“I’m good,” he’d said, to which the nurse shrugged.
AJ sat at her side as she squeezed his hand tightly, so tight that the tips of all his fingers went white, when the needle punctured her skin and the resident’s voice slipped fromclinical to apologetic, when the numbing agent failed to fully numb. Despite being a twin, AJ had never before experienced the sensation of having someone else’s pain transmit directly into his own body, but that’s what occurred: every wince, every shallow intake of breath, was mirrored in the deepest recesses of his chest cavity.
Poppy was still pale, but she had gotten a little of her color back. She looked…fucking beautiful, but also so vulnerable, so frail. Seeing her like that awakened every primitive cell in his DNA he hadn’t even known he had. In that moment, he knew he would kill anyone who tried to harm her. He’d never felt like that before. There was no rational thought involved, it was a base, animalistic instinct he was fully prepared to act on.
He’d endured three hours of relentless noise, the flicker of fluorescent lighting, and the constant chemical assault on his senses and felt nothing except singular, laser-like focus on Poppy’s well-being. His entire sensorium was occupied with her. Now his job was to distract her. She was currently coming up with questions to try to stump him.
“Why do we pronounce the g in longevity twice?” Poppy asked as she lay in the hospital bed with a row of stitches on her forehead and an I.V. tube coming out of her arm.
“It’s due to a linguistic process called palatalization. You are pronouncing it first with the hard g sound and then with the soft g sound.”
“Okay, so there’s ‘disheveled,’ but why is there no ‘sheveled’?”
“Disheveled was incorporated into an English word from Old French, where the root referred to hair, not shelves. Words of those origins are often referred to as
“cranberry morphemes” or “unpaired words.”
“Okay, fine. Um…what travels around the world yet stays in the corner?” she asked.
And they were back to brain teasers. She’d been alternating between those for the past hour to pass the time.
“What travels around the world yet stays in the corner?” he repeated, then repeated again silently to himself. What travels around the world yet stays in the— “A stamp.”
Her lips split in a smile so wide it covered her face from ear to ear. “Wow. Your brain must be so fun to live in.”
That was the first time anyone had ever said that to AJ, and the way Poppy was looking at him, he could tell she actually meant it. He wasn’t sure about how fun it was, but it was nice to have someone appreciate the differences in how his brain worked.
“Get the fuck off me!” A patient from another trauma bay screamed, and there was a large amount of commotion as hospital staff and security rushed past bay six down the hall to handle the disruption.
Poppy tilted her head, leaning as far as she could in her bed to see the action, then looked back at AJ. “You can go. I appreciate you waiting with me, but I know hospitals area lot. The noise, the lights, the germs.”
“Germs don’t bother me.”
It was a common misconception, one that he was sure he’d fed into since he had to shower immediately after sex, but that had nothing to do with germs, it was a sensory issue with his own body. He couldn’t stand the feeling of dried bodily fluids on himself.
“Okay, but still, you don’t have to stay. I don’t know what’s taking so long, but I can Uber home. I’m sure you’d rather be anywhere but here.”
She was wrong. There wasnoplace he’d rather be but there. In fact, if she was in the hospital and he wasn’t by her side, he wasn’t sure how he would handle that or what he would do with himself.
“I’m staying.” He wasn’t leaving her. That was out of the question. It was a nonstarter.
When he said that, her entire body relaxed, and she shifted in her bed onto her side, so she was facing him as she took a deep breath. “What can go up the chimney down, but not down the chimney up?”
He repeated the question in his head, silently to himself. Once, twice. And then a third time. Her face lit up when it took him more than a second to respond. The fourth time he parroted the riddle back to himself, the answer became clear. “An umbrella.”
Her nose scrunched in what might be the cutest expression he’d ever seen. “Aw, I thought I stumped you.”
“Where did you get all these from?”
“One of my patients. Dylan.” The name escaped her lips like the last note of a lullaby, soft and sad. “My first week working here, actually. They warned me about him on day one. He was six, but they talked about him like he was a seasoned bank robber. Respiratory nightmare, immune system even worse, nonverbal, but really what nobody could handle was his severe SPD.”
AJ had always been thankful that his sensory sensitivities were not extreme. The people he knew who suffered with severe SPD, sensory processing disorder, were affected in every aspect of their lives.
“He couldn’t stand to be touched or looked at or talked to directly, and he was just a kid, but most of the staff labeled him ‘difficult.’ They said that they had to block out extra time whenever they saw his name. I remember thinking,everything you’re telling me is about you, that has to be extremely traumatizing for him. I felt so bad for the kid before I even met him.”
Poppy’s eyes filled with tears. She bit the inside of her cheek and cleared her throat, as she continued, her tone was laced with something raw and unguarded. “I remember the first time I did. He was screaming, full meltdown, and basically being dragged in by the armpits. His mom looked like she hadn’t slept in a year. She told me I could just strap him down if I had to. ‘Do what had to be done,’ she said. No one else could get him to stay still for scans, so they always used restraints.” Poppy shook her head, as if dislodging the memory. “But I was thinking, I can’t do that. I mean, I guess I would have if Ihadto, but I don’t know, I just thought there had to be a different way.”
AJ listened in silence, all of his attention tethered to her, so present, so connected, it felt like they were the only people in the world, that no one else existed.
