I dropped to my knees, but not from a seizure. Strobe lights don’t trigger them for me.
Ava was down, her skin pale, her body twitching. My stomach tightened as I was forced to witness what others saw in me. I got it now. Their fear, why they kept their distance.
It was like watching someone die.
I’d never met anyone else with epilepsy. I knew kids my age had it because more than one school nurse had referred to them when I was stuck on a cot in a sick room. But I guess their seizures were under control, because I’d never seen anybody doing what I did.
DeShawn, my nurse, laid a hand on my shoulder. “Tucker, come back over here.”
“I’m fine.”
“I’m not worried about you,” DeShawn said. “We need to give them some room.”
The nurse on the floor pushed Ava’s dark hair from her cheeks. “Ava, come on out of it. Time to start breathing.”
I stood and backed away. Since I’d had about a bazillion and one seizures, I wasn’t worried that Ava was having one now. But as the seconds ticked by, I sensed the tension in DeShawn and the other nurse.
“Time check?” the nurse asked.
“One minute thirty,” DeShawn said. “What’s her typical?”
“Mom says a couple of minutes.”
More seconds passed. I squeezed my hands into fists, then loosened them again.
“You want me to order diazepam?” DeShawn asked.
“Let’s give it thirty more seconds,” Ava’s nurse said.
We waited. I gripped my backpack strap so tightly my fingers howled.
DeShawn looked over at me. “You doing okay, Tucker?”
“Bang-up,” I said. But I wasn’t. My longest seizure had been eighty-five seconds. We were pushing two minutes on this one.
Another minute and nothing.
“Call for diazepam,” the nurse said.
“I need to get him out of here,” DeShawn said. He meant me.
“Grab Cindy. She’s at the desk.”
“Will do.” DeShawn got on his phone and gave several terse instructions I couldn’t follow.
I didn’t want to go. Ava lay completely still, her color the grayish-blue of somebody who wasn’t ever going to breathe again.
I knew that color. I’d seen it before.
My mom, my dad, my brother. All of them looked like that after the car accident. I’d been the only one to survive, with the parting gift of a brain injury that caused myseizures. But I’d been awake when they loaded me on the stretcher. When they covered everyone else in my family with plastic.
“Go grab your phone,” DeShawn told me.
This seemed unreasonably practical, given there was a girl lying on the ground who hadn’t breathed in over two minutes.
But I walked over to the speaker, unhooked my phone, and followed him out. Two more nurses with a cart between them hustled down the hall toward the room. Ava really was in danger.
A sick feeling welled in my gut. I got it after a night of bad dreams, nonstop sirens and the smell of leaking gas, asphalt too close to my face.
