Anything but Ordinary

• Prologue
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Chapter Seventeen
  
• Chapter Eighteen
  
• Chapter Nineteen
  
• Chapter Twenty
  
• Chapter Twenty-one
  
• Chapter Twenty-two
  
• Chapter Twenty-three
  
• Chapter Twenty-four
  
• Chapter Twenty-five
  
• Chapter Twenty-six
  
• Chapter Twenty-seven
  
• Chapter Twenty-eight
  
• Chapter Twenty-nine
  
• Chapter Thirty
  
• Chapter Thirty-one
  
• Chapter Thirty-two
  
• Chapter Thirty-three
  
• Chapter Thirty-four
  
• Acknowledgments
  

To my brother Wyatt

Farewell, hello, farewell, hello.

—
Kurt Vonnegut,
Slaughterhouse Five

ost divers forget to see the space, the air. You focus on your body—how to make it into a thin board, or curl it up like a piece of spaghetti and flatten it back out. You lift off and you barely have time to think before you hit the water.

But Bryce, she would never forget where she was going when she was about to jump. She would never forget the small eternity between the stone platform and the deep blue below.

“Bryce Graham,” reporters asked her, “only seventeen. What’s your secret?”

She would usually say something easy, something written on an inspirational T-shirt. “Concentration,” she would say. “Focus.” Things that should be said into microphones. But never: “Fear, Ted. Fear.”

That day, Bryce was carried up the stairs by the noise of the crowd. They yelled louder for her than for anyone else. This was her home, after all. Those were people from her high school in the stands, though she didn’t know most of them. The Tennessee fans wore little clothing and were red in the face, yelling and yelling. The out-of-towners wore Olympic Trials T-shirts and fanned their pale faces with programs. One of them had become as red as anyone in Nashville, on account of the heat. He had gone to the concession stand for a soda, a Coke in a sweating plastic bottle.

He watched from his spot at the back of the building, propping the exit door open with his foot. He sipped his Coke, and a cicada landed on the bleachers. The crowd went silent as Bryce crouched at the end of the platform, like a cicada herself.

Bryce jumped. She was bending, coiled, and the insect rubbed its legs together, calling out to any other cicada that might be nearby.

She was bending, coiled, and the man from out of town felt the breeze on his face.

She was bending, coiled, in the small eternity between block and blue.

She was only seventeen. What was her secret?

Space,
Bryce answered, but there was less than she thought, and her tight twist was an inch longer than it should have been, and the inch happened to be on the curve of her lovely head. Her skull jutted over the cement platform, and the weight of her body went falling, falling into the empty Tennessee air.

If you asked Bryce’s mama how long was a cicada, she would answer, “About one inch,” and if you asked her daddy, it’d be the same answer. Bryce Graham’s sister, too, and her friends. Nashville people.

If you asked that man from out of town, he wouldn’t know, but he could hear it calling out into the air, the moment before a plume of blood colored the pool dark red.

eartbeat has been generally faster.”

Who said that? Match sound with image. Lights and metal and movement. A woman’s hands untying something. Sounds but no image. Try again.

“Get her records,” a voice said. “She’s coming—” Before the sound cut out again, the light pooled, brighter and brighter.

This was a game Bryce played. How long would it take for the endless exhaustion to set in? Sometimes she bothered to open her eyes, but it was difficult enough just to remember that she had been around once, being and talking. The very idea made her retreat back into the dark. It hurt to be alive.

But she had been playing sound-plus-image for a while now. Five days? Five hours? Even if it was five minutes, the sensation was a strong one.

Someone’s breath was on Bryce’s face. “Get her parents on the phone.”

Bryce’s parents. She had heard their voices in the darkness, but she could never make out their words. They had touched her shoulder, rubbed her forehead. But Bryce was too tired.
I can’t,
she tried to say.
I can’t move.

“Bryce.”

Bryce could tell by her tone the woman was trying to speak softly, but she wanted to put her hands over her ears. Her fingers twitched at her sides. She opened her eyes. Light flooded into her skull. Colors became shapes, shapes became people.

The smells and sounds switched on like a machine. The acidy scent of cleaner, mechanized humming, metal creaking. A gray-haired woman leaned over her with a stethoscope, blocking the fluorescent lights.

She was awake.

“I’m hungry,” Bryce had breathed, though it was a pain to talk. The room was silent, save for the beeping of machines and the slurping of liquid Jell-O from a straw. She moved her tongue through the sweet substance, relearning the motions of every swallow. The movements were blurry, but everything else came at her with an edge. The hospital room was the beige color of pale skin and seemed to throb. Her mother sat near the bed in an electric-pink bathrobe. Her father stood next to her mother, in his same old gold-and-black Vanderbilt sweat suit, COACH emblazoned on the chest. Their faces erupted in teary smiles as her gaze hit them.

It was all different. Her mother’s hair was shorter, for one. And her dad had lost some weight. They had been waiting for a long time. What had happened?

“Bryce.” The voice from earlier, now softer, came from a short-haired woman in a white coat. “My name is Dr. Warren. Do you know where you are?”

“Hospital,” Bryce said in a dull monotone that didn’t sound like her voice. She cleared her throat. “Hospital,” Bryce repeated in a higher, lighter tone, looking at her parents.

Dr. Warren kept writing on her clipboard. “Do you know what you are recovering from?”

Bryce swallowed. Her throat felt like sand. She could do this.
Push yourself
. “I was asleep.”

Dr. Warren nodded. “You were in a coma. You suffered serious head trauma. In order to heal, your brain eliminated your consciousness for quite some time.”

The dive, Bryce thought, the blinding crack coming back to her in a flash of pain. The memory replayed itself again as Dr. Warren spoke, and for a strange moment Bryce could see herself from the stands, a blur in a colorful swimsuit, falling to the water.

“The good news is that your brain’s healing progress was not as absent or slow as we had thought. We’ll do some more MRIs, but it looks like your cognitive functions will continue to improve.”

“Why can’t I move?” Bryce asked. Beside her, the heart monitor began to beep more quickly, as if warning her. As if her body knew something she did not.

“Your recovery depends on how well your muscles return from extended disuse,” Dr. Warren replied carefully.

Recovery. Her brain was foggy, but the word never meant much to her. She avoided injury. For competitive athletes, there was
could
or
could not
. There was no
recover
. She looked at her hands. They didn’t move much, but they looked fine, a little pale and thin maybe.

“How long was I asleep?”

Dr. Warren looked at Bryce’s mother, her eyebrows raised in a silent question. Her mother nodded at Dr. Warren. The doctor started in slowly. “Bryce, you’ve been unconscious for a while. Some things have changed.”

Bryce felt blood rush to her cheeks. She ignored the doctor’s steady gaze, trying and failing to clench her fists, feeling for the first time the presence of tubes stuck in her forearm.

“Where’s Sydney?” Bryce’s curly-haired twelve-year-old sister was probably taking advantage of her stay at the hospital that very moment, going through her stuff, putting on her junior prom dress and pretending she was a Broadway star.

“Your sister is out,” her father said, crossing his arms.

“Out?” Bryce responded. “Doing what?”

“Syd—well.” Her mother tightened the tie on her pink bathrobe. “She’s…gotten older. We all have, even you.” She laughed a little.

Bryce noticed the circles underneath her mother’s light blue eyes, the gray glinting in her dad’s close-cropped hair. They hadn’t answered her.

“How long—”

She was interrupted by fast footsteps, the squeak of the handle, a bang on the wall as the door flung open. A tall, pale teenage girl loped in. She looked familiar.

Bryce’s mother sprung up. “Not now.” She stood between Bryce and the girl.

“Yes, now! Are you kidding?” the girl responded.

“Please,” her mother said, but it was more like a command.

From the other side of the bed, Bryce’s father said loudly, “Elizabeth—just…” He finished his sentence by shaking his head.

The girl wore fishnets and heavy-soled boots. Bryce glanced at her parents, but their eyes were fixed on the floor. Back to the girl. Dark waves. Their father’s big dark eyes.

Sydney
. The girl was
Sydney
. Bryce’s heart skipped a beat.

Her mother stood over the chair. “Please. She’s not ready. She’s disoriented.”

“Seriously, Mom,” Sydney said through gritted teeth. “Maybe now would be a good time to pretend I’m part of this family.”

Dr. Warren moved toward the door. “I’ll give you all some time.”

“Bryce.”
The girl grasped the support poles on either side of the hospital bed, as if the sight of Bryce made her dizzy. The smell of cigarettes filled Bryce’s nose. She frantically looked for the dark freckle near Sydney’s ear, the one Sydney pretended was an earring. It was there. “You’re…awake,” Sydney whispered.

“How—” Bryce began but stopped when Sydney looked straight at her, mascara streaked on her round cheeks. “How—how old are you?”

“Me?” Sydney landed her black fingernails on her chest. Bryce noticed for the first time a small hoop piercing her lip. “I’m seventeen.”

Seventeen.

Bryce felt like she was underwater, trying to swim to the surface. She’d been asleep for five years? She was…twenty-two?

“Oh, my god,” Bryce breathed. Her blood was pumping so hard it felt like it was trying to escape her fingers. Tears leaked out from her eyes, running down her face. She thought of her calculus exam, the one she’d barely studied for. Olympic Trials. Graduating from Hilwood High. She was supposed to stand next to Gabby. They’d planned it. Greg would be at her other side.

What now?

She couldn’t look at anyone, though they were all looking at her. She closed her eyes.

Bile welled in her throat, and heat grew on her forehead, stabbed by pinpricks of pain. The hospital window was imprinted on the back of her eyelids, the world outside of it changing from night to day, and in another moment she felt the room was bathed in moonlight and sunlight, dusk and dawn.

A hospital room. The shades drawn.

Bryce realized she was looking at her own sleeping form on a strange, distant afternoon. Her family drifted around the hospital bed, looking like they used to. Her mother’s eyes were glazed, as if they had been emptied of tears. She laid her head on the bed next to Bryce’s body. Her father paced the room, his coaching whistle around his neck, anxiously running a hand through his dark hair. Sydney was still twelve years old. She sat in the patterned chair in the corner, her head in her hands, her body shaking silently. Nobody moved to comfort her.

Then the pain that had risen up so quickly vanished, and Bryce was blinking into the glare of the fluorescent lights. Her family stared back at her, still shadows of the people she knew. She wished this older, sadder version of her mom and her dad and her sister would go away and come back as their usual selves. With a pang she thought of their faces as she had last seen them, flushed and beaming above
GO BRYCE!
T-shirts. She had huddled with them in a big group hug. Her dad reminded her to watch the timing on her back tuck. Her mother told her to loosen her goggles, that they looked too tight.

Then Greg and Gabby jumped in behind her, and they were all smiling nervously at each other, their heads close together. Gabby reached to give Bryce’s face a couple of playful slaps. “Focus!” she cried. Greg stretched across the huddle and his lips met hers in a soft, sweet kiss.

It felt like yesterday, not five years ago.

She’d awoken from nightmares before, but…the Jell-O rose up in her stomach as she realized she would never wake up from this.

This was her life now.

“I can’t believe you guys,” Sydney said, grabbing the arms of her chair. “Why doesn’t she know that already? Why didn’t you tell her?”

“Sydney, your input is unnecessary right now.” Their father fumbled for his wallet. “I’m getting one of those crappy coffees,” he muttered and walked out of the room, their mother following, talking in a low whisper. It was the first time they’d so much as moved since she woke up.

Sydney scooted closer to the bed. She continued to stare at Bryce in disbelief, as if at any moment Bryce would disappear.

“Have they told you anything that happened?” she slurred.

Bryce stared. “Sydney, are you
drunk
?”

“Did they tell you about everything?” Sydney pressed on. “About Greg and Gabby?”

“That’s enough,” Bryce’s mother’s voice came sharply from the doorway. She handed her coffee to Sydney. Bryce kept her eyes on her sister, begging her to go on.

“Bryce just woke up,” her mom said in a gentler tone. She sat on the bed, crossing the long legs Bryce had inherited. She brushed hair from Bryce’s eyes. “You must be tired.”

“The opposite.” Her body was heavy, but everything else felt flurried now, like snowflakes that were scattering away, and her mind was scrambling to catch it all. She wanted to move, but instead only her eyes darted, looking at Sydney. “Do Greg and Gabby know I’m awake?”

Her mother reached out to touch Bryce’s cheek. “Let’s just slow down.”

“I agree.” Dr. Warren had reentered, flipping a page on her clipboard. “Though her vital signs are excellent, with the extraordinary amount of cerebral activity that has occurred in such a small amount of time, Bryce is at risk for any number of brain malfunctions.”

Bryce tried to meet her family’s eyes, to show them somehow she was ready to wake up. For good. She wasn’t a piece of faulty equipment breaking down,
malfunctioning
. She was here. She was back.