I’m sitting in a hospital bed, basically unable to move, but my heart is pounding like that feeling I get right before we have a race. It’s not a good or a bad feeling. It’s a combination of excitement and dread.
Lucie is coming. So is Mrs. Vaughn.
I can feel the moments ticking by. I used to feel that too on race day: the extreme strangeness of moments that are here and then gone. I get so nervous waiting for things to happen. When I’m alone and in my head, it’s almost unbearable.
But not on race days anymore, because a team of girls who have spent all morning making French braids and eating peanut butter and spoiling Lucie’s foster dogs could drown out any introspection. Mostly I like to be alone, but sometimes it’s nice to be on a team.
Team is such a funny word in cross-country. It’s not really a team sport, not like soccer or baseball. Mrs. Vaughn’s motto, “Everyone runs their own race, but we are stronger when we run that race together,” is such a bad motto that we all make fun of it every year. We even put it on our T-shirts ironically, which is fine because Mrs. Vaughn is in on the joke. One time she told me: “Yep. It’s super-corny. But the reason you guys love to hate it so much is because you know it’s true.”
Our cross-country team is a weird cross section of people who weren’t good at anything but have to play a sport and real athletes who play a spring sport and need something to do in the fall. That’s my best friend, Lucie. She’s a soccer star all spring. And then there are people like me who are not even slightly interested but who are awfully fast anyway. It’s totally different than real sports because no one gets cut.
We do a few cool things as a team. Pizza parties. Sleepovers. Running, of course. Every summer we take a bunch of shelter dogs on a run. I didn’t really like it at first: the summer before freshman year, the summer I met Lucie, I tried to fake sick but my parents made me go. I ran with a dog who kept trying to bite me. I’ve had bad luck on our annual puppy runs. Lucie loves it, though. Her parents have let her foster every dog she’s run with. We like to dress up her dogs as superheroes and take pictures of them and make Twitter accounts for them so they can talk to one another even after they get adopted. She has a house full of pets because she has to take home every stray she touches, if only to make sure that it finds its forever home.
It’s kind of what makes her a good friend and a good leader: she doesn’t need a reason to like you, she just likes you out of the box. She’s a good person. She thinks everyone she meets is a good person too. Even me.
I don’t want Lucie to see me like this.
I don’t want anyone to see me like this.
I close my notebook at five minutes to nine. I’ve been dreading this. But it’s here now. Time marches forward even if you wish it would stop.
As predicted, Lucie and Mrs. Vaughn are outside my door the split second visitors are allowed. Mrs. Vaughn asks a lot of technical questions about my summer reading, which I definitely intend to complete, and Lucie tells me all about the practices I’m missing.
It becomes clear that none of us are going to talk about the fact that I’m in a hospital. Mrs. Vaughn is sporting her worried parent look, and Lucie is cool enough to know what you do and do not say in mixed company. We are at a standoff: Mrs. Vaughn won’t ask parent-y questions in front of Lucie, and Lucie won’t ask friend questions in front of Mrs. Vaughn. Result: awkward, stilted silence.
“I bet this will cheer you up. Henry sent you a present,” Lucie says. She withdraws a small box wrapped in blue paper with Scotch tape coming undone on all sides. A classic Lucie job. She plays bass, which is good for her “gross club fingers,” as she calls them.
I rip the paper right in front of them. I’m usually much more secretive—that’s my family’s favorite word—but I want to know. I want to somehow find out what Henry knows…if he knows about George. I love Henry more than any other real person alive. He’s the only real person I’ve ever been in love with. If he ever finds out about George, it will kill him, and that will kill me.
It’s a little blue iPod shuffle. The clippy kind.
“Since I had to put the songs he picked on it and I had to wrap it, it’s basically from both of us,” Lucie says. “Unless you don’t like it. In which case it is strictly from Henry.”
“I love it,” I say.
With a boy like Henry, the ultimate show of trust is plugging your phone into the speakers on random. I only have cool music on my phone. He’d never say it, but someday he’ll see me for what I really am, and he’ll realize that he doesn’t love me, he just feels obligated.
“Can you tell him thank you?” I ask, cradling the little iPod in my hands like a broken robin’s egg.
“He’ll be home in a few days. You can tell him yourself,” Lucie says. I must look mortified because she continues: “You look totally fine. Really. Maybe you could call him. He’s been trying to reach you. He’s been texting me like crazy.”
She flashes her phone at me. I can’t read it that quickly, but I see my name over and over on the screen.
“I don’t have a phone,” I tell her, but I know he’s been calling the hospital. The nurses say, “There’s a young beau calling for Miss Sadie,” and I always say I’m asleep and I’ll call back later. I’m afraid to talk to him. I can’t give anything away. He’s too good a guesser.
Like this: I love mixtapes. I’ve never told Henry. But he knows because he watches. It’s the difference between someone who can remember facts about you and someone who is in tune with you.
When I was little, my parents made a mixtape for road trips on a real cassette tape. We would be in the car for ages, and I made them play it so many times that it didn’t even have a title, it was just The Tape. When they would get tired of it and turn it off, I would get so mad. I threw epic temper tantrums. I never get mad like that anymore. I just fade to black.
It was a Beatles mix because back in the day, my mom was a Beatles superfan proto-fangirl, pre-Internet style. I kind of think my dad slipped in on a vague resemblance to Ringo Starr and a Polaroid of him holding two drumsticks midbeat in his high school band. (I’ve seen it. He looks one hundred percent as lame as you are picturing.) He liked the Beatles too, and that’s how Mom and Dad got into doing these local radio shows about cars and music. They’re such nerds. You should hear my parents talk about the merits of two basically identical Mustangs, or make a top-ten Beatles list.
I always count myself extremely lucky that Dad’s rational, mechanical approach to life nixed such baby names as Prudence and Jojo. That’s right: Mom almost named me Prudence, and I would never have forgiven her, and Dad will still never let her live it down. Sadie was a compromise. Though honestly, I think Sadie is pretty much unacceptable. Sadie is a good name for an obedient golden retriever.
Sometimes I like to imagine what my life would have been like as a Lucy. That’s my favorite Beatles name. And yes, my best friend’s name is Lucie. No one would ever call her Lucille. But Sadie doesn’t shorten to anything good.
Lucy is such a cool name. I can imagine who Lucy Black would have been so easily. Lucy’s hobby is horseback archery. Lucy paints detailed portraits of Humane Society dogs. Lucy is in calculus this year instead of precalc, and plays electric violin.
If Lucy were lying here, she’d be dying. She’d be a shark bite victim or maybe have been wounded pulling a stranger out of a burning car about to explode. Something cool. She wouldn’t have a broken leg.
For better or worse, I am just Sadie. I think a name says a lot about you. Your name is kind of like your destiny—people make all kinds of guesses about you because of your name. Doesn’t that seem too much like fate?
Anyway, I don’t really listen to the Beatles anymore. The Tape, the one I loved so much, was falling apart, and the sound had deteriorated, but it was still my favorite until I lost it: it got eaten by Old Charlotte the summer before ninth grade. It survived a car crash, but it couldn’t escape its fate. That pretty much ended the Beatles for me. My parents listen to NPR now. I don’t know about at work, but they don’t listen to rock and roll at home. I miss that tape sometimes. Every single song was magic. I listened to it so many times that it felt like my own thoughts.
Lucie coughs loudly, and I remember where I am. The room pulls into focus and my thoughts recede. Mrs. Vaughn is looking at me, very concerned.
“I’ll call as soon as I have a phone,” I say, and Lucie starts texting Henry. This is so awkward. “Thanks for visiting,” I tell Mrs. Vaughn. She nods, but that uniquely annoying look of parental concern does not leave her face.
“I’m going to go chat with your parents. It’s good to see you, Sadie. Lucie, come find me when you’re ready.”
She leaves us and Lucie laughs, snapping her fingers in front of my eyes to wake me up.
“God, sometimes I think you’re secretly a stoner, you’re so moony,” she says. She jumps up and starts rummaging through my stuff. Lucie and I never hang out in my room because she cannot help but rummage everywhere she goes. My room is a disaster of dreams, and she finds clues too easily.
Lucie’s room is military-spotless exactly once a week when her mom checks it, and then it’s like a bomb made of sports bras and video games and Quidditch and bass guitar exploded right on her bed. She’s been the bass player for Henry’s band, Brother Raja, since the very beginning, and so we usually hang out at her place before they practice, or after we go running. I find her stories all over her room. She loves to tell those stories, one for every clue I find. I know I have too many secrets to let her find mine.
“So,” she starts, “like…you know this is a psych ward, right?”
“Yeah,” I say. But she doesn’t look embarrassed. She’s super-excited.
“So cool. So, so cool.”
“It’s really not. I mean, it’s just a mandatory hold. It’s not like I’m supposed to be here or anything.”
“Oh, I get it. But still. It’s so cool. It’s like we’re behind the scenes in a scary movie. What do you do here?”
“Uh…color. Watch TV. Read. Talk. That kind of thing.”
“So basically what you do at home.”
Lucie is always talking, always moving. She’s always working on a project or running from practice to practice. I can see that being trapped like I am would drive her crazy.
I like to hang out with her between all her missions because there’s always something to help with: a poster that needs painting, or a guitar that needs stringing, or some drama with her other friends she wants to vent about. Sometimes I listen to her try out songs, and it makes me happy that she cares what I think. She makes me feel useful. I’m a good sidekick.
“What are you working on?” She points to my notebook.
“Oh. I’m supposed to be writing a story. There’s a lot of kindergarten tasks here.”
“What kind of story?”
“I don’t know. A ‘true’ story, whatever that means.”
I really don’t know what that means. It’s one of the tasks Roberts has extracted from me in order to secure my release. She asked me to write “one true story.”
“What if I can’t tell the truth?” I asked her.
“You’ll find a way. There are a lot of ways to tell the truth.”
I probably rolled my eyes.
“You love going to museums, right? You like art?” I shrugged. I like museums: walking around and stepping through frames to other worlds. Art is somewhat incidental to my liking of it.
My indifference took some of the “cool doctor” wind out of her sails, but she plowed ahead anyway. She pulled out her phone and swiped through some pictures. Then she showed one to me. It was Van Gogh’s last self-portrait: the swirly one. I think his eyes are so beautiful and sad. Supposedly his final words were “The sadness will last forever.”
“So what do you think? Is this true?” Roberts asked. I shrugged, and she took back her phone.
“You might say it’s not realistic, but it’s true,” she said. “How about this?”
She flashed what I could only assume was a big Pantone swatch of Rothko at me.
“I dunno. I guess if you like that kind of thing.”
“Rothko was trying to tell a big truth, in his way. He was obsessed with truth. The point is, you can tell the truth in a lot of ways. I want you to tell the truth however you see fit.”
This, to me, seems like a lot of ridiculous art therapy bullshit on the level of teaching angry girls to ride horses, but I nodded because I wanted her to go away.
“I won’t read it if you don’t want to show it to me,” Roberts said sweetly. “But I think seeing it yourself would be good. So try to find it. The truth.”
I really, really dislike this project.
Lucie is staring at my notebook because I zoned out again and I happen to be staring at it too. This time, she looks a little annoyed.
“Where are you?” she asks me.
“Huh? Oh. Sorry. You know, I am basically a stoner right now,” I say. “Pain drugs. So high.”
She laughs at that, and for the moment, at least, my mask is firmly in place.
And I know she wants to read my notebook, but she won’t ask. People hold back all kinds of things you know they would ask you if they could.
“Oh man. Well, I’ll write some new fan fiction in solidarity,” she says finally. “Can you get online?”
“No. I don’t even have a phone.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. I’ll be home in a few days, though.”
“Cool. But I guess you’re not going to be running anytime soon.”
I look pointedly at my leg.
“Sucks. Senior year and everything. Who will be my cocaptain?”
“Vice captain,” I correct her.
“Co,” she insists. Technically, I was voted vice captain. But Lucie wasn’t having it.
“Well, it’s not like I was any good at it.”
“None of us are any good at it,” Lucie says. “But the team misses you. Everyone wanted to know if they could come see you, but I said no. I thought you wouldn’t like that.” I doubt anyone but Lucie even cared about seeing me. They probably just felt obligated.
“Well, it was cool of you to come,” I say. “I appreciate it.”
“I appreciate it,” she mimics. “God, you’re like a middle-aged businessman sometimes. You sound like my dad.”
“Well, I do,” I say quietly, and she gives me a gigantic Lucie hug, which is like no other hug ever because it is too tight, and very lopsided. It’s the perfect hug. “I really do.”
I pick up my new iPod, but I don’t want to hear the sounds of Henry. I hide it in a drawer, out of sight.
I open up a Harry Potter book and start half-reading. I know that story so well, my eyes just dance across the pages, the words conjuring the places I’ve been a thousand times before.
I visit all my old haunts: the Hogwarts library, the Three Broomsticks, Flourish and Blotts. I try to fill in the space all around me with that other world. I try to pave the linoleum with cobblestones and brick myself in with magic. I want to feel George’s hand taking mine, the way he does when he sneaks up on me and suddenly we’re off on an adventure. But it isn’t to be.
I read but the words stay on the page, and I am in a hospital room and my hands are holding a book and I am alone.
You want the truth? The truth is that I’m all alone.
It is on this self-pitying observation that I notice the pixie standing in my doorway. I know who she is immediately. She has foreshadowed herself, written her hints into my story.
Maybe “pixie” is not the best way to describe her. She is a Titan: she dominates every breath I take from the instant I see her.
She is wearing a shark costume, and her arms are crossed and wrapped with pink bandages, her hospital bracelet nestled among a few long strands of technicolor pony beads. Her crazy hair is dyed all sorts of colors, but it has grown way out so that it looks like she has a white-blond crown on top.
“Hi,” she says. “My name is Eleanor.”