Out of Nowhere (3 page)

“We’re right next to your fridge and you’re eating Riley’s lunch?” Eva said, opening a container of orange slices.

“All that’s left in there is yuppie shit like hummus and non-fat yogurt. I need real food.”

“I love hummus!” Eva exclaimed. She finished up her veggie wrap and twisted open a bottle of water. No wonder she was so tiny. She didn’t eat meat or dairy or anything fried. “And it is real food. What are the health benefits of chickpeas, Riley?”

“They have zinc and protein and are high in fiber,” I said, licking the salt off my pretzel. “Low in fat too. Helps reduce cholesterol.”

She raised her eyebrows at Lucas, who shrugged. “Every time I disagree with you about food, you sic Dr. Tate on me,” he said.

“Tell me about it,” Sydney said, slurping her fresh mug of coffee, which was all she ever had for lunch.

“Stop calling me that,” I snapped. “I’m not a doctor yet. You’ll jinx me.”

After we ate, we still had twenty minutes until we needed to go back to school. Eva and Sydney stayed in the kitchen, arguing back and forth about regular meals and metabolism, while Lucas powered up his laptop at the kitchen table. I threw my pretzel bag in the garbage and did what I usually did at Lucas’s house in the afternoons—I wandered into his parents’ study.

The study was a small, windowless room, just big enough to accommodate a desk and one pitiful, sun-deprived plant. A set of shelves, jam-packed with books and medical journals, lined one wall. On the desk sat a computer and several framed pictures of Lucas and his older sister, Bethany, who was away at college. One picture showed Lucas at about eight years old, in a dark blue soccer jersey, one foot resting on a soccer ball and a big goofy smile on his face.

I perused the bookshelf, looking for something new. Lucas’s mother taught human physiology and sometimes brought home articles and research. Ground-breaking stuff. When she did, I pounced on it.

“Riley.”

I whirled around. Lucas stood in the doorway, watching me. “I’m just looking,” I said, feeling almost ashamed.

“It’s okay. I found something yesterday that I wanted to show you.” He moved to the desk and rifled through a pile of papers. When he found what he was looking for, he handed it over to me. I read the title on the cover page.

Risk Factors for Subarachnoid Hemorrhage: A Systematic Review.

“Wow,” I said, already browsing the abstract. “Thanks. I haven’t read this one.”

“You give me sandwiches, I give you neurological studies.”

“Fair trade. Can I…?”

He waved his hand at me. “Take it. My mother won’t notice. Give it back to me next week.”

“Thanks,” I said again, and Lucas smiled. He’d sprouted up a few feet since that soccer picture, and his hair was darker, but he still had the same big goofy smile.

I glanced at the clock on the desk. Fifteen minutes until we had to leave. Lucas went back to his laptop, and I sat down at the desk and started to read.

Most of the stuff I already knew, like the causes and prevention and fatality rate. Facts I’d read a million times online. Clinical accounts. Impersonal. No textbook or website or medical journal ever tells you how you’re supposed to feel when it’s your father’s brain that starts bleeding, or how to deal with being eleven years old and finding him lying on the ugly linoleum floor in front of the microwave where he’d been warming his dinner, likely dead before his plate of lasagna stopped revolving. No one ever tells you how to cope when it’s your parent who was one of the unlucky ten percent who die before reaching the hospital.

Still, I devoured every word, feeding pieces of information into my brain until they arranged themselves into an order that made sense.

Chapter Three

When I woke up on Saturday morning, I knew something was wrong before I even opened my eyes. My skin tingled, like a row of ants was marching up my spine. My sheets were twisted around my legs. I felt sweaty and strange. Something was
wrong
.

Then the itching started. I sat up in bed and peered at my arms, which sported several red patches in various shapes and sizes. The rashy spot on my wrist had disappeared, but not before calling in some replacements.

“Mom?” I called before realizing I was alone in the house. It was ten-thirty already. My mother had left for work hours ago, and Tristan was spending the day with our grandparents. Even the cats had deserted me.

I trudged into the bathroom, where I took off my shirt and pajama pants and stood in front of the mirror. My chest looked as bad as my arms, but the skin from my thighs down was clear. At least it wasn’t on my face. Yet.

Still in my underwear, I went to the kitchen and called the number for my mom’s store. “Mom,” I said when she came on the line. “I’m allergic to the antibiotic. I have to go to the ER.”

“Allergic how?” she asked, suspicious. This wasn’t the first time I’d called her at work with a medical emergency.

“I have hives all over my body. They itch.”

Mom sighed. “Take some Benalyn, Riley. You’ll be fine.”

“Benadryl,” I corrected. “And we don’t have any.”

“Then put some Calamine lotion on them.”

I snorted. “Yeah, Calamine lotion will be a big help when I go into anaphylactic shock.”

“Come on, babe. You’re not going to go into ana…whatever…shock.” She sighed again, louder this time. “I have to get back to work. Call me when you get back from the ER.”

I hung up and got down to business. A visit to the ER took a lot of preparation. The wait might be anywhere from one hour to eight hours, depending on how many doctors were on call and if some kind of dire emergency took place like a ten-car pile-up or a sudden wave of heart attack victims. Such unpredictability required a battery of supplies—book, cell phone, change for the vending machines, granola bars, and anti-bacterial hand gel for those times when a Cougher decides to sit right next to you and hack germs in your direction.

After my shower I actually did dot myself with Calamine lotion, making me look like I’d been attacked by a swarm of angry bees while standing in a patch of poison ivy. But it helped quell the itch enough for me to eat a whole bagel without stopping to scratch. Finally ready, I slung my backpack over my shoulders and walked to the bus stop.

By the time I arrived at the hospital, it was almost one o’clock and my throat felt a little tight. Maybe I
was
about to go into anaphylactic shock. Oh well, I was in the right place for it.

Ten or so people sat in the waiting room, all wearing the same
Am I ever going to get out of here?
expression. I pulled a number—37—and took a seat near the middle of the room. Three seats to my left, a large woman with dark moles on her face turned to stare at me. I guess I did look pretty weird, stroking my pink polka-dotted arm like I was washing with an invisible bar of soap. I gave her a tiny smile and she went back to her Danielle Steele novel.

My number was called a few minutes later and I made my way into triage. The nurse there recorded my basic information and vitals. Then, while examining me, she assured me that my throat was not about to close over and asphyxiate me.

“I’ve seen worse,” she said, squinting at a particularly rashy spot on my stomach. She dropped my shirt and smiled. “You can go have a seat again.”

Back of the line, I thought on my way back to the waiting room. I wasn’t dying or even going into shock, so that meant people with more pressing issues would get seen before me. Which meant I’d better get comfy because I’d be here for a while. I plopped into a vacant seat in front of the window and reached into my bag, digging out a book.

Soon I was engrossed in my novel, a true crime story Mom had left lying around. I’d just finished reading the author’s account of the murder victim’s autopsy—something I found oddly fascinating—when something distracted me. A soft gasping sound. I glanced up to discover a boy around my age sitting directly across from me, covered head-to-toe in dirt, scratches, and blood.

Jesus
, I thought. I’d been to the ER many times, and I’d seen many a banged-up person, but this guy looked like he’d been mauled by a pissed-off bear. As I gawked at him, he shifted in the chair and gasped again. I noticed then that he was cradling one arm with the other. Broken, maybe? The arm in question was scraped raw from elbow to wrist and smeared with drying blood. I started to feel a little light-headed. It was one thing to read about wounds and gore, but quite another to see them right in front of you.

Damn. How was I supposed to become a doctor someday if the sight of blood made me woozy?

I tried to go back to reading, but the guy kept squirming and wincing and panting, clearly in a lot of pain. Surely he’d get in to see a doctor before me. My eyes slid from my book to his injured arm again. My own arms looked like a mild case of sunburn next to his mess.

“Skateboard,” a voice said. The battered guy’s voice.

Startled, I swung my gaze from his arm to his face. He was looking at me, a slight smile on his lips. Obviously, he’d caught me peeking at him. “Pardon?” I said, playing dumb.

“Skateboard,” he repeated. “Lost my balance during a boardslide and hit the pavement.”

I didn’t know what to say to this besides, “Ouch.” Then for some reason I pushed up my sleeve and showed him my hives. “Allergic reaction,” I said, as if we were exchanging names.

“Brutal.”

I nodded and opened my book again, assuming that was it. I wasn’t one to make small talk in waiting rooms, especially with sweaty, dirty, wild-looking boys like him. I’d seen his type around school, guys with longish hair who smoked and drove too fast and got hammered on weekends. The kind of boy Sydney liked. Dangerous. My ex-boyfriend, Adam, was a clean-cut honor student who cared about environmental issues and wore freshly-ironed shirts to school. Then again, I knew a different version of him, a much less respectable one.

To hell with first impressions. I cleared my throat to get the guy’s attention, and he glanced up at me. His eyes were brown like mine but lighter, milk chocolate rather than dark. I jerked my chin toward his bad arm. “Does it hurt?”

He lifted it a little, then hissed through his teeth. “It’s not as bad as the time I broke my elbow. Just another sprain, I think. I wasn’t even going to come here but my friend insisted.”

“And where’s your friend now?”

“Still in the bowl at Crawford Park, probably. I didn’t need him to hold my hand.”

I believed that. While he was talking he’d adjusted his good arm and I’d noticed a long, pink scar on the underside of his forearm. He was either a daredevil or extremely clumsy. Or both. With that scar, and the way he talked about his injuries like they were routine occurrences, he was likely an ER regular too.

“James Larson!” a nurse called from the front of the room. A short man with crutches got up and followed her through the double doors.

“This hurts the most,” the guy across from me said, lightly touching his scraped skin. The blood surrounding the abrasion had coagulated, but it still vaguely resembled raw hamburger. I felt woozy again, looking at it.

“Don’t touch it,” I said firmly in what my friends called my Dr. Tate voice. “Bacteria.”

“That pavement was dirtier than my hands,” he pointed out. “Look at the dirt and rocks in there.”

My stomach lurched. Some doctor I’d make. “Still…the doctor needs to clean it with an antiseptic solution and then bandage it with sterile gauze to prevent infection.”

He studied me with this wary expression, like he was wondering which mental institution I’d escaped from. “You look a little young to be a nurse.”

“I’m not. I just…I like medical stuff.”

“And serial killers.”

“What?” I said, bewildered. He gestured to my true crime book. “Oh. Yeah. It’s my mother’s. There was nothing else to read.”

Two more names were called. I peered at my watch; almost three. I wanted my granola bar, but I wasn’t about to eat in front of this boy. For one, his injuries weren’t exactly appetizing, and for another, it would be kind of awkward. I batted around the idea of going to the washroom and then sitting in another seat when I returned. Nah, too obvious. Besides, talking to him was distracting me from my itching.

“Do you, um, live around here?” I asked, hoping he hadn’t heard my stomach growling.

“Rocky Lake. But I come to Weldon a lot on weekends, for the skatepark.”

I’d noticed the skatepark before, of course, but the idea of hurtling along hard surfaces on a small board always seemed sort of pointless to me, not to mention reckless. I didn’t even like bike-riding, especially with drivers like Eva on the roads.

“I’ve lived here forever,” I said. “I think I’d go crazy in a rural place like Rocky Lake.”

“It’s not so bad. You need a car to get anywhere though.”

“I don’t drive.”

“No?” He repositioned his arm again and his face turned pale. Maybe
he
was about to go into shock.

“I
can
drive. I mean, I have my learner’s permit, but a lot of people don’t use cars in the city. It’s easier to walk or take the bus. Traffic, you know.” I figured if I kept talking I’d distract him from keeling over and bleeding out at my feet. Why in the hell hadn’t they called his name yet?

“I’d die without my car,” he said, his voice suddenly strained. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead, mixing with the dried sweat from before.

“You okay?” I asked, hovering at the edge of my seat. Another thing I didn’t handle well was puke, and I didn’t want to be anywhere near him if he was about to toss his cookies.

“Yeah.” He breathed deep through his nose. “I’m okay. Just got a little dizzy there for a second. I haven’t had anything to eat or drink since this morning.”

Of course! I should have known. He had all the symptoms…pale, sweaty, dizzy, shaky. “Hypoglycemia,” I explained. What a relief. This was something I could help fix. “Your blood sugar dropped, that’s all.”

“My what, now?”

I extracted a granola bar from my bag and held it out to him. “Here. Eat this. You’ll feel better.”