Damage

Woodbury, Minnesota

Damage
© 2011 by Anya Parrish

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Flux, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

As the purchaser of this ebook, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Cover models used for illustrative purposes only and may not endorse or represent the book’s subject.

First e-book edition © 2011

E-book ISBN: 9780738730219

Cover design by Ellen Lawson

Cover image of claw scratches © iStockphoto.com/Piai

background © iStockphoto.com/Emre Yildiz

girl © PhotoAlto

Flux is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

Flux does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

Any Internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific reference will continue or be maintained. Please refer to the publisher’s website for links to current author websites.

Flux

Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

2143 Wooddale Drive

Woodbury, MN 55125

www.fluxnow.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

Acknowledgments

Many, many heartfelt thanks to the publishing team at Flux. You are what writer dreams are made of ! Thanks also to Jessica Verday and Caitlin Kittredge, two generous, talented ladies who helped make my year. Special thanks to my husband and two little boys, who are the reason and the everything and so much damned fun. More special thanks to readers of this book. I appreciate you so very much.

For the survivors

There was a time when I prayed for Rachel to be real.

During those long nights alone at the hospital, when Mom and Dad left to fight in the privacy of our own home, when all I could feel was pain and sleep lingered just out of reach—the string on a balloon bouncing against the ceiling—I wished and wished and
prayed
for Rachel to be a real girl.

I would hold very still, focusing with everything in me until I could make out her dress and the back of her shining brown hair, until I could see those mischievous blue eyes peeking at me over her shoulder. I knew she was smiling, though I never saw her face.

Her eyes told me she was smiling. They made promises I knew she would keep. They promised fun and laughter and escape from a world of sharp needles and food that tasted of rubbing alcohol and burnt marshmallows. For a year everything had tasted charred, ruined. Dad said it was a side effect of the medicine they were using to make me better. He said ice cream would taste good again once I was well.

Once I was well, they would lower my dosage and I would see how wonderful everything tasted, how wonderful everything smelled, how wonderful it would be to eat and run and play and be the healthy child I had never been.

Once I was well, I would see.

But I wasn’t well.

The fluttering near my heart—birds trapped in a cage of bone—was fading, but it seemed to be taking forever. I was eight years old. A month was forever. A year was an eternity. I had been trapped for an eternity in that bed with the scratchy sheets, in that room with the cold floor I could feel even through my slippers and the night nurse who smelled so strongly of coffee it seemed she’d bathed in it.

I wanted out. I wanted a way to forget. Rachel gave me both.

I’d followed her out of my room before, trailing her to adventure in the closed cafeteria or up to the roof where we’d danced under the stars, but that night was different. The smelly nurse was right there at her desk when Rachel slipped from my room. She’d always waited until the nurse went to refill her cup before beckoning me out into the hall. Not this time. Now, she walked straight up to the desk, grabbed the nurse’s cup, and threw it.

Hot liquid splattered over cold tile. The stale hospital air bloomed with a sharp, bitter smell. The nurse cried out and turned to clean up the mess and I nearly fainted.

That coffee cup had confirmed it. My mother was wrong. Rachel wasn’t an imaginary friend. Rachel was
real
. I watched her knock a chart from the desk in awe, more excited than I could remember.

Christmas morning had nothing on Rachel.

Come on, silly.
I heard her voice in my head, louder than before.

Her blue eyes flashed above her shoulder before she turned and ran. I followed, creeping past the still bent-over nurse and chasing after Rachel. My heart thudded dully in my ears; my lungs struggled to draw breaths deeper than I was accustomed to. I wasn’t as strong as Rachel, but I was getting stronger. The medicine was working. For the first time, I believed my father’s promise. I was going to be well. I was going to grow up to be tall and strong and put the miserable days of my childhood behind me.

And Rachel would be there with me, a real friend only I could see, a piece of magic only I could touch.

I trailed her laughter and the soft tapping of her dress shoes down one hallway and then another, past rooms that smelled of disease and pain, past the muffled sounds of a sleepless kid watching
SpongeBob SquarePants
after hours, past the beeping of machines and the buzzing of florescent lights and the endless concrete walls with their cheery murals painted by kids who were long dead.

There were ghosts on the ninth floor of Baptist Memorial, the place where kids went to die, but Rachel wasn’t one of them. I was more sure of that than ever.

Come on, we’re nearly there.
I could hear the excitement in her voice and hurried up the stairs marked
No Exit
, the ones that led to the roof and the stars. The hospital was set far back from the road, surrounded by thick pine trees that taunted the sick kids inside with their greenness. On a clear night, there were always stars.

I wondered if we were going to dance tonight? I wondered if this time I would be able to hear the music that Rachel heard? She’d said the stars could sing and someday I would hear them.

I wanted to hear them. So badly.

I hurried up the winding staircase, out of breath and tasting salt on my tongue by the time I reached the top and threw open the door. I was suddenly terribly thirsty, but I ignored the scratchiness in my mouth. Not a smart thing to do when you have diabetes, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to think about being sick. Rachel was real, the world wasn’t the same dull, hopeless place anymore. It was something more, something enchanted.

The ash gray of the roof shimmered before me in the moonlight, a road littered with diamonds, a field full of fireflies where Rachel and I could play unobserved. I saw her standing on the opposite side of the great expanse. For once, she faced me directly instead of peeking over her shoulder. Her hair hung in shining waves over her face, shadowing her features, but I knew I would be able to see her if I got closer.

I couldn’t wait to see her. I wanted to watch her smile, I wanted to laugh and throw my slender arms around her neck and spin. I’d never had a best friend before. I wanted to thank Rachel for coming to me, for choosing me out of all the sick little girls in the world.

I ran, jumping over rough patches in the roof, light and full of joy. I knew the end was coming. Soon I would be out of the hospital forever, soon I would be free of tests and medicines and pains in the night.

Maybe sooner than you think.
She lifted her face.

The moonlight was a hand catching her under the chin, holding her in place, forcing me to look long and hard and see her for what she really was.

“Rachel,” I gasped, a part of me thinking that speaking her name would fix things.

It didn’t.

Rachel was broken. Where her mouth should have been there was only a thin, red line, a wound that gaped and bled when she smiled. Rachel wasn’t real, after all. And she wasn’t my friend.

By the time I saw the broken place in the wall surrounding the roof, the one Rachel had been blocking with her slim body, I was flying through it. I twisted in the air, breath catching and holding as I watched myself as if from a distance. I could see the terror on my own face, watch my arms and legs churn through the air against a background of utter blackness.

There were no stars. They were hidden behind the clouds, unwilling to be witnesses to my murder.