Flutter (3 page)

“Emery!” I heard the familiar squeal as soon as I stepped off the elevator.

“Gia!” I leaned in a bit and tried as always not to seem awkward when Gia gave me her requisite hug. Gia is a hugger, unlike the Land family. But she is my best friend—my only friend, really.

“I didn’t know you were coming! Does Dad know you’re here? How’s school? How’s Xander’s class—”

“Emery!” She gave me another hug and pushed me out at arm’s length. “You look like hell.”

“Thanks,” I mumbled. “You look great too.”

She moved us toward the cafeteria line and hooked her arm through mine. I was instantly lighter in her presence.

“Gia,” I told her, “I’m so glad you showed up. I needed a visit.”

“That’s what your dad said,” she replied, popping an apple slice in her mouth from the salad bar. She was wearing her dark hair flatironed, stick straight. And she had the same old sequined cat’s-eye glasses. She wore dark, skinny jeans and lots of silver bracelets.

I pulled my robe tighter as we grabbed our breakfasts.
I’m dressing like one of them
, I thought, wincing.

“My dad called you?” I asked. This was new … curious.

“Texted me, actually,” Gia said, lifting her eyebrows. “Can you believe it? Dr. Land and the twenty-first century.”

“Next he’ll be getting hair plugs and a spray tan,” I joked. We laughed and made our way over to a table near the kitchen door, and I sat down, trying to smooth my flyaway hair into some kind of shape, knowing it was useless.

“So, give me the details. What’s new at school?”

“Emery, I think I’m in love.”

“Not again,” I answered, not even looking up from putting ketchup on my eggs.

“He’s gorgeous and emo but not too emo, no guyliner or anything. Turtlenecks but no wallet chains. You know what I mean.”

I nodded, smiling, glad to have the distraction. “Just no guys with hair dye, okay? All goth and moody, writing bad poetry.”

Gia was already on to the next topic. “Mr. Phelps, the health teacher? Well, he’s been canned because of the whole blogging thing. I’m sure you heard about that?”

I shook my head and buttered my toast, listening to Gia recount all the news. It was so good to have something close to normal to talk about. But I also felt that familiar snaky coil of envy in my stomach.

I wanted Gia to have all this fun. I wanted this for her, but I wanted it too.

“What’s up with Julliard?” I asked her.

“I got the audition, Emery!” Her eyes danced, and I reached across the table.

“You do? When? I knew you would. I’m so happy for you!”

“January. The week after Christmas break.”

“You rock, Gia! That is awesome, really.” I could feel my eyes tearing up. I couldn’t help it.

“Emery?”

“I’m sorry, Gia. I’m sorry. I’m happy for you. I am. It’s just …”

“I know. How are you? We need to talk about it.”

“It’s okay.”

“Emery, you don’t look good.”

“I know.”

“And I know everything is top secret, double-oh-seven and all, but I’m here and your dad called me, and I can see that—”

“They don’t believe me.”

“The team? I know.”

“I’ve been thinking of quitting it all. Leaving,” I told her, not looking up from tearing the crust off my toast.

“I’ve heard that before.”

“It feels different this time.”

“How?” Gia grabbed my hand over the table and squeezed it until I looked at her.

“I’ll be eighteen soon. I can go be somewhere else.…” And at the last instant, I added, “Or some time else.”

“You can’t control it,” she whispered.

“Not yet.”

“But you think you might?”

“It feels more physical lately.”

“Yeah, it looks more physical, Emery. You look—”

“Gia, I know it’s killing me.”

“Emery, please! Ha!” Her attempt at a laugh sounded more like an accusation. She looked at my eyes for an instant but then looked away.

We sat in silence for a long moment.

“Emery, I wish—” Gia started.

“I don’t think I want to die in a hospital bed having lived only for my scientific observers, data recorders, and data interpreters. Maybe I don’t have too much time left. Maybe I just want to go … to be … normal. I mean, what did I used to do before Dad stuck me here? Before the meaning behind the loops became my whole reason for existence?”

“You worried about pimples and boys and did homework, Emery. It’s not that great.”

“But it’s normal.”

“You don’t want normal.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t want to be a lab rat anymore.”

“What
do
you want?”

I looked at Gia, attempted to lift my mouth in a smile. “To live. Really live.”

“Emery, you—”

“I want choices.”

Gia nodded.

“How did I get here?” I said, gesturing to my bathrobe and the bright white, too-clean hospital surfaces around us.

“That first crazy EEG when you were, what, twelve?” Gia said.

“That started it, I guess.”

“I remember,” Gia said, and began humming while she took a bite of her breakfast burrito.

And then I nearly choked on my eggs. There on the inside of her left wrist, Gia had a tattoo. Just a plain blue-and-black cluster of different-sized stars. Six or eight of them, a few dark blue, the rest a black outline with sky blue in the middle.

A tattoo.

How many times had we talked about doing that together? How many designs had we drawn out together?

I put my fork down for a moment and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands, not wanting Gia to see that I had noticed.

I didn’t know if I even wanted a damn tattoo anymore. They were kind of stupid, really. But who had Gia gone with? When did she go? Where? That place on Margaret Drive? Did it hurt?

I cleared my throat and went back to eating, tried not to make eye contact until I could calm down, not wanting to have to endure a conversation about this mini-betrayal that I felt inside. I knew to Gia it would be no big deal.

She lived in the regular world.

I tried to ignore the way my nose stung with tears that wanted so badly to break through. I rubbed the heels of my hands in my eyes again and focused on my plate of eggs.

Gia was still humming. That song from an earlier loop. The one that I had come to think of as
my
song.

Gia stopped humming and said, “I actually put that song down on some sheet music so I could play it for you on my guitar.”

“Yeah?” I whispered, not trusting my voice, glancing up but trying not to look at her tattoo.

“Does it have any words?” she asked.

“All I can remember is the last line. You know, ‘You’re my home. You’re my ho-ome.’ ”

Gia grabbed my hand again. “They’re going to fix you, Emery. The doctors will find the answers, I think—”

“I’ve got my answers, Gia. I know what’s going on. I just can’t control it, or keep it from killing me—or making me a vegetable. But I know what it is. These past few years may not have proved it to anyone else, but I know what my loops are.”

“What do you think needs to happen for them to believe you?”

“Maybe if I can demonstrate the wormhole,” I said solemnly. “Or bring back a DeLorean.”

“Or Marty McFly,” Gia said, giggling.

For some reason, my mind flashed back to Ryan McClannis. I thought about his nervous gaze when he had asked me to the frosh-soph homecoming dance, how I had had to say no because it was being held on a yacht on Lake Michigan, with all the kids getting to stay overnight with chaperones on the boat. But I couldn’t, of course. Because nights were off-limits. Nights meant sleep, which meant possible loops, which meant doctors, hospitals, and the little liquidy gel-probes stuck to my forehead.

I remembered that I had tugged at the cuffs of my long sleeves while I was talking to Ryan, rejecting him, trying so hard not to hurt his feelings because he was so nice and his left eye had this little nervous twitch, and I just couldn’t bear for him to think it was because of him. Tugging at my sleeves had been my habit, to cover the IV marks on my arms.

I was fifteen then.

Gia took the last bite of her breakfast burrito, gave me a smile. Thank God for Gia. She believed because she couldn’t
not
believe and still look me in the eye, she said.

It was so human and real in the land of the statistic, in the land of the report, the medical journal, the unyielding, all-powerful
beep, beep, beep
of the monitors and their untruth.

Gia checked her cell phone. I tried to hide my disappointment
that she would be leaving so soon. But what did I expect? She had a life.

“It’s eight-forty,” she said, taking one last swig of her orange juice. “I gotta motor.”

I looked at the clock on the cafeteria wall, behind Gia’s head. “I think your cell is messed up. It’s nine-ten.”

Gia craned her neck around. “Heavens to Betsy! I’m late.”

She got up with her tray, but I stayed at the table, kind of in shock.

Gia came back and gave me a quick hug. “Why did you say that?” I asked.

“What?”

“Heavens to Betsy.” I was used to my boy saying things like that—“Heavens to Betsy” or “For the love of Pete.” He had all kinds of old-fashioned sayings. But Gia? I was used to “OMG.” “It’s weird that you would say that.”

“You’re pale.”

“I’m always pale. Why did you say that, though? You don’t usually say that.”

“I don’t know.”

I got up and emptied my tray, shaking my head. I walked with Gia to the door. “That’s weird,” I said.

“Okay, but not
that
weird. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Gia squeezed my hand then and looked at her cell phone again. “I’ll call later.”

“Okay,” I answered.

I stood there, in the sky-blue hallway, tying and untying
my bathrobe, thinking of my boy, remembering his plea for help. And all of a sudden I didn’t care about the damn tattoo, or school, or being normal. I knew that something important was going on. My boy. I wished more than ever that I could control this damn looping, so I could go there right now and figure out what he needed from me.

It scared me to think he was in some kind of danger.

That morning, after my breakfast with Gia, I came back to my room and found two Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups on my pillow. I smiled and shoved these in my backpack, along with my laptop. I called down to the nurses’ station, to let them know I was leaving. I needed a break. I changed into some jeans and a T-shirt, pulled my hair into a ponytail. Then Dad showed up. Unscheduled. Looking all kinds of worried, running his hand through his hair.

He didn’t say anything at first, just sort of stood in the doorway. “Did I forget about some test or consultation?” I asked, shoving my feet into my boots.

“No,” he said, but he sounded weird. Worried.

Something hit me then. Was there a breach? “I’m not
going public?” I whispered, seeing flashes of government agencies, E.T.-type secrecy, and me living in a bubble.

“No, nothing like that,” Dad said, rubbing his temple in his uncertain way. “You shouldn’t leave.”

I got it then. Was he going to stop me from leaving? I actually laughed. “Dad!”

But it didn’t feel funny. It was a breach after all, of our trust, or what was left of it, what hung so loosely between us, the last threads of what used to be so impenetrable.

“Dad, you …” I didn’t finish.

“You don’t know what the episodes are doing to you, Emery. I see the data.”

“I live the data, Dad. I do know.”

“We don’t have time.” Dad shook his head then. He had said too much, although he wasn’t surprising me. He wasn’t shocking me. I knew it all on some level.

This infuriated me. This whole situation was nuts. I needed out. A break.

Dad stood there for a while, scarlet burning on his high cheekbones. I caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye as I found my favorite gray sweatshirt. I grabbed my iPod, my notebook. Dad looked the same, tall and reed-thin, but different too. He looked beaten a bit, shell-shocked.

The difference between him and me was that he hadn’t accepted that the loops were probably going to kill me before we figured this out.

I had accepted this long ago. Once you are no longer
afraid, once you are no longer prisoner to the what-ifs and the if-onlys, there’s a pocket of calm in the middle of the craziness. As if you can see things as they really are instead of just how you wish them to be, or how they could be, if this place—this life—wasn’t so messed up, so contrary.

I needed to leave, and so that was what I did. I left. My shoulder brushed Dad’s arm as I went past him, and I think I might have seen a bit of remorse there in his expression, a certain line to his lip. I wanted to believe that I was still his daughter more than his scientific conquest. I wiped a few tears away before they had a chance to fall, thinking of my future-dad in the loop, yearning for him to hurry up and learn his life lessons and turn into that man—the man who knew compassion, who knew empathy, who knew how to be more than clinical.

I asked the taxi to wait as I went up to the apartment and grabbed my pink gym bag, my shoes. Then I gave the driver the address of the studio. It was early in the afternoon, and I knew it wouldn’t be busy until later, after school got out and little girls in tutus came twirling in for their lessons.

I sighed as we pulled up to the studio. Had it been so long since I had spent my days at an actual high school, my evenings teaching at the studio? It seemed like a lifetime.

Lucinda was out, so I had to use my key to let myself in. I changed quickly in the dressing room into a leotard and tights. I kept the studio lights low, and I sat on the hard oak
floors and laced up my toe shoes, humming softly under my breath—Beethoven’s Fifth.

Mom had taught me ballet, before she had gotten sick, before she died. I could remember the black see-through skirt she would wear over her leotard. I remembered running my fingers over it as a young girl, looking up at my mom, who could move so beautifully to the music.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirrored wall. An actual gasp escaped my lips. I looked like a ghost, like a shell of myself. I stood up straight and tall, and I put my feet in first position, arms at second.
I can almost see through myself
, I thought, and then rolled my eyes at the ridiculous idea.