I wake up to a beeping. It’s a steady thing that rises above the clicks and hums of the machines around me. The noises bounce off one another like a shitty robotic choir, sounding like Transformers changing from car to robot but glitching halfway through.
My left arm itches, and I throw my other one over to scratch it, only to hit not skin, but a gritty thing, like a woven little blanket that’s hardened and cold. I realize that it’s surrounding my arm, and everything comes back to me. The baseball bat, the Tesla, Jack. Then a groan erupts from my chest, more out of instinct than choice, and I try to push myself up in my bed only to stay still. It’s like I’m some sort of fat slug, too chunky to even move.
There’s a stirring from somewhere in the room, a rustling of papers and asses getting off the couch, then a hand on me. Beth’s hand. Her long fingers wrap around my good arm one by one as her face comes into focus. It’s a blurry thing at first, her features fading in and out of fuzzy little circles. Her hair is pulled loosely together in a dark, haphazard bun on top of her head, and I realize it isn’t her at all. Not her blue eyes with the green ring around them, and not her blonde hair.
“Jack,” Lauren says. Her eyes gloss over with tears, and her lower lip starts to tremble. “You’re up.”
I try to swallow, but my mouth is dry. Lauren leans over the bed and wraps her hands under my shoulders, sobbing into my chest and grabbing at handfuls of my hospital gown.
“I’m so sorry,” she cries.
I lift my arm to hug her back, but there isn’t anywhere to put it. She has my good one pinned, and, in my cast, I can’t move the other one that well. I know I should say something, but I can’t put a sentence together. My mind’s so full of everything that happened that I’d almost forgotten that Lauren cheated on me, or that Lauren existed at all. It’s like everything I ever thought or felt about her has been replaced with Jack and S.A.M. and, well, Beth.
Lauren lets go of my shoulders and pulls away, cupping my face in her hands. Her cheeks shine red now, and her makeup runs down them in little black and gray rivers that look like a map of a mountain or gorge. Her hands aren’t calming like Beth’s are. They’re hot, her fingertips pressing into my cheekbones as she stares at me and sobs. Her touch makes me want to wrestle my head away.
The sound of footsteps draws closer from behind her, and my brother appears. He’s wearing an Incubus T-shirt and glasses, and his hair’s a tangled mess atop his head, showing the hints of the receding hairline he started to develop after med school.
“That’s an expensive stunt you pulled,” he says.
I force a smile, expecting my black eye to sting, but it doesn’t. “Sorry. I never heard it coming.”
He shrugs, but his eyes narrow. “You have a broken arm and a concussion to show for it, so I guess I’ll let you off the hook. Plus, they let me pick the color of your cast.”
I run my fingers over the cast again. It’s bright pink, like something out of a glow-in-the-dark mini golf course. Across my forearm, Brian’s written in big, choppy black letters:
TESLA: 1, JACKASS: 0
I cough up a laugh. “Glad you were concerned.”
“I’ve seen worse,” he says. “The real miracle is that you didn’t kill the cat.”
At the mention of Jack, my eyes go wide, letting me see the room for the first time. The Purdue game’s on TV—they’re up 14-7, though the announcers don’t think they’ll hold it—but, otherwise, it’s all vanilla. The walls are cream, the trim white, the sheets white, the blinds white. Hell, even the machines I’m hooked up to are cream or white. The only thing that looks like anything is the paper towel dispenser, which shines metallic on the wall.
“Where is he?” I ask. I lift my head an inch or so off the pillow, turning from one side to another. My neck feels like a rusted support beam about to break, though, so I give up. “And where’s Beth?”
Lauren bites her lower lip and crosses her arms. She side-eyes Brian, who forces a small, closed-lip smile.
“Beth’s at the house,” he says. “We’ve sort of been taking shifts.”
Lauren puts her hand on my arm again. “What’s important is that you’re—”
“What about Jack?” I ask.
Brian and Lauren look at one another, reminding me of how Brian and Beth looked at each other on the porch when I told them about Kenny and S.A.M. Without either of them speaking, it hits me that Jack might have gotten away, and the memories of the bat, the car, and Mark’s room all boil up, spilling onto the surface. I start to feel my face going red, my eyes tearing, my lip trembling. I picture steam erupting from my ears like it does in cartoons, so I take in a slow breath through my nose, then hold it. Exhale.
“Please say you got the cat. You have no idea what I went through to get that goddamn cat.”
Brian places a hand over my chest, as if he’s ready to push me down if I try to lunge at him. “He’s at the house. With Beth.”
A sigh falls out of me, and I sink farther into my pillow. It’s a cheap thing, feeling more like a fat wad of cotton ball than anything else, but it’s all I have. “So what happened?”
The way Brian looks at me reminds of when we were kids and, when even though I was the athlete, he’d stare down on me when he’d kicked my ass or made me tap out. It was a sad thing, like he knew it didn’t have to be this way, and I hated it. Still do, apparently. “I mean, you darted out in front of the car. That’s all there is to it.”
“Where did you come from?”
“I had the headlights off,” Brian says. “Thought it would be sneakier that way. You sounded pretty urgent when you called.”
“And Jack’s okay?”
“Yeah,” he says. “You pretty much absorbed the blow.”
I work back through the few memories I have. There’s the sound of the ambulance, the distant shouting of the EMT running in my direction. There’s Brian telling them he’s a doctor, Beth sobbing as she explains what happened. I rewind a little, and there’s Jack purring against my ribs in the bedroom, Mr. King’s baseball crunching in Wolverine’s face. Then, I’m staring at the Fantastic Four poster all over again. They’re fighting the moldy mashed potato-looking monster, and Mr. King’s bat is pointed right at it as he tells me that the cat’s named after Jack Kirby. That he wasn’t named after me, that I was an idiot to think he was.
I don’t know why I wanted the cat and me to be a thing. I guess it made me feel like Mark tried to keep a piece of me with him, that even though I’d let him down, he forgave me by naming an adorable little furball after me. It sounds stupider and stupider the more I think about it, though, so I stop. Jack Kirby makes sense, after all.
The fact that I’m too sore to move and can’t close one of my fists makes it all worse, like I have enough energy to run a marathon but can’t do anything with it. All I want to do is lunge out of bed, run down the street, and find Kenny, but I can’t. The aching in my back, the needles and stickers on my arms and chest—I’m stuck.
I prop myself up on my elbows. “We have to get him back for this.”
Brian’s mouth falls open. It takes my mind a second to register this, because it’s not what’s supposed to happen. In my head, he’s the cheerleader he was on Mark’s front porch, the one with the balled fists ready to kick some ass.
“I think we ought to calm it down,” he says. He pauses, and for a second I think he’s going to tell me I’m terminally ill. “With the cops and the accident and all, I think it’s time to let it go.”
Lauren sits down on a couch near the window. She’s crossed her arms now, too, and she taps one foot against the linoleum while she stares at the two of us.
“Before all this,” he says, pointing at me as if I’m some sort of evidence, “it was just pranks, you know? It sucked, but the paintball, the glitter bomb—it was all in good fun. But this—you could have died, dude.”
I start to open my mouth, but Lauren jumps in. “What I think your brother’s trying to say is that—”
“I get it,” I tell her, turning my head toward the paper towel dispenser. Now that the shock’s worn off, I don’t want to look at either of them. Before this trip, I’d never really thought of myself as the adventurous type, but here I am, having punched someone, broken my arm, and been hit by a car, all while my girlfriend fucked another dude in my house. I want to laugh about it, but I can’t. There’s just a heaviness in my gut, a sinking feeling that this was all for nothing, that I fell for a trick and wasted my time, that I could be back in Louisville oblivious to my cheating girlfriend but living a quiet, peaceful, and relatively healthy life.
Honestly, I could use a Wednesday Wake-Up from Rob right now, and I don’t even know what day it is.
“This is bigger than that,” I say, still facing away. Half my face is mashed into the pillow, making it sound like I’m drunk. God, I’d love to be drunk right now.
Brian walks around the side of the bed, stepping directly into my frame of vision. He squats down, resting his hands on the bed’s guardrail, and stares at me. He doesn’t blink, looking like our dad used to look at us when we were in trouble. “Look, man,” he says. “I get that this hasn’t gone according to plan, and I swear we’ve all tried to make the most of it, but you have to slow down. The cat, S.A.M.—nobody’s out to get you.”
I start to open my mouth, but he interrupts me.
“Well, yeah, S.A.M. was out to get you. But that’s beside the point. The funeral’s tomorrow, and they’re not going to be thrilled if you show up. So let’s calm down the revenge talk for a while and figure out how to get you in, okay?”
This is the most serious Brian’s been with me in years. He’s normally full of jokes and beers, but his face—his settled eyebrows, narrow eyes, closed lips—is anything but. I imagine this is how he looks at patients when he has to give them bad news, stoic and settled and confident, and, for a second, I hate him for it. I hate how successful he is, with his stupid Tesla and medical degree, and how confident he is that he can admit that he’s screwed up and not think twice about it. I have so many things I want to yell at him, but I can’t, either from exhaustion or not knowing what to say or just knowing I shouldn’t. So I focus instead on his eyes and do my best to keep mine steady, like his and Dad’s, but I don’t have those eyes. I have eyes that, in moments like these, try to look at feet or water stains on the wall or anything other than someone else. I have the unconfident, trembling eyes of an idiot who thinks he can fix things, only to get beat up and hit by a car instead.
I want to tell him to fuck off, that he should have told me to stop all along, that he owes it to me to stick this through, but I can’t because he’s right. I could be in much worse shape right now, and Beth and Brian are the only reason I’m not. So, I say the only thing I can.
“Fine.”