Bull-fighting clowns move in too close, horror written across their faces as Wrecking Ball buckles beneath me.
The arena spins into a swirl of faceless ghosts and dust eddiesthat blank out the world. I stare up at the lights from the ground, gravity reversing my world in less than a blink—blinding damn things. West needs to fix the angle for next year. If next year happens. Motion crosses my field of vision, and I assume people are moving around me.
Funny that, because I can’t. Move, that is.
Or feel anything at all.
Lanie’s face hangs over mine, tears tracking her cheeks. I want to raise my hand, touch her face, but nothing works like it should. She looks up, her mouth falling open as she rips someone a new one. The girl I love is blazing hot in pure protective mode.
I know she’ll never give up. Her or West, Levi or Billy. The perfect family. My vision tunnels down to Lanie’s tear-tracked face, tears that drip over me, tears I want to feel and taste but can’t.
Then she disappears, too.
A masked face with a high white collar stares into mine. I watch the man move above me, but the doctor gives no indication he notices my reaction. Like I’m not even here, a visitor in my own body. This isn’t a new state; I’ve been here before.
Cold.
Still.
Patient.
Huh. Good to know I can still crack jokes inside my own head, even if they only last half a second and I won’t remember them tomorrow. Or today. Or whatever time it’s meant to be.
Time can’t be my focus. I know this waiting game. It’s one I have to play alone, everything slipping away until there is only slipping away.
And no time at all.
A flash of red wakes me. Not wakes, exactly. Brings me out of…where? I’ve been drifting. Alone, for a long time. Or no time atall. Frustrating. I breathe out but I can’t. The heaviest weight rests over my chest. The color flashes by again, crossing over my vision. I flick away at it, but nothing changes. I can’t see it. It can’t see me. They. Whoever.
Wait—
A hint of blue eyes, her voice. Ranting at someone? Impossible to tell. Then she’s gone where I can’t chase her as I sink deeper into another old friend.
Nothingness.
TWENTY
LANIE
Four White Walls
A plastic chair molds to the shape of my butt outside the door to Cord’s room. Nurses flit in and out, carrying clipboards and cups of meds, though he doesn’t use those. Others push carts to change out his IV stands. The surgeon refused to look at me at all for the first few hours, and West explained the process, being the veteran in the room.
All we have to do is wait. Simple, yet terrifying.
They’ve operated three times already. Levi, West, and Billy mingle in the corridor, providing a constant stream of burnt coffee from the hospital café. I initially tried to push back their offerings with an equal stream of politeness and failed. The world has become a blur of white coats, white walls, white pens. Clipboards and sterile trolleys.
White, white, white.
I don’t know the time, or if the day has turned over.
My phone died sometime before my butt turned numb. That was before my stained plastic cups filled with coffee dregs stacked up beneath my plastic chair and before Billy slid down the wall to rest beside me. Sometimes, I sleep. On a shoulder or a plastic seat.It doesn’t much matter.
Not until Winnie marches in and slaps me. Even then, the additional body barely registers.
I stare up at my best friend, my face lacking sensation just like the rest of me. Every inch is deadened, just as Cord appears to be, with only a wall and eternity stretching out between us.
“Get her out of here!” she yells at the nurses, her voice reverberating along the endless white hall that stinks of bleach. “It’s her fault he’s in there.”
