When Gram returned a half-hour later, I could tell instantly that she had news. Her face had bloomed pink.
“What did you find?” I asked.
“Two things that are going to make your day. One is a cupcake.” She set a plastic container on my tray. It held a chocolate cupcake the size of my face.
I wasted no time opening it. “What’s the other?”
“The girl is still on the ward. Room 205.”
I wanted to kiss her.
“How do I see her?” I asked. “I’m all wired.”
“You could go back to the disco room,” she said.
“But she won’t be there. The nurse said so.”
Gram sat back down on the sofa. “Surely there is some other activity you can do. At least to allow you to walk by her room.”
The tech gave me a knowing smile. “A girl, huh? There’s a support group they let teens go to.”
“Will she be there?”
He shrugged. “No way to know, but at least it would get you back in the mobile unit.” He picked up the wires leading to the wall. “You’d have to be moved to a backpack and escorted, same as for the disco room. That hasto be arranged in advance. But it’s doable once I’m gone.”
I turned to Gram. “Let’s call the nurse. I’m ready for a second shot.”
The hours with the nuclear medicine tech felt like a year. I watched TV and played Scrabble with Gram. I tried on her Squirtle hat over my gauze, much to the amusement of the tech guy. He ended up taking the hat home for one of his kids. This lit a fire under Gram, who decided she needed to make them for all the nurses.
Finally, the EEG tech arrived to rewire me from the wall to the backpack. I practiced all my opening lines.
So, you decided blue wasn’t your color?
No, no, no. She might be self-conscious about goingunconscious.
Not the first time I’ve made a lady swoon.
Okay, that was worse.
DeShawn popped in to say he was coming on shift in five minutes. He’d been the one pushing me to talk to Ava last night, so I waited for him to walk me down. When he finally came to fetch me, Gram looked up from her newest creation, a Charmander.
“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” Gram said with a wink.
The moment we were out in the hall, I scanned the nearby room numbers. The epilepsy ward was a long hall lined with circular wards. In each section, all the doors faced a nurses’ desk in the center.
Ava’s 205 opened directly across the circle from me. Technically, I could stand at my door and she could standat hers and we could wave to each other without ever leaving our rooms.
Not that I intended to do that. Best-case scenario was that I’d be able to get her phone number and we could text each other. But an occasional visual from across a crowded nursing station worked, too.
DeShawn tried to take me the wrong way around the circle, the direction that wouldn’t pass her room. But I didn’t follow him.
My heart beat ninety-to-nothing as I approached 205. What was I going to say? Would it be any better than the last thing I’d said? I didn’t have AC/DC to help me this time.
I spotted her right away through the half-open door. She was sitting on her bed, holding a giant textbook.
My shoulders relaxed. For the first time in my life, someone had recovered from the blue-gray skin of death.
DeShawn came up behind me. “Oh, I get it.”
