Chapter 56
BEST FRIENDS
Kooks.” Marjorie shakes my shoulder gently. “Kooks, wake up.”
“Ohmygod—what time is it?” After a late-night burger and fries, I’ve fallen asleep in the waiting room. Damned cozy Snuggie! Damned comfy chair!
“Seven fifty-five. Visiting hours start at eight. I knew you didn’t want to be late.”
I catch sight of our shadowy reflections in the long windows across the room. Marjorie’s hair is as wild as usual, and mine is sticking up straight on one side and plastered to my head on the other. That, combined with my bright red Snuggie (matted with wood chips and sporting a mustard stain from my midnight burger), makes me look like something you’d find in a Dumpster the day after Christmas. I try to fluff/smooth my hair, but give up after a few seconds. Katie isn’t going to notice. She cares about her own clothes, but not anyone else’s.
“Do you want me to stay?” Marjorie asks. “I can wait for you.”
I give her a little hug, and she pats my back with her small, nervous hands. “Zitsy will take me home,” I tell her. “You go get some sleep. It’s almost your bedtime, anyway.”
Marjorie’s mouth twitches a half laugh, and she rakes her long, elegant fingers through her bird’s-nest hair. “If you need me, call me. I’ll keep the phone by my pillow.”
There’s a new nurse on duty, and she looks up Brainzilla’s room number, then directs me to the elevator. I’m so impatient that I try to calm myself by counting. I do that sometimes. It’s kind of Zen. Anyway, I’m muttering “one hundred and forty-four” by the time I finally find Brainzilla’s room. She’s mostly asleep when I tiptoe in. She looks pale and drained under the bright hospital lights.
I’m so relieved to see her that my eyes start leaking like mad, just pouring water down my face. I don’t make any noise, though. I don’t want to completely wake her up.
There’s a hideous pink chair beside her bed, and I sit in it and watch her sleep. Her face isn’t blown off. No limbs seem to be missing—no bruises at the neck, no slashes on the arms. She must have taken pills. I sit there, staring and thinking, for seventeen minutes before her breath catches and her eyes snap open. She sits straight up.
She looks around the room frantically, as if she has no idea where she is. Then her eyes land on me.
“Hi, Katie,” I say softly.
And then her face sort of collapses on itself and she falls back against the rumpled pillow.
Brainzilla is silent a long time, staring up at the ceiling. “I’m in a hospital,” she says.
“Yes.”
“And my mother isn’t here.”
Beyond the door, the floor is waking up. An orderly passes by with a cart. Two doctors are chatting at the nurses’ station. “She was here when they admitted you. Visiting hours just started. I’m sure she’ll be here soon.”
My best friend doesn’t look at me. She just keeps her eyes trained on the ceiling tiles. “Dad is probably just getting home from his shift. Mom will have to open the day care in a few minutes. She can’t close down—the parents are counting on her. If they don’t have day care, they can’t work, and if they can’t work, they get fired.” Machinery hums all around us. “I’m sure she’ll come by afterward.”
“Your mom loves you.”
“I know that. It’s just life, you know? If she shuts the day care—even for a day—the families will go somewhere else. Then we’ll all suffer. I don’t even know how she’s going to pay for this.” She gestures to the hideous hospital room. “God, I wish I’d thought of that.”
“They still make you pay part of it.” Katie wraps the white sheet around her hand. “The Yale lady saw what they wrote, Kooks.”
“But it wasn’t true.”
“She doesn’t know that.” Her blue eyes lock on mine.
“Katie, the world won’t end if you don’t get into Yale.”
“I don’t want my parents’ life.”
“There are a thousand ways to have a different life. A million! Yale is just one. Just one.”
Brainzilla looks out the window. She’s in a semiprivate room, but there’s nobody in the other bed, so she has it all to herself. Outside, the sky is pale blue, and the sun shines on the icy white below, making the trees sparkle.
“I love you, Kooks,” she says. “I even love that you’re wearing the Snuggie I gave you.”
I reach for her hand. Her elegant manicured fingers intertwine with my ragged ones. “I love you, too,” I tell her.
Then we settle into the kind of silence that you can only share with a best friend.