Then I felt him pull away. His footsteps retreated quietly across my room. A crack of painful hallway light infiltrated my dark cave, and then he was gone.
* * *
The next seven days went by very slowly. The Beaumont dean helped Mom rent a discounted hotel room at the college conference center. “I’m not going home until I know you don’t need help,” she said.
Unfortunately, I really did need help. And I hated that.
The all-over headaches began to ease up, becoming intermittent instead of constant. But I still got an odd pain across my brow line, as if someone had pulled a cord that cinched my face too tightly. It came on whenever I focused my eyes on a book for longer than ten minutes.
So Mom did most of the reading. We sat in my room — me on the bed, and her in the desk chair — and she read chapter after chapter to me of developmental psychology and Roman history. She also attended my classes, taking notes for me.
Until you’ve dragged your mom to three lectures a day, you haven’t lived.
By dinnertime, we were always exhausted and rather tired of each other. But we ate together anyway, sometimes putting in a little more reading time after dinner. And then she’d retreat to her hotel room, and I’d lie on my bed doing nothing. I couldn’t even surf the web, because staring at the screen made my head hurt. So I listened to playlist after playlist, tossing a tennis ball over my head and catching it again.
Meanwhile, my hockey team was busy trying to set new records for post-season victories. They beat Providence in the semis, advancing to the conference championship. Rikker had long practices every night. A few times he stopped by afterwards, but I was pretty much useless by nine o’clock. And usually grumpy. Which made him sort of grumpy too.
It sucked. All of it.
Coach called me to ask me if I wanted to ride the bus to Colgate with the team. “This is your game too, kid. I’d make room for you at the hotel.”
“Wow, Coach,” I said, feeling a little choked up. “That is such a nice offer.” I searched for a reason to say no, though. “I have a doctor’s appointment on Friday, and my mom is real eager to see what they say. And she’s been so much help to me that I’d feel bad about blowing it off.”
“Let me know how that goes, okay? Shoot me an email.”
“I’ll be watching the game on TV, Coach. Can’t wait.”
“Hang in there, kid.”
Could I have gone to that game? Probably. But I just wasn’t ready. It was partly that I still felt like shit all the time. The glare and noise of a jam-packed hockey stadium wouldn’t have been easy on me. But that wasn’t the whole problem. For the first time ever, I was reluctant to face my teammates. If I walked into the room, they’d look at me and remember that the last time they saw me I was screaming Rikker’s name.
A smarter man would talk this over with Rikker, and ask if there had been any further discussion about me. Rikker would probably remind me that that paranoia is one of the many symptoms of concussion. He’d say that I was being ridiculous. That these were my friends. And by the way — who fucking cares what they think?
Well, I did, unfortunately. And I was always going to care. When I walked out of the room, I didn’t want them whispering about me. I didn’t want anyone to look at me and thinksick.
Paranoia was a symptom of being Michael Graham.
* * *
The Thursday before Rikker’s big game, my mom decided to take the train to Manhattan to have lunch with my sister. “She can only take an hour and a half for lunch,” my mom said, rolling her eyes. “But she promised not to check her messages every two minutes during the meal.”
We’d just come back from statistics class, and I dumped my backpack on the dorm room floor. “You raised quite the brood, Mom. You’re keeping company with either your bitchy daughter or your grumpy, dopey son.”
“I love you both equally, all the time,” she winked at me.
“Even during statistics class?” We’d gotten ornery at each other a half hour ago, when she’d had trouble keeping up with the formulas the professor had written on the whiteboard.
Mom tucked her phone into her purse and prepared to leave. “Even then.” She looked at me, her face serious now. “I don’t mind all this, Mikey. I like that I have this extra chance to take care of you for a little while.” She took two steps and hugged me. “You’re still my baby, you know. If my baby needs me to draw the Z and T distributions on graph paper, I’ll do it.”
Oh, man. Watch the concussion patient get emotional.Again. I had to swallow hard a few times before I could choke out, “Thanks, Mom.”
She let go of me and went to the door. “I’ll bring you some dinner when I come back. Okay?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
Then she was gone, and I was alone for the first time in a week.
I sat down on my bed and pulled out my phone. Rikker answered on the first ring. “Hola, Miguel,” he said. “How’s the head?”
