“You can see fine out of your left eye. Just drive, you pussy.”

He’s got his foot off and he’s resting his stump on the dashboard. I ball up my fist and hit him as hard as I can. I don’t know where the punch is going to land, because he’s in my blind spot. I don’t care if I club him in the nuts or what’s left of his leg. Either would hurt. Either would be fine. I’ve been listening to him bitch and moan about phantom pains for days and miles, but the asshole still won’t cut me some slack.

“You hit like a girl,” he says.

I clearly didn’t hurt him enough. I jerk the gearshift into drive and get my reward: the sound of gravel under the wheels and the loud scrape of car guts on the edge of the pavement as I pull into the right lane.

“Is that like an insult to you? Calling you a pussy? Saying you hit like a girl?” he asks. It isn’t an apology. He isn’t curious. He’s just probing my defenses. I don’t answer. I don’t need to give him a new way to burrow in, under my skin.

I’m creeping down the blacktop slowly, so slowly, slow as a little old man wearing a hat, and we all know how slow they drive.

Beside me, the passenger seat makes a familiar purring sound and I know he’s reclining.

“It’s nice to have a little break from driving Miss Crazy,” he says. He probably been working on that one for days, but he finally got to the punch line.

The grey-black of the pavement stretches out and away through a whole lot of nothing until it’s no wider than a shoelace. The telephone poles get smaller and smaller as they string out toward the horizon.

“Just look at the telephone poles,” Odd says. “See how they get bigger when you get closer? You don’t need depth perception out here.”

Son of a bitch. It’s like he reads my mind.

It occurs to me that I can push the gas pedal to the carpet and get all two tons of vintage Cadillac up to deadly speed and crash right into a pole if I want. If I want, I can put us both out of my misery.

If Odd picks up on that thought, he doesn’t mention it.

 

A couple things . . .

 

1) I am not a pussy. I prefer the term Vagina American. I am not a pussy.

2) Murder-suicide never used to be my go-to response. I used to see things differently.

 

I miss my eye.

Not as much as I did at first, but I still miss it, especially when it comes to situations like this, when distance and closeness matter. I can’t play ping-pong. I can’t catch a set of keys if you wing them at me. Those are things that Polly-That-Was could do. Not me. I can’t depend on the world, but other than that, I’m doing fine. I’m moving my story down the road. Slowly, slowly, like an old man in a hat, I’m moving my story down the road.

 

I’d rather be home on the couch watching a monstrous shark and monstrous octopus locked in mortal combat. When I say monstrous, I mean really, really big—so big the octopus can slap a fighter jet out of the sky. Fireball! Wreckage plummeting down and disappearing into the waves with a pathetic sizzle. Did I mention the shark is so big it can pull passenger planes out of the sky? Well, it can. And it did. And I don’t know how the pathetic humans are ever going to survive.

Seriously, I don’t know. That’s the question in every monster movie: how will the humans survive? Not if. Not “do they deserve it?” Just “how?” When it comes to this particular shark/octopus/human three-way death match, I don’t know, because my mom walked in before the stupid movie ended and told me I had company. Then she turned off the television and opened the blinds. And I sat there, blinking in the way-too-bright sunlight, wearing a faded “Walk for the Cure” T-shirt and the U of M flannel boxers Bridger had given me when it was true-love-forever and he was going-to-wait-for-me because two-years-isn’t-too-long-to-wait-for-true-love.

“Want to go fishing?” It was Odd Estes.

 

I hadn’t seen Odd since he got out of the hospital, but I’d seen him plenty during those recovery weeks. He was, in fact, my first and only visitor other than my parents. My friends would have come. Bridger would have come. I know for sure he would have come because of true love and all of that. It just wasn’t allowed. I was quarantined to minimize the risk of contagion. Even my dad, when he came, stayed on the other side of an observation window.

But the quarantine didn’t apply to Odd, because he was Case Three. I was Case Six. Cases One, Two, Four, Five, and Seven weren’t being very sociable because they were dead.

It killed a lunch lady, a newborn baby, and three varsity football players.

Football was probably why it killed them, the athletes, I mean. They played hard. I’m sure they were always a little banged up. A scrape, a blister, that’s all it takes. Every little break in the skin is a welcome mat as far as MRSA is concerned. No pain: no gain. Play hurt. It’s just a scratch. They were athletes, members of a team. And since they were members of a team, they hung out together, which made it handy for the infection. By the time they got sick enough to go to get it checked out, it was too late. It was already systemic. The doctors carved the soft, dead meat off those guys like they were boiled Thanksgiving turkeys. The doctors grabbed surgical saws and filled the air with the smell of hot bone during multiple amputations. The doctors poured the best medicine straight into those proud, blue veins. It didn’t help. Three guys just rotted and died.

As far as the infection goes, the lunch lady, the little baby, and I hadn’t been in the locker room—so we didn’t catch it there. The lunch lady had a lot of little nicks and burns on her hands. Maybe she touched a doorknob or stair rail or a pen in the front office after the bacteria had found its way out into the classrooms and hallways. I could never really ask or get an answer about how it got to the baby. At some level, I just don’t want to know. As for me, I scratched a zit on my face after I touched a desk or a light switch or the handle on the drinking fountain. That’s how it got me. Never scratch a zit, kids; it only makes it worse. Boy howdy. No fucking kidding.

Oh, I’m way lucky. I didn’t have an embarrassing acne flare-up. Nope, lucky me, I got flesh-eating bacteria—MRSA, the next-gen superbug. It ate my eye and part of my cheekbone. It left behind a mess of bumpy pink scars that twists the corner of my mouth up on one side like I’m a half-finished Joker. But I’m so lucky, I live. That infection should have gone straight to my brain. I should have died quick. But I didn’t. I’m a miracle of modern medicine, only the medicine doesn’t get much credit, I notice. People say I’m lucky, or I’m blessed, and then they turn away.

I’m not the only miracle.

There’s Odd too.

If anybody ought to have died it was Odd. Not because he deserved to die, although, knowing him as I do, I feel pretty confident saying that most of the world wouldn’t miss him. That’s not it. He should have died because he was right in that locker room, snapping towels with those other naked asses. And he had a little raw place on his ankle where his shoe rubbed him wrong. MRSA got in him and started eating him up. Then it stopped. It stopped killing him, and it stopped attacking people altogether.

The outbreak was over.

It left behind a sprinkle of new graves in the community cemetery. In fifty years, a historian could walk through and never notice. They will never guess that this was the year MRSA came to town. With nothing but the dates to go on, the future might chalk it up to a couple of rollovers without seat belts, crib death, and a heart attack. As medical disasters go, it doesn’t compare to the bad old days, like the winter when diphtheria killed brothers and sisters so fast they buried them together in one casket like a huddle of puppies.

But there will be evidence if the historian knows where to look.

It’s going to be easy to see the tracks of the flesh-eating monster in the win-loss record for the year. And the section of black-bordered pages in the yearbook is a dead giveaway.

I’m in the yearbook too—just check the index. There are a lot of page numbers after “Furnas, Polly” because I was a very busy person. I also really liked to have my picture taken.

“Estes, Odd” has even more numbers after his name—what with the rising sports-star thing. I don’t know if he likes having his picture taken, but he has one of those camera-loves-it faces.

He is not immediately repulsive.

But he’s got problems.

We all have problems.

And, like I didn’t have enough already, Odd showed up.

 

“How do I look? Be honest. My mom’s not being honest.”

“You sure?”

“I need to know.”

He took a second.

“You look like a mummy.”

I put my hand up to my face. Of course, the bandages. He doesn’t have X-ray vision. He can’t see through that wad of gauze and goo.

“Welcome to the twenty-first century, Tut. See you around.” I could hear the crutch-slipper shuffle as Odd left my room and moved down the hospital hallway.

 

Odd stopped by a couple times a day after that, during little breaks from practicing walking up and down the short hall in the quarantine unit.

The visits were always short. He was just taking a breather while he worked to get strong again. They promised he’d get a new, high-tech foot as soon as he was strong enough, and he wanted it. The crutches were just temporary. The robot leg, that was the future.

Nobody promised me a robot eye.

 

We never mentioned that we were in the hospital, or why, or that we had never been friends outside of the quarantine ward. It should be obvious why we didn’t talk about MRSA. As for why we hadn’t been friends before, that is simple: I’m a graduating senior, and he was going to be a junior in the fall. Both of us had other, better, options in the friend department. Until we got stranded in quarantine, that is.

After a few dead-end convos full of long, uncomfortable silences, we found out we had one thing in common. We both like to fish. Neither of us is obsessed or anything, but the occasional day on the river or a spring creek—we’re down. So we talked about fishing.

The day I got the letter from Bridger explaining that he understood how I needed time and space to heal . . . and so he wanted to do the right thing . . . and so we would kind of take a little break as far as our relationship . . . and so he wouldn’t be coming home for the summer because he was going to go to Portland to work for his uncle . . . kind of like an internship. The day I got that letter, Odd and I talked about fishing. The day I had the video-consult with the plastic surgeon and learned that it might be possible to do some more reconstruction and scar revision in the future, but not soon, Odd and I talked about fishing. The day I got my provisional diploma in a manila envelope and realized I would never be joining my friends when they moved the tassels on their caps from right to left, Odd was with me. We talked about fishing.

Odd was released from the hospital a few days before me. He wasn’t there to hear the smattering of applause from the nurses when the orderly wheeled me out of the quarantine unit. I could have walked—I’d been getting up and pacing the halls for days—but it’s hospital policy. So they rolled me down the wide hall and into the elevator and out the doors, past the oversized aquarium full of not-very-healthy-looking rainbow trout to the passenger pick-up zone. The sunshine was very bright. The world looked funny. My mom marched along beside my wheelchair, clutching a red-white-and-blue Mylar balloon in one hand and stack of disposable bedpans in the other. The bedpans were unnecessary. I’d been able to get up and walk to the toilet for weeks. They were also a very bad sign that my mom wasn’t ready for any of this.

 

My happiness is essential to my mom’s happiness. There is nothing weird about that. As long as my perfect future was moving along on schedule, we were both fine.

We had always been close. She supported me in all my extra-curriculars. She was my number-one fan who attended every play, every recital, every game (even though I was only there myself to sell pop and crap at the refreshment booth). But during the hospital stay, while I was delirious and tippy-toeing toward death, she morphed into a mom-bot. When I got home, she followed me into the bathroom—just to make sure I’d be OK. She hovered over my shoulder while I spooned up applesauce and chicken-noodle soup, which was always my favorite—when I was five. And I let her, because it was just easier. She quit her job and spent all her time taking care of me. She became my parasitic twin, or I became hers. Same difference.

 

A couple of days after I got home, I took the mirrored door off the medicine cabinet in my bathroom. What was the point of looking in the mirror while I brushed my teeth? Or after I washed my face? It isn’t like I needed it to put on mascara. Just trying that would probably leave me blind in the only eye I have left. So I got a screwdriver and adapted my environment to my new condition, as was suggested by some handouts I received in the hospital.

One of the screws fell in the sink, and I knocked it into the drain because I still don’t know how to reach for things, exactly. I was still in the process of developing coping skills and new strategies for my new condition like the rehab handouts said I needed to do. Then, when I was taking the mirror downstairs to stash it in the basement storage closet, I heard my mom in her room.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed with a wad of soggy tissue pressed over her nose, crying. So I sat down beside her, and we hugged each other like two stray kittens drowning in a flood. We were there for I don’t know how long; then, when we were both starting to be able to breathe without little sniffling sounds, Mom said, “Do you want to watch The View with me, babykid?”

 

That’s how I ended up on the couch with the clicker in my hand. It turns out, unlike playing ping-pong or putting on mascara, a person only needs one eye to watch TV. The TV never blinks or looks away. It accepts a person unconditionally and is generous with its love—all it asks for is a little bit of attention in return. My mom came and sat beside me during The View. I laid my head in her lap—good face up—and she stroked my hair. Then, when lady-TV was over, I rested my head on a pillow with my scar side up and watched monster movies. Between ladies and monsters I was learning a lot about myself.

A few months later, Odd Estes showed up in the middle of Mega Shark vs. Giant Squid and said, “You want to go fishing?”

I stood up, wearing the flannel underpants of the guy who didn’t love me forever and ever after all, and I said, “Yes.”

It was not the last of my bad choices.