I shrugged my shoulders. I couldn’t talk about this.
“Brandon, something severely upset you. I can tell.”
I remained quiet.
“Do you know that man?”
I shook my head.
“Did the man make you feel uneasy or frightened?”
I shook my head. It was a few more minutes after Dr. Chisholm left before James spoke again.
“Brandon, I know that something about that man upset you. Do you want to tell me, but don’t want to say it out loud?”
When I didn’t answer or move, he put the notepad in front of me and offered me the marker. He encouraged me to write it down, and he said he’d keep it between us. I took the marker and wrote the terrible news that the man delivered to me.
“Oh, Brandon.” As he wrapped me in a hug, I fell apart crying.
“I’m alone,” I sobbed uncontrollably.
“You aren’t. I promise, Brandon.”
As I cried in James’ arms, I didn’t know if my hysterical crying was because my mom was dead, or the fact that someone was holding me and not hurting me. I must have fallen asleep in his arms because all I remembered was him holding me.
When I woke up, the first thing that I noticed was that James was sitting beside me reading a book. From my bed, I looked through the sheer drape covering the window and could tell that the sun had set. Tons of twinkling gold and white lights of Los Angeles were smiling at me. I couldn’t help but feel good knowing that I really was away from Sebastian and able to see the outdoors again.
“Hey, Brandon,” James said as I tried to carefully stretch. He set his book down on the table beside him and gave me his full attention. “How are you feeling?”
“My head is throbbing,” I admitted.
“Okay, we can take care of that.”
James stood and went to the doorway and asked a nurse for eight hundred milligrams of Ibuprofen and a bottle of water. He turned and smiled at me while he waited for the nurse to hand him a tiny plastic cup with the pills and a bottle of water. Since I’d been in the hospital, I had panicked over and over around bottles or cups of water. James said that I’d relax over it in time, but he’d never once said my fears were stupid.
He came over to me and set the pills, water, and paper-wrapped straw on the table beside his book. Without a word, he reached up and pressed a few buttons on the heart monitor. He knew that I was nervous without having to ask because he could hear it with my rapid heartbeat. James twisted off the lid to the bottle, unwrapped the straw from the wrapper, and pushed it into the opening of the bottle. I reached into the small plastic cup that he held for me and grabbed one of the aqua-colored pills, put it in my mouth, and quickly took a few sips of water. I repeated the process with the other pill. James didn’t ask why I didn’t take them at the same time. I thought he understood that I was trying to be careful with my mouth because it was still sore. I leaned back and looked out the window.
“Did you play any sports when you were younger?” James asked me.
“Yeah, I played soccer my freshman year of high school. I liked it a lot but found that I liked track and field more. Really, just the track aspect. I tried cross country in the fall, and that was okay. I used it mainly as a warm-up for the track season in the spring. I liked sprinting the most, and then the team relays.”
James listened to me and nodded or smiled as I spoke. I told him that I had been the anchor on our track team and that we had earned lots of ribbons while I was there.And my mom never saw me run once.
“That’s great, Brandon. So track was your thing. I jog and can go a mile without stopping. But beyond that, I’m exhausted.”
I tried to smile and could feel the sores around the left side of my mouth pull, causing me some sharp pain. I reached for it, and James patted my blanket-clad leg.
“So you ran track. I gather that is in part why your heart is so strong,” he mused.
Was he being funny? Was that sarcasm? Was it a joke because my heart races?
“Um, I’ve always had a fast heart,” I volunteered carefully. I didn’t want them to do any more tests than they already had.
“You have?” he asked. Faint wrinkled lines formed on his forehead as he listened.
“Yeah. Every now and then I could feel my heart racing or pounding without a reason. It would pound harder during track practice and meets. But my physicals were always okay. During high school, I found out that I had been a crack baby … which, I guess isn’t really a surprise considering how my mom died.”
The faint wrinkled lines on James’ forehead had now turned into much deeper lines as he looked at me.
