The walls of the waiting room at the X-ray place were covered in cheery posters with really uplifting and stupid sayings: Don’t Quit Five Minutes Before the Miracle—as if you should know when that might be—and Tomorrow’s Coming, Hang On! There were a few other posters as well, which just had puffy clouds on them. Maybe they were intended to trick us into thinking we were soaring through life, instead of sitting there on these stained couches, waiting and waiting.
I don’t mean to sound cynical, because I’m not. Not usually, anyway. I’m not one of those people who are all jaded and act as if they don’t care about anything and walk around as if they’re exhausted by life. But those posters were killing me.
My mom had let me sleep late, so my dad was already at work by the time I hobbled into the kitchen, which was the only upside of the day so far.
A young boy and his grandmother sat across the room, waiting, too. I couldn’t tell what might be wrong with them; they looked totally fine. The boy seemed to be about eight years old. He could have been this Thomas kid for all I knew.
It was my first experience with X-rays—other than the dentist, which doesn’t count. The guy doing the X-rays was surprisingly young.
“Are you the doctor?” I asked him as I followed him into the small room.
He laughed. “Why, do I seem like one?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “No, I’m the technician. I’ll be taking your photos.” He was super gentle as he positioned my ankle in this weird way, and he had a southern accent that made everything he said sound like honey.
“This looks like a beauty,” he drawled, as if he was talking about a particularly fine vegetable or something. “Must have hurt a lot.”
“Not too bad.” I shrugged.
That sweet-sounding technician then threw this heavy X-ray-proof blanket over my body and raced out of the room like I had a contagious disease. Maybe it was because up to that point he had been so nice, but when the door clicked behind him I never felt so alone in my entire life. Then he zapped me.
The X-rays were negative. That’s exactly what the doctor in the white coat said after she looked at them for a grand total of thirty seconds: “They’re negative”—very medical sounding. Of course I was glad, but frankly, part of me was disappointed. It would have served my dad right if it was broken. Instead, I was just going to have to hobble around on crutches for several days with a bad sprain.
My mom let me stay home for the rest of the day, and when my dad came in for lunch I was in the kitchen eating. He didn’t have much to say to me. What was there to say? The facts were the facts. He sat down beside me and gave me his sincere look. I wasn’t buying it.
“I know you’re upset, Lucy,” he said. “I wish I could change things, but we’ll get through this. You’ll see.”
“It’s okay,” I said. I took a bite out of my sandwich. I just wanted him to go away. “These things happen.”
He just looked at me when I said that. “Well, I don’t know about that, Lucy, but in no way does this affect how much I love you or your sister.”
Up in my room I lay on my bed, staring at the map of the world on my wall. I plan to visit all seven continents and the North Pole, and cross the seven seas. I haven’t been anywhere yet—except for thirteen states, if you count driving through and airports. I’ve stuck pins in them all. I was just finishing the count again when my best friend Arianna texted:
Jumped off the roof and nearly broke my ankle
Insane
Just bored
Typical!
For some reason that remark really bothered me, especially the exclamation point.
Well, if your father had just told you that he had screwed some chick, got her pregnant, and had a kid that is running around in the world you might jump off the roof too!!
I actually considered sending that, but I didn’t. I mean, how could I? I watched the cursor on my phone suck back up the words.
My mom was going to let me stay home from school again the next day since I could still hardly walk, but I couldn’t stand the thought of being around the house.
Then the second I walked into school, it seemed like everyone was looking at me. The crutches felt like this giant blinking neon sign that went on and off with each plunk on the ground, blaring, MY DAD . . . HAS ANOTHER . . . KID.
Arianna had obviously been very busy spreading the news of my little roof jump—I caught a good deal of grief for it.
“Hey, it’s Superwoman—NOT!” this computer geek named Zac said as he passed me in the hall. He thought that was very funny.
At lunch I couldn’t carry my tray since I had the crutches. Ruby, this really big varsity volleyball star, was behind me in line, so she helped me out, mostly because it was the only way she was ever going to get through the line herself. The whole time she just kept shaking her head, as if she was trying to tell everyone that she didn’t approve of my existence and was only stuck helping me because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Eventually we made it to my usual table. Ruby almost dislocated her spine shaking her head again as she left.
“Thanks for telling everyone,” I said to Arianna. I could barely squeeze my foot under the table without banging something.
“I didn’t tell everyone.” She shrugged. “Just some people. And it’s not like no one would have known. I mean, look at you.”
At that moment my crutches slipped from the side of the table where I’d leaned them and crashed to the floor. Everyone nearby looked over at the commotion.
“They wouldn’t have to know I jumped off the roof,” I hissed at Arianna.
“Whatever.”
As if that was an explanation.
“You are way too impulsive, Willows.” Arianna always called me by my last name; why, I have no idea. I think she saw somebody talk that way in a movie or somewhere. “You gotta learn to relax.” She was shaking her head at me, also, not demonstrating a lot of sympathy. If I’d had any thoughts of sharing my real, serious news with Arianna, they evaporated right then. The rest of the day was no better. More snide remarks and stupid stares from people.
That night Arianna texted.
Hope you’re not trying to fly again
What was wrong with her? I didn’t even answer.
The next morning in front of my locker she came up to me. “What’s with ghosting me?”
“I didn’t ghost you. I just didn’t answer your stupid text.”
“It wasn’t stupid, and I’m not the one who jumped off the roof.”
I just closed my locker and hobbled to class. Clearly, whatever flair I had with people was out of sync. The next few days were no better. I started to feel like a freak, and began to give everyone a wide berth. School usually never troubled me too much, but now it was starting to stress me out. I really began to dislike going to my classes.
I also started to fall behind on these interviews I was supposed to be doing for the yearbook. A while ago I had this crazy idea to speak with various people about things that they were not very good at. For example, if someone was a great basketball player, I talked with them about what sport they were the worst at. Or if someone was very outspoken, like the president of the debating club, I asked them what they felt shy about. The yearbook advisor, Mr. Burke, thought this was actually a pretty great idea, so it became my job to interview people—twenty-four of them was the number he decided. Then they would put my interview answers on the yearbook page next to the one with those lame Senior Superlative winners—although, I suppose if you were named one, like “most likely to earn a million dollars the fastest,” you wouldn’t think it was so stupid. Anyway, I had to find about four people a week if I was going to have all twenty-four in time for the printing, but now I started to get behind.
The first day I didn’t have my crutches, we took a field trip into New York to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at the impressionist paintings. We’d been studying that period in art history and we were supposed to find a painting we liked and sketch it.
Arianna was in my art history class, but she was getting her braces off and not at school that day. I actually didn’t care all that much that she wasn’t there. Frankly, I couldn’t really deal with her recent attitude—I couldn’t deal with anyone’s attitude.
I ended up sitting next to Maxine Wagner on the bus. I had sort of known her for years, but had never really spoken to her much or hung out with her before. She rode horses all the time and had no interest in anyone—which at this moment was fine by me.
But by the time we reached the highway, she still hadn’t spoken a word, so just to be polite I said, “How are the horses treating you?”
“I quit,” she said.
“Really?”
“Yup.”
“Wow. Didn’t you ride all the time?”
“Six days a week.”
“What happened?”
She shrugged. “I grew up.”
Of all the answers she could have given, I actually thought this was one of the best.
I nodded.
She nodded back. Then she broke into the biggest, warmest smile I think I have ever seen. Who knew she was capable of such a nice smile?
We had a pleasant chat about the joys of getting out of school and going into the city, but mostly we were both content to just hang out. I spent a good deal of the time gazing out the window. There’s something really peaceful about seeing things zip past, knowing you don’t have to deal with them—just look at them and then they’re gone.
Then we disappeared into the Lincoln Tunnel. I know a lot of people dislike going into a tunnel; they find it claustrophobic or some such. But I really enjoy it. I can’t help but feel that when we come out the other side, things will be different.
There was a lot of traffic in the city, like there always is, but we eventually made it through the park. At the museum, we went through security like we were getting on a plane to nowhere, then we were herded directly up the stairs and off to the left to the appointed galleries. I am not an artist. I thought since the paintings were impressionist instead of realistic they would be easier to sketch—I was wrong. I tried to do the big painting of water lilies by Monet. My sketch was a mess. It looked like a bad necklace with large teardrops hanging off it.
I didn’t expect it to be any good since I’m generally so bad at artistic stuff, but I was surprised how embarrassed by it I was.
“Yours is the only one worse than mine,” someone said over my shoulder.
It was Maxine. She was smiling her big open smile again. Then she held up her sketch, which was of that famous Starry Night painting by Van Gogh. Hers was terrible also.
After a less boring than I would have thought lecture on the “radical reactionism” of the impressionists, we had a half hour to look at whatever else we wanted at the museum. Maxine and I went to the Egyptian section, not because I had any real interest in it, but because it was the only place I knew. When I was little, my family used to go to the museum occasionally and I remember I got freaked out by the mummies. This time they just seemed really sad. Those poor people didn’t have any place to eternally rest. When I die, I do not want my coffin sitting in some museum, not that any museum would want my coffin. I would like to be under a tree on a hillside, or better yet, cremated and scattered somewhere that holds deep meaning for me. I haven’t found a place like that yet, but when I do, that’s where I will want to be scattered. At sunset.
For some reason I noticed this mummy tucked over in the corner, behind glass. It was really small; it must have been a young person—perhaps an eight-year-old boy.
“What are you staring at?” Maxine asked.
“Nothing.” Were thoughts of this Thomas kid now going to pop up everywhere I went? That was all I needed.
The truth is that most of the mummies were fairly small. They must have been pretty short in ancient Egypt. I should have been born then—I would have been average height. Of course, I probably would have been some slave who had to carry water through the desert under the blistering sun to the other slaves who were building pyramids or the Sphinx or some such ancient ruin.
But on the off chance that I was actually royalty, my exalted status might have come in handy. Back then life was cheap, and if you were a nobleman you could get away with killing just about anyone you wanted to kill. And there were one or two people right about now that I wouldn’t have minded seeing dead.