that was enough.

She helped Sydney back to bed, and then Carter came over. Though it was sprinkling lightly, they sat outside, the mist coating their warm skin. Bryce wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his shirt.

“So tell me,” he whispered.

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me how you knew to keep Sydney out of that car.”

The wind swept through, and droplets of water landed in her eyes. She huddled further into him, not answering.

“Or you could tell me how you knew I sat with you while you were sleeping,” he said, his fingers under her chin, bringing her out of the folds of his arms. “Or why the CAT scan broke.”

Bryce sighed.
Don’t tell Dr. Warren
sounded too much like
Don’t tell Mom.
She sat up as he narrowed his eyes at her.

“My family doesn’t need any more trouble,” she said.

“I know,” he said.

“Good.” They were clear.

Bryce started at the beginning, from the moment she woke up. The sharp filter on the world, the strange sights, the feeling that things weren’t quite right. She told him everything. Every little detail, from the heated pain to the visions moving her forward and backward in time, putting her in places she’d never been before. When she finished, she felt like seven layers of heavy skin were peeled off her body. She was bare, yes, but she was free.

“So tell me,” Bryce echoed, willing with every ounce of her that he wouldn’t pick her up right then and carry her back to the hospital for another CAT scan. “What does it mean?”

But Carter was lost in thought. “So that’s why your brain activity spiked so rapidly.”

He grasped the sides of Bryce’s head suddenly, looking back and forth between her eyes. His intensity made her laugh. But she was curious.

“Is there an answer?”

“No,” he said, letting go, brushing her hair from her face. “Neuroscience has always said the human brain is hardwired, permanent by the time we’re adults. But there are also studies that say the brain has the ability to change structure and function in response to experience. When the brain suffers trauma it has the ability to rezone itself.”

Carter paused, taking in her confused expression. “It’s like after your accident, your brain was a puzzle, adjusting the shape of its pieces and how they fit together, but creating the same overall picture.”

“Oh,” Bryce said.

He was getting excited. “Experiences could be registered more or less intensely, with different emotional and even sensory reactions. Memories could be stored differently, released differently. Understanding changes, perception changes. Your perception could have been replaced by what you imagined others to see.”

He stood up, pacing around the blue rectangle of the pool.

“Everyone’s brain is trained to think linearly in time, but yours could have been rewired to understand time in a webbed or networked fashion, moments becoming linked less by cause and effect, and more by objects, words, other emotional triggers.”

Bryce sat on the pool chair, her apparently miraculous head resting in her hands. Dried leaves skittered across the tarp. Carter had paced all the way to the other end, standing near the unused diving board.

“But what’s the point of all this if I’m going to die?” Bryce called.

His face looked pained, but his body remained stiff, upright. He slowly made his way back to her, sitting in a neighboring pool chair, his legs stretched in front of him.

“Maybe you won’t die,” he said lightly.

“You said my brain wouldn’t survive the swelling,” she said.

He looked away.

Bryce had had plenty of time to come to terms with this fact. She had hit out her doom with a hammer, cut it away with a saw, walked with it past the Grahams’ property until her legs were too weak to stand. Carter had not.

He looked back at her, squinting. “You remember things from when you were asleep?”

Bryce nodded.

“Tell me about one of the articles I read to you. The one about insects.”

“I can’t just pull things out of my head,” she said.

“Try. It was in one of those nature magazines for kids. It was all there was around to read that day because I read you everything else.”

Bryce closed her eyes. She thought about her hospital room, the blue curtain, the white ceiling, the circular lights. With a quick streak of pain, Carter was next to her, his face fuller than it was now, younger, wearing a T-shirt and shorts because the room was sweltering on a sticky summer day.

“Uhh…” he was saying, flipping through a faded magazine. “Let’s see.”

He settled on a page. “Want to learn about cicadas?” he asked Bryce.

She watched his face as he read, fascinated with this version of Carter just barely out of his teenage years, deciding to spend a summer day at the bedside of a girl he didn’t know, might never know.

“Cicadas are one of the longest-living insects. You may know them from the buzzing sound coming from certain trees as they emerge each summer. That sound is their legs rubbing together, communicating with each other after they have spent the winter underground.”

Each word coming out of Carter’s mouth was one Bryce knew better than the last. She began to speak along with him as he read.

“‘Some cicadas can live up to seventeen years underground, slowly growing from babies to adults. They read the temperature of the ground in cycles to know when the years have passed. When it’s time, they emerge from their holes to mate as beautiful, fully winged adults.…’”

Bryce was in the backyard again now, the heat of her head morphing with the fading heat of the September afternoon, quoting the article to Carter, tears pricking her eyes.

“‘Once their purpose is fulfilled, they die, leaving the earth as quickly as they came.’”

Carter looked tired, brushing her cheek with his hand. Then he wrapped his arms around her like he would never let go.