When I wake up, I stretch and fold forward into Child’s Pose. My face against the fabric. I smile, my lips rubbing the sheets. Yesterday was a good day.
I turn to my phone to catch up on email and see a text from Luke. It’s from two hours ago.
Hey beautiful. I still feel shitty about missing your solo. Can I take you to dinner after?
My stomach feels funny, and I read the text three times. But no, I don’t have to do that. He agreed we were just having fun.
So I text back: We always go out as a troupe after.
This isn’t completely accurate. We do, but friends and boyfriends come too. That gnaws at me. You could come too, but only if you promise to show off your modern dance moves.
It’s almost instantaneous: Anything for you.
I hold the phone to my mouth, smiling, for longer than I should. Finally, I flop out of bed and make myself go to the bathroom. I stand in front of the sink, fumbling for the toothpaste and rubbing out the little sparkly mint green blobs that Mandy left in the sink. (Okay, okay, some were probably left by me.) Something is off in the mirror.
I stop.
I stare into my eyes.
I shake.
My breath has escaped me and it feels like it will never come home. I steady myself by clutching the edges of the sink. Staring back at me, my eyes, the supposed windows to my soul, are foreign.
They are no longer blue.
They’re purple.
They don’t feel weird, they just look weird. I feel fine, except that I’m completely freaking the fuck out. I didn’t take whatever stupid drug Mandy and Zachary tried. What the fuck?
My chest tightens, like someone’s hugging me too hard. I look all around, to the seashell soap dish, to the window, to the dirt behind the toilet, as though answers lie there.
When I’m able to convince air to once again enter my lungs, I hold my hands out and calm myself down. “It’s okay, I’m fine,” I mutter to myself. “Except for the fact that I’m talking to myself.”
I try to assess the situation.
I’m shit at assessing situations. Where is Mandy? She’s not in her room, or the kitchen, or the living room.
I pull on some clothes and go outside and up the stairs to Conrad’s.
When he answers the door, I just blurt it out. “My eyes are purple.” I say it more to the world than him. I say it more to myself than to the world.
He squints. He smiles. “You’re blessed.”
I sigh. “Conrad, I need your help with this shit. It’s fine if you think God did it. Go ahead, think that. But I still need to, I don’t know, go to the hospital or something?”
He nods. “Probably still a good idea. Let me just get my coat.” He grabs his Technicolor one, which is really just a rainbow flashy jacket. But, yeah, he basically has a Technicolor coat. No, I’m not surprised by this. In fact, I’d be a little disappointed if he didn’t.
“Everything will be fine. You’ll be out smiling like the sun again soon,” he says as he crooks his elbow, an offer of physical support. I’m still visibly shaking, and we do need to walk down stairs. My hand plunges through the loop and wraps around his arm.
He drives me, even though it’s just four blocks. A walk might have been better. I need time to digest the stone of worry clinking around inside my intestines. And I need time to let Mandy respond. She didn’t answer my call. She didn’t answer my text, even though I definitely dived into the bush instead of beating around it: I have purple eyes.
Who wouldn’t respond to that? I continue to wonder after Conrad has deposited me in an examining room. I thank him and insist he goes home. He’s planning a huge fundraiser for the interfaith council tomorrow. But I know he’d also stay with me all day, and then stay up all night working on any homework or fundraising tasks he missed because he was staying with me. And he’d continue through his sleep deprivation with a brave smile.
I appreciate saints like Conrad. I don’t take advantage of them.
Finally, he agrees to leave, and I’m left in the cold, sterile room. Alone. I clench my phone and adjust my hospital gown because it’s really bright in here.
Dr. Brown comes in. She taps her lips more vigorously than she did with Mandy. She also seems less concerned with explaining things to me as nurses extract my blood and knock my knees with torture devices.
“I’ll be honest with you...um—” She looks at my chart and takes an uncomfortably long time locating my given name. “—Quinn. I’ll be upfront with you.”
“Are you normally obtuse and obstructive?” I crack a smile. She doesn’t laugh. It makes the nerves that seem centered in my belly hurt even more.
“Of course not,” she says, emitting the exact kind of chuckle that reveals she is about to tell a semi-lie and isn’t entirely comfortable with it.
“As you, of course, know, you’re not the first one with this condition. Well, your frie—” Dr. Brown looks to the ceiling before looking back at me. “I mean, a similar case revealed abnormalities in the blood, so we’ll order a complete blood work for you. It will take a week to process.”
My mind flashes. What abnormalities? Have they told Mandy this? Are they keeping it from her? I’m outraged on her behalf until I consider the disturbing possibility that maybe Mandy just hasn’t filled me in.
I stare at my thumbs.
“The good news is otherwise you seem fine. Perfectly healthy. However, we’re still unsure what we’re dealing with here,” Dr. Brown continues. “Someone from health and human services has requested to speak with any patients with similar symptoms. At this point, we can’t make you stay and talk with him, and honestly, he probably doesn’t really know...” She looks at the ground and sucks in her lips. “It probably is a good idea if you talk to him. It might help him figure out a possible connection and cause. One other patient has already agreed.”
Of course she’s talking about Mandy or Zachary. Right? I would have noticed if someone else was walking around campus with purple eyes. And, anyway, in terms of connections, it’s not hard to deduce Mandy and I live together, and Zachary and Mandy are bonking boots, often in our apartment. But I didn’t take their drug. These eyes have to be caused by something else. Maybe some strange mold in our house or some combination of food products we’re all eating?
These thoughts buzz in my brain until I realize Dr. Brown is still looking at me. “Of course, I’ll talk to him,” I say.
She writes down the number of the conference room in the hospital. “The other patient just went to speak with him about fifteen minutes ago, so you might need to wait.”
“Fine,” I say. I’m glad I can catch Mandy or Zachary between our interviews.
I put my clothes back on, and it’s a relief to get out of the flimsy, revealing hospital gown.
While searching for a ladies room, I overhear something about blood abnormalities. I stop in the hall, pressing my back to the wall. Feeling like a spy.
“Yeah, her count was 100 white blood cells per Mcl,” a woman’s voice says.
“No,” says a man. “That can’t be. It must be a typo or something.”
“No, it was 100,” she says. Her voice has two edges to it, like curiosity and fear are duking it out to see which emotion will be reflected.
“She would be sick, or dead even, with that count.”
“I know,” the woman says. “But she’s fine.”
When they walk out of the room I have to think fast and pretend I wasn’t eavesdropping by staring at my fingernails. (I’m not very good at thinking fast.) Fortunately, they don’t notice me.
I move on. Eventually, I find a bathroom. Relief. And then I find the meeting rooms. The chapel is on the same hall. A brilliant stained glass and wooden door among a dozen mundane cerulean doors.
There’s a small waiting area, so I pull out my e-reader and start reading about nineteenth century French art for a class. But it just annoys me because it’s about Monet’s Woman with a Parasol. It’s not that I don’t like that painting, in fact I adore it. My parents have a reproduction and as a child I would sit in the living room and stare up at it, imagining that the umbrella was magical, and that it protected both the woman and her child from everything in the world, which is why they could be above it all. I love to analyze some paintings, pick away at levels and meanings and attributes and faults, but there’re a few that you don’t want to analyze. Like a good joke or a favorite hamster, dissecting it will kill it.
So I’m grateful when the door to room 356 opens. I hop up, ready to see Mandy or Zachary. Ready to finally talk to at least one of them about this crazy purple eye shit.
But the creased purple eyes staring into mine don’t belong to Mandy or Zachary.
They’re Danny’s.