Sun Poisoned (The Sunshine Series) (39 page)

“
Okay, now what?” Jade asks.

Myles sits down on the bed next to me, careful not to move me too much.
“The fastest way to bring down the fever is to give her a cool bath,” he answers.  Then, to me, “Do you want Jade or me to do it?”

“
I’ll do it,” Jade says before I can even formulate a way to make my speech work.

I nod. At this point, I don’t care who does what. One of them can start tap dancing while the other pulls rabbits out of a hat as long as it’ll make everything stop.

So Jade lifts me up and I grab around his neck with my hands, trying to ignore the way some of my wounds crack and bleed when I do.

Myles leads the short way down the hall to the bathroom, but stays outside when Jade and I go in.

“Wait,” Jade says, as if Myles was about to shut the door.

Hell if I know, my eyes have been closed since this whole process began.

“What do I do if, you know. . .” he says quietly. “It happens again?”

“
She’ll be ok.” Myles pauses. “Just keep her in the water for about twenty minutes.” His tone is almost professional, but it wavers.

Soon after, the door closes and I’m alone in the bathroom with my brother.

“Okay,” he says to himself as he sits me down on the closed toilet seat. I brace myself with my hands and try to keep my eyes open and not fall over. Jade turns on the water in the tub before coming back to me and helping me take off my shirt, careful not to touch the skin on my stomach, because there’s a trail of bright red trickling downward. Now I’m just wearing a bra and pajama bottoms.

“
You remember last time you got sun poisoning…you know, when you were little?” Jade asks me, brushing my hair to the side, and then seeming overly concerned with folding the shirt and placing it on the edge of the sink.

I shake my head
.

“
You were I guess, about twelve?” he asks himself. “Yeah. twelve.” He takes a towel that’s folded somewhere else around the sink and begins to unfold it.

“
It was in May, and there was some pool party going on. A girl in your class invited you.” He smiles a little, wrapping the towel around me, but motioning for me to lift up my arms so I can cover myself up. “Mom and Adam went on vacation somewhere, and they left me in charge of you and Laura.” Again, a small smile appears on his face and then fades as soon as he looks back at me.

“
I don’t know how it happened. I can’t remember. What I do remember is running around like crazy trying to find out where the kid lived so I could scoop you out of the pool.”

I snort a little. As much as my body will allow.

“You were determined to go.”

Next, Jade starts going for my sweatpants, and without even thinking I lift up my butt to help him.

I don’t know how I forget about the scars.

You have a monster live inside of you and
 follow you around for most of your life. You hide it so well that mostly everyone you come in contact with never gets a glimpse. So how do you explain it to yourself when you slip up and someone suddenly sees? How are you supposed to even begin to explain what you’ve done?

“
What is this?” Jade asks. I can’t say I wasn’t expecting that question. “Did you do this?”

Another question I was ready for. He knows these marks are somehow different from the ones all over my body right now.

I nod. The water splashes in the bath.

“
I knew it.” This is something I was
not
prepared for. It comes out so soft, so ghost-like, that I’m not even sure he’s said it.

“
What?” I whisper back.

Jade leaves my pajama bottoms around my ankles and grabs a hold of my hand.
“I just…knew. I knew that there was something wrong. I was just too afraid to ask.” His eyes are welling and if the tears start falling, I may just lose it.

“
I don’t do it anymore, Jade,” leaves my mouth because it has to. I can’t stay silent while my brother blames himself for something out of his control.

Jade sniffs one last time, then continues to take off my pants.

“No more secrets,” he says, folding those now. “Okay?”

“
Okay.”

T
hat’s it.

No yelling, no crying. But there’s also no indifference, like there was when Mom found out. There’s worry and anxiety but it’s hidden well on Jade’s concentrated face.

Adjusting the towel around myself one last time, Jade wraps his arms around me and we’re moving toward the shower. Without any more talking, The towel’s taken away and he lowers me into the water in just my underwear. It’s freezing cold and I begin shaking. Jade closes the shower curtain a little, giving me some privacy while still being able to see his face when he sits down on the closed toilet seat. I lean my head back on the hard fiberglass, because the faint throbbing in my skull is better than the ache in my neck from trying to hold it up.

“
I was so scared,” Jade says softly. “When the marks started forming on your skin, when those marks became blisters and then you started throwing up and got a really high fever.”

The water seeps into my wounds. I can feel it in my back, arms, and legs. Particularly my shin, where there’s a gaping red hole that I have to tear my gaze away from.

I close my eyes, trying to concentrate more on his words than my shivering and pain.

“
And Mom and Adam were on some island somewhere, so I couldn’t get in touch with them until later that night, and they only told me that nothing really could be done except to wait,” Jade continues. “But then I remembered from one time, that they made you take a cold bath. Do you remember that?” he asks.

I shrug.

“I made it cool, but not freezing. It felt just like pool water to me, but it made you shake and shiver like there were ice cubes in it.”

I smile a little
; that’s exactly what it feels like now.

“
And then, after a few hours, the fever went down. Eventually, it disappeared.”

“
How old were you?” I ask, my voice scratchy.

“
Seventeen. I was seventeen years old.”

Even then he was taking care of me.

It’s quiet for the longest time.

“
I called you the day Stevie died because he opened his eyes,” Jade says, almost piercing the silence with the sentence, even though his voice isn’t above more than a whisper. “He opened his eyes for a minute, looked at me, and then he closed them.” He takes in a sharp breath.  

“
I want you to know,” he says, tears forming and this time, he doesn’t bother wiping them away. “I never wanted to send you away. I just…didn’t know how to deal with it.” He looks up to the ceiling like he’s looking for more words. “I still don’t know how to deal with it. Or
this
.”

“
I’m sorry, Jade.” I have to close my eyes tight to keep my own tears from forming, and that only works for a fraction of a second. “I’m sorry about everything.”

I can’t imagine what he’s going through right now. Losing Stevie and
now . . . Now his sister is dying too.

“
There’s nothing to be sorry about.” When I open my eyes to look at him, he’s balancing on the edge of the tub.

“
I’m your big brother. I’m supposed to look out for you.” He’s talking about the sun-poisoning incident again, and he’s wiped the tears away.

“
You do.”

“
Not well enough.”

Then there’s a knock at the door and Myles’ voice comes through,
“You can get out now.”

Jade nods before swooping his arms into the slightly pink water, not caring that he’s getting soaked
, to help me get out of the bathtub. He helps me sit on the toilet again,  wrapping the same towel around me as he hands me clean underwear that I throw on quickly when he turns away. He threads my arms through a tank top, then helps me stand so I can put on a new pair of baggy sweatpants.

When I’m sitting down again, Jade helps me dry my hair the best that he can. The towel then lingers at my arms, where there’s fresh blood mixing with the water from my body, causing it to run down in small separate streams from each bite mark, only joining together again at other wounds. He tries wiping it away, but it’s no use. Only more appears.

“Does it hurt?” Jade asks.

I shake my head.
“Not right now.”

His eyes linger for another moment or two on my arms before letting them go. There’s another knock on the door, and Myles is asking if he can come in.

I nod at Jade, who goes to get the door. Myles walks inside with the supplies I’ve become accustomed to seeing lately: disinfectant, rubber gloves, Band-Aids, gauze.

Without saying anything to each other, Myles sets to work with bandaging up the marks that will only need new bandages in a few hours.

I say: “I’m tired.”

And Myles says:
“I know.”

Jade says:
“We’re wasting time.”

And I think we all agree.

Jade lays me back down on the bed, covering me with a clean white sheet. I’m partly awake because I’m cold, clammy, and uncomfortable.

“
Now what?” he asks Myles once my head touches the pillow.

“
We have to wait.” Myles’ voice is close, like he’s watching me, but my eyes are closed.

“
Wait?” Jade sounds uneasy. “Wait for what?”

“
I told you,” Myles says calmly. “If we try anything before the fever goes down, we’ll cause more damage. She could go into shock or die.”

There’s a pause. A really long, really tense pause.

“I need some air,” Jade finally says. I hear the bedroom door open and then close.

Myles takes in a deep breath then lets it out slowly. I open my eyes a crack to peek at him, and he’s looking right at me.

“Sorry I can’t give you another blanket,” he says softly, adjusting the sheet around me.

“
You were right,” I say through a shiver, waiting for it to pass before I continue. “He’s scared.”

Cautiously, Myles sits near my legs, facing me.
“I didn’t do this to make things better between us. I want you to know that.”

“
I know that. You did it so I would stop wasting time.”

He smiles to himself, but there isn’t any happiness behind it.
“I thought about what I would want if I were in the same situation,” he says. “I wanted to do the right thing.”

I swallow.
“Does it make me a terrible person if I don’t care that Jade’s scared?” I whisper. “That I only care that he’s here with me?”

Myles takes my hand in his.
“No. I think it makes
you
scared.”

I close my eyes again, nodding.

His hand is on my face, in my damp hair. “Just rest, Sophie. It’s going to be okay.”

This time when he says it, I almost believe him.

Get Well Soon

Chapter 18

“I'm hovering throughout time, I crumble in these days.”—AFI

It can’t be more than a few hours when I’m being woken up again. This time, it’s not pain jolting me out of sleep. It’s Myles.

His hand is in mine, the same as it was when I fell asleep, and he’s wearing the same clothes. This, along with the fading light in the window confirms the idea that a new day hasn’t begun since I last closed my eyes.

I want to ask why he woke me up, but Jade does all the work for me.

“
What are we doing?” he says to Myles.

Myles doesn’t take his eyes away from me.
“Remember last time?” he asks. “Last time Michael’s blood was in your body?”

I squeeze my eyes shut. Oh God no. I don’t know why I’m surprised. We had to go through the list of options eventually. Between Myles biting me and becoming infected, turning into a vampire, and this, I guess this is the least traumatic choice.

I nod when I open my eyes again.

“
What?” Jade asks, coming closer and standing on the other side of the bed.

Myles stands now, turning toward Jade.
“If I told you, you wouldn’t like hearing what I have to do.”

Jade glances at me.

“You don’t have to stay,” I tell him.

“
I’m not leaving.”

“
Okay,” Myles says. “But you can’t interrupt. Do you understand?”

Now Jade looks like he’s not sure. He’s going to freak out if it’s anything like the last time. I know it.
 ”Yeah,” he says anyway.

“
You’ll hurt her more if you do,” Myles adds.