Anything but Ordinary (7 page)

Bryce took a deep breath. What should she say? “Why?” was the only thing she could think of.

Carter had picked a leaf and was crouched over the pool with it, trying to help a floating bug to safety. Bryce jiggled her arms a little bit to relax, like she used to do on the platform before she dove. She swallowed and walked through the doors onto the patio.

“Hi,” Carter said, looking at a spot above her head.

Bryce could see that he had just come from the hospital. He was still wearing his ID badge on the pocket of a worn button-down shirt, through which she could see the lines of his upper half. He was lean and long and solid, all the way from his broad shoulders down to the waist of his khaki cutoffs.

“Hey,” Bryce said, trying not to smile.

“How are you feeling?”

“Great,” Bryce responded. He was now staring at his feet. Bryce continued, “I mean, physically. I’m sore, but…good.”

“Good,” he echoed.

“Yeah,” Bryce said, looking at him pointedly. He still avoided her eyes. Was he going to say something about the other day? She wished he would make a joke. This clean, formal version of Carter was making her nervous. “Am I due to go in for a checkup or something?”

“Kind of,” he said. “Remember when you made me take you to that restaurant?”

Before Bryce could nod, he continued. “I forgot to tell you. Before I left, I told Dr. Warren where I was going. She said it was a good idea. Didn’t seem to think you’d be coming in much on your own. So. She decided to work something out where you don’t have to go all the way to the medical center, if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t want to,” Bryce said quickly. “I definitely do not want to.”

“There ya go,” Carter said, shrugging.

“And instead…”

“I will be checking up. On you,” he said slowly, almost one word at a time.

“Is that standard procedure?” she asked, tilting her head, smiling.

He squinted off into the distance. “Not really.”

Bryce made her way over to the edge of the pool, where Carter’s bug was crawling away. “You know, if med school doesn’t work out, you could always find work rescuing drowning insects.”

Finally, a small laugh. “At least then I wouldn’t be tempted by beautiful patients.”

Bryce froze, looking at him.

“What happened the other day was completely out of line. I apologize.”

“That’s okay,” Bryce said, but cursed herself immediately afterward. She should say something more—well, more official. But she was distracted. Carter had said she was beautiful. He had just gone ahead and said it. “Apology accepted,” she added.

“And it wasn’t professional,” Carter went on, taking a breath. “Not only was it unprofessional, it was inappropriate. You know, to what—to what you were feeling at the time.”

“Right,” Bryce said. But she didn’t mean “right.”

She looked at him. His brow was unfurrowed, but his head was still down. “So.” He looked up at her and forced a smile. “Do you remember what ‘checking vital signs’ means?”

Bryce smiled back. “Is that what they call it these days?”

Carter blushed. “It means you’ll have to stay in one place for ten minutes. Can you do that?”

“I can try,” Bryce said with mock exasperation, and sat gingerly on a pool chair while Carter removed a stethoscope from his shoulder bag.

He kneeled next to her and put the cold disc to her chest. Bryce felt an electric jolt with his hand near her skin. He stared in concentration, his mouth turned down at the corners.

“A little fast, but consistent,” he said after a minute, looking at his watch.

He recorded the number on her chart. Bryce could see somebody had typed her name incorrectly on the top of the paper;
BRICE GRAHAM
, it read. Carter had crossed out the
i
and replaced it with a
y
in his own scratchy writing. He took her blood pressure and temperature, staying quiet all the while.

“Well.” He stood up.

For some reason the motion was too fast for Bryce.

A small fire seemed to travel up the base of her neck, to her skull, behind her eyes. At first, Bryce just thought she was blushing, but no, this was a real fire. Pain branded the top of her spine and traveled in shots of heat to her forehead.
This
again.
She looked down, trying to get control.

“Wait,” she tried to say.

But the cement by the pool turned on its side. Again, she fell. It was almost as if Bryce moved forward right into it, like a wall.

A spring day.

She was looking through a crack in the hospital curtain. A young man in a white shirt was facing away from her, bending over a bed. There lay Bryce’s body in a light-blue gown.

The young man pulled the covers closer to her face as a cool breeze came through the open window, washing away the hospital smell. He sat down on one of the empty chairs and cracked open a book with a gold cover and a deep red spine.

The sound was clear. No crackling or buzzing, just the sweet song of birds from outside. He began to speak.

“I, uh. I heard you like Westerns.” He cleared his throat. “This is a biography of Wyatt Earp. Ahem. Sheriff Wyatt Earp was a man of swift and decisive action.…”

The poolside cement appeared again, like it was knocking her over, and she was tipped back to the chair. Her head jerked back.

The hot pain flashed once again, then faded into cool relief. She blinked, situated herself, and shook her hands out of the numb feeling.

“Yeah? Do you need something?” Carter was saying, standing over her. “Bryce?”

Bryce shook the vision away. “Huh?” she said, pulling her mother’s tunic around her legs. She bit her lip. “No.”

“All right, then,” he said, putting his bag over his shoulder. “Stay healthy.” He looked at Bryce. “I mean that.” He turned away from her, heading up the hill.

“Carter, wait.” Bryce blinked slowly.

Flashes of what she had just seen would not leave her. The person by the bed. The way his voice sounded. There was something connecting them to the reality of Carter next to her, right then. Something had just fallen into place.

Carter stopped.

“You spent a lot of time with me when I was asleep, didn’t you?” she asked. “You were there.”

Carter found Bryce’s eyes and held them there for a second. A long second, puzzling. “Almost every day.”

And with that, Carter continued up the hill. Bryce watched his figure as he disappeared around the house. He was a person from her strange dreams, but she didn’t know him before her accident. She had known he was with her while she slept—before anyone told her.

Which meant that the visions from her bedside were not just visions. They were real.

Bryce leaned against the chair, her stomach in knots. Gray clouds were collecting over the sun, fading the blue sky like a sheet washed too many times. Little laps of the now darkening pool water spilled over the sides—the wind had picked up this afternoon.

She closed her eyes, trying to bring up the scenes like the one she had just been inside of. Tipping back and forth from her hospital room, her body behind the blue curtain; Sydney as a child; her parents drifting around her like they barely knew each other; Greg in the barn; Carter sitting, reading on a spring day she had never known. They were all looped in her mind now, somehow.

Something had gone too far when her brain reignited. She could be in a time where she wasn’t supposed to be, she could see what she wasn’t supposed to see. Colors seemed to fall on her like overturned buckets of paint, and each sound was its own little orchestra. Her senses were wide open now, and they would stay that way, wider than she could have ever imagined.

As heavy drops began to fall, Bryce couldn’t help but raise her hand to her head. She almost expected it to shock her. But it felt just like it always had.

“Bryce, get inside!” Her mother called from the sliding door. “There’s going to be lightning.”

Carter knew that I liked Westerns
. She would see him again soon, and again the day after that. At the thought of that, she smiled.

Sun, exercise, clothes.
Bryce went over her list again as she reentered through the French doors.
And friends.

The emptiness she’d felt wasn’t emptiness anymore. It was space to be filled.

he air wrapped Bryce in a blanket of moisture. The leaves on the oak tree in the Grahams’ front yard stood still, waxy and green. There was no breeze. The lawn was thriving like a football field, so bright it almost looked fake. Bryce wished she could suck up water from the humidity like the plants could. She had stepped outside to wait for Gabby five minutes ago, and she could already use a tall glass of something.

After Carter walked away yesterday, Bryce had felt powerful. She had felt full of good things.
Only good things,
she had declared, and she had gone straight inside to call Gabby, eager to tell her that everything was going to be okay.

Gabby picked up on the first ring. “Bryce.”

Bryce’s confidence had faltered at the sound of her voice. It was easy enough to forgive her best friend when she was thinking of the Gabby whose perfect fishtail braid she used to mess up, the one who she could tease about being a hopeless romantic because she was too wrapped up in a soap opera plot to notice.

But this wasn’t quite Gabby. Her voice had an edge now.

“So what’s the deal with the bridesmaid thing?” Bryce had asked.

“Oh,” Gabby said, and Bryce could hear the surprise in her voice. “So you don’t want to talk—?”

She had looked at the storm outside, thinking again of Carter as he walked away. She swallowed her fear.

“Let’s meet up!” Bryce said, before Gabby could say anything else. “If I’m going to be your maid of honor, I’m going to need a dress, right?”

They agreed Gabby would pick her up for a trip to the mall. “Just to start,” Gabby had said. “Because you also need regular clothes.”

“How did you know?” Bryce said.

“Believe me, I recognized your mom’s old pajama top.” Bryce had to smile.

A black VW pulled up. Different from the van Gabby usually drove. Used to drive, Bryce corrected herself. But then Gabby honked twice, like she always did, and Bryce made her way down the walk.

“Hi, gorgeous!” Gabby called as she leaned to open the door. The air-conditioning was blasting. Gabby’s lavender shampoo filled Bryce’s nose, and suddenly they were sixteen again, driving to practice, to a football game, anywhere. “How are you?”

“Went to Belle Meade yesterday,” Bryce started. “Sydney was hung over, as usual.”

“Oh god.” Gabby glanced from the road. “Sydney’s one of
those
girls?”

Bryce knew exactly what she meant—the girls at their school who mixed vodka into gas-station slushies at football games, who partied every weekend while she and Gabby trained or went to meets.

Bryce shook her head. “I mean, she wouldn’t be part of, like, Renee Sutterlane’s clique. She’s a little too punk-goth-whatever for that. Those girls always pretended to be Christian.”

“And they all got pregnant, like, right out of high school,” Gabby said, shaking her head.

“What? Really?”

“Renee has two kids now. Kat O’Hare has a baby with Chris Driggs. Kylie Timmons has one with who knows who.”

Bryce laughed in disbelief. “Wow. That
sucks
.” She could barely take care of herself, let alone a baby.

“I don’t know, Bry.” Gabby looked thoughtful. “They look really happy on Facebook. They dress their babies in these cute little outfits.…”

“Gabbyyyyy—” Bryce chided. “Don’t get any ideas.”

Gabby pursed her glossy lips. “Come on, wouldn’t it be fun to have an adorable little baby?”

“No!” Bryce shook her finger at her friend. “Just say no!”

“Fine,” Gabby said, her lips still pursed, but then she smiled.

Bryce smiled into the rearview mirror, watching suburbia shrink as they got closer to downtown Nashville.

Gabby sighed as they pulled up to a red light. “Besides, Greg is
not
ready to be a father.”

Bryce’s chest tightened. She had been lulled by the comfort of Gabby’s familiar smell, the feeling of sitting in the passenger seat. For just a moment, she had forgotten.

Gabby glanced at her. “I tried to get him to come with us today, maybe try on some tuxedoes, but he said, ‘Nah.’ That’s exactly what he said. ‘Nah.’”

Bryce’s jaw clenched. The cars around them started to move. This was the part they should glaze over. This was the part that would make her pissed off. But they were going dress-shopping, and he was the groom. Did she think she could avoid it forever?

They jerked forward. Silence. Greg’s name was ringing in Bryce’s ears.

Finally, Gabby broke the silence. Her voice was grave. “Bryce, I have something to tell you.”

Bryce’s stomach was in knots. What now?

Gabby opened her mouth, but instead of speaking, she hit the CD player’s ON button. A few chords filtered out, and Bryce recognized the song instantly.

“Yeah, B. Talk your shit,” Gabby said in her best Jay-Z impression.

Bryce always played the Beyoncé part, because then Gabby could call her “B.” She let out a throaty, “Partner, let me upgrade you,” and immediately giggled with embarrassment. Like most things these days, Bryce was out of practice singing like an R&B star.

As they pulled into the mall parking lot, Bryce and Gabby danced Beyoncé-style in their seats, swinging their hips and flipping their hair. “Upgrade U” was the first track on their warm-up CD. This was what they pumped from Bryce’s basement speakers as they practiced tucks at her house. This was what they sang to as they rolled into Hilwood High in the mornings. The CD even skipped at the right place.

Bryce yelled over the Jay-Z part, “Where did you find this?”

“Are you kidding?” Gabby yelled back between lines. “I would never have let this thing out of my sight!”

As she nodded her head to the beat, Bryce dabbed sudden, grateful tears with the back of her hand. She smiled at her best friend. A thank-you for this little part of Bryce’s old life, and for letting the subject of Greg drop. They kept rapping and dancing as they entered the mall, doubling over with laughter at the shoppers who stared as they passed.

An hour later, everything was chiffon. Layers of the light-pink, netlike fabric surrounded Bryce. She climbed through them, the edges of each piece tickling her face. Suddenly she was in the open air again, staring at her own reflection. The dress was very puffy and very pink.

“I look like one of those shower pouf things.”

“Let me see,” Gabby said, and pushed her way into the dressing room. She caught Bryce’s eyes in the mirror, and there was an awkward pause. There had been a lot of those since Bryce had filled up her Macy’s bags with T-shirts and Gabby pulled an issue of
Modern Bride
out of her purse. She had asked if Bryce wanted to take a break while they looked through it, maybe get some Orange Julius. She even offered to take Bryce home to rest, but Bryce was determined not to let the mood fall, not when things were starting to feel normal between them.

“I just thought it would be interesting.” Gabby twisted a strand of her hair around her finger, looking worried. “You know, different from the average bridesmaid dress.”

“No, it’s nice,” Bryce said. The top of the dress was pretty. Kind of soft, not too shiny, with a cut right at her bust line. But then it exploded. “Different is good.”

“But not always good,” Gabby offered quickly. “Here, let’s get it off. Now we’ve narrowed it down. We need something more classic. Maybe slimmer lines.”

She stepped out of the dressing room while Bryce wriggled out through the forest of chiffon.

“See, my…er, dress is really traditional,” Gabby said in the eveningwear section when Bryce emerged, moving through different shades of red. “I was thinking bigger shapes, something more elaborate to provide a contrast.”

Gabby picked out a long, silky dress in vivid red. She pulled Bryce into an oversized dressing room with an upholstered chair in the corner. “But now that I think of it, maybe consistency would work better. Here.” She laid the dress out on Bryce’s open arms.

Gabby took a seat, looking at her, but Bryce didn’t move to change immediately. She had changed in front of Gabby a thousand times, but Bryce found herself setting the dress aside slowly and bringing her arms inside her T-shirt before she slid it above her navel, her eyes avoiding Gabby’s.

“Oh,” Gabby said, realizing, and busied herself with her purse.

Bryce had always been modest, waiting to take off her warm-up until immediately before she dove, refusing to be interviewed post-dive until she had put it back on. But ever since her body had failed her, it felt foreign to her. She understood her limbs and back and stomach as a diver’s, as an athlete’s who used every muscle for a certain purpose.
When other girls were getting curves, Bryce and Gabby were “manly” together, as Gabby had called it. Built to be slick, aerodynamic, but not really, well,
feminine
.

Now neither of them were athletes. Their muscles lay dormant, covered by curves.
Why here?
Bryce had found herself asking of her newly thickened thighs when she squeezed into Sydney’s jeans, or earlier that day, when she had spilled out of a B cup.

Bryce stepped into the red dress, looking at Gabby’s turned back with a pang of guilt.
I’ve been avoiding mirrors,
Bryce wanted to tell her, but she knew that would sound weird.

Even now, as she stood in the center of her threefold reflection, Bryce blurred her eyes until she was just a long blob of red. “Okay!” she tried to say with enthusiasm.
“Voilá.”

Gabby looked up and gasped. “Bryce,” she said, putting her hands up to her mouth. “You’re stunning.”

Bryce refocused her eyes and had to admire the shape the dress seemed to bring out. It cinched at the waist, hugging her sides, and sweeping folds of fabric came across her chest, gathering on one shoulder. Gabby always seemed to know what would look good on Bryce.

“You really are.”

She looked at Gabby. At the sight of her face filling with a trembling smile, Bryce had to smile back.

Gabby gave a quiet laugh. “You’re going to steal him back from me in that.”

Bryce’s stomach balled up at the joke. Gabby drew in a breath but said nothing more, looking at Bryce, searching for her reaction.

Bryce remembered waiting her turn at the bottom of the ladder at practice as Gabby climbed ahead, wishing with every ounce that she would nail the dive every time. And Gabby always went first in the diving order because she could tell Bryce was nervous, though Bryce never said so. Gabby knew Bryce better than anybody. Some things mattered over time, but maybe this didn’t. Maybe it shouldn’t.

“Never,” Bryce responded, shaking her head. “Never.”