I find the nurse’s office and poke my head inside. Sitting at a tiny desk covered with bat-themed stuff—bat-print tissue boxes, pencils with bat erasers poking out of a bat-shaped ceramic mug, and even a phone covered with bat stickers—is a woman with brown skin and long black curls held back with a green headband. She has on magenta sneakers, turquoise-rimmed glasses, and green scrubs printed all over with cartoon bats.
“Hi, I’m Quinn Knight. I’m new here.” The woman looks up and smiles wide. I try to smile back, but I’m not one of those super-smiley people, even on a good day. “I came down because I was getting a migraine, but now it’s starting to feel better.” I shrug and drop my gaze to the batty desk.
This happens all the time, and it’s so frustrating. My migraines can last for ten minutes or ten hours, so I never know whether to go lie down or ride it out. Sometimes just getting away from whatever triggers them is enough, but not always. The doctors say that’s sometimes how it is with kids, and that as a teenager, I’ll have fewer short headaches and more migraines that go on for hours or even days. Great, something to look forward to.
Most nurses that know how migraines work get it. But a lot of teachers don’t, I can tell. When they’re doubting me, they tilt their heads and smile big to try to cover up the fact that as much as they want to, they don’t believe me. But it’s always one of those pasted-on smiles, kind of like when you take a bite out of what you think is a chocolate chip cookie and it turns out to be oatmeal raisin, but the mom that made them is watching you so you can’t let on that you hate raisins.
The woman waves at me to come in. “I’m Nurse Ramirez-Johnson, but everyone calls me Nurse R-J,” she says.
I go into her office, feeling relieved that she doesn’t seem to think I’m making a big deal out of nothing—no pretend wrong-kind-of-cookie smile on her. I sit in the chair next to Nurse R-J’s desk and look around.
This place doesn’t look like most nurse’s offices I’ve been in. It has the basics—a row of cabinets by a desk and two sets of bunk bed–style cots. But the fluorescent lights are draped with sheer cloth in soft blues and greens. And each cot is decorated with posters, wacky throw pillows, and different types of beaded curtains that create a theme—the beach, snowcapped mountains, deep sea life, the night sky.
Nurse R-J looks amused as she watches me take it all in. “What do you think of my happy places?”
“Happy places?”
“Sure. Haven’t you ever heard someone say to close your eyes and go to your happy place when you’re upset? Well, I bring the happy place to you.”
“I like them,” I say, and not just to be polite.
“Go on, take one for a test drive.”
Of course, I lie down on the space-themed bunk with galaxy-print pillows. It even has glow-in-the-dark stars stuck on the bottom of the bunk above me. Someone had tried to recreate the Big and Little Dippers, but the alignment is off.
“Can I fix this?” I ask, pointing to the out-of-whack stars.
“Sure.”
I wedge my fingernail under star stickers and work on rearranging them to make more accurate constellations.
“I’m glad you came in,” Nurse R-J says. “I missed you this morning. I thought your sister was going to bring you by?”
“She got too busy,” I say, choosing one of the bigger star stickers for Polaris and placing it at the end of the Little Dipper’s handle.
“Auditioning for queen of the drama department, no doubt,” Nurse R-J says and winks. I smile back. Clearly, Nurse R-J knows Vivica.
“So, I reached out to your mom to tell me more about your migraines and what we needed to know to help you be successful at school. And she replied with a few thoughts.”
With a raised eyebrow, Nurse R-J holds up an email printout and fans through the pages. I can’t help but laugh at her expression.
Mom’s mega list of instructions is five hundred different ways of saying, “At random, Quinn’s brain will explode in pain, and you can try all this stuff to feel like you’re helping her, but don’t kid yourself, nothing really works.”
“I understand,” Nurse R-J says, “that you’ve figured out most of what can trigger your migraines, even if you can’t always avoid the triggers or predict whether they’ll actually set off a migraine.”
I nod and adjust the two stars in the Big Dipper’s bowl to better point to Polaris, then start creating the Pleiades so that they line up as they should be with the bottom of the Big Dipper’s bowl. I can’t leave out the Seven Sisters.
“And there’s not much we can do for you during a migraine attack beyond giving you a place to lie down in comfort.”
Nope, nothing, nada, I think. I’ve tried everything, but nothing has worked. Not changing what I eat, how much water I drink, or when I sleep. I’ve even tried stuff like yoga, to lower stress, and acupuncture, where someone pokes teeny-tiny needles into your skin. Yoga just made me feel like a clumsy pretzel, and acupuncture did nothing but creep me out. And the medicines kids can try didn’t work for me. Someday, when my body is bigger, there will be a lot more medicines I can try. But for a few more years, I’m out of luck.
I’ve almost got all the star stickers arranged for the Pleiades, which actually takes more than seven stars. People think there are just seven stars in the cluster because of the Seven Sisters name, but the Greek myth is about nine stars: seven sisters and two parents. I stick the seventh sister star in place and am about to get up when the stars flash. I rub my eyes and look again. Now they glow steadily brighter, the intensity of their light increasing until a beam erupts out of them and shines like a spotlight on the edge of the bunk. There, I see what seems to be a corner torn from a piece of paper. Something printed, like maybe a newsletter. I read the few lines and realize they’re part of a poem.
“Why do the Pleiades want me to have a poem?” I clap my hand over my mouth, mortified to realize I said the words out loud.
“What was that?” Nurse R-J looks up from where she’d been scanning Mom’s email.
Zip it, Quinn. I do not need Nurse R-J to think I believe stars are trying to talk to me. I put the scrap of a poem in my pocket and get up to leave.
“Just that I’d better get to my next class.”
“Okay, then,” Nurse R-J says, handing me a bat-shaped sticky note. “Give this to your next teacher so they don’t mark you tardy. You just come on down to see me whenever your head hurts and have yourself a little lie down until it all passes. I’ve got a drawer here with things that might help you. You’re welcome to anything in here, anytime.”
Nurse R-J pulls open the bottom drawer of her desk. I peek in and see a satin sleep mask embroidered with closed eyes and long, dramatic eyelashes; a box of foam ear plugs; several packages of adhesive cooling pads designed to stick to your forehead; a six-pack of Gatorade; and a big box of Famous Amos mini chocolate chip cookies. That makes me smile. Nurse R-J may have only just met me, but she already gets me.