Anything but Ordinary (15 page)

“It’s nice to see you…”
Like this,
Bryce wanted to say. “It’s good to see you home.”

“Yeah.” Sydney rolled her eyes. “Got kind of burned out.”

Bryce was silent. Burned out doing what? She wasn’t sure if she wanted to know.

Sydney spoke up. “Listen, I don’t know what really happened, but I think you’re better off without Greg. None of us are the same as we were before your accident—not even you. If he’s stuck on you, then he’s stuck on the past you. You know what I mean?”

Sydney then grabbed the remote to unmute the TV. Bryce thought about what she had said. Was she really that different from the Bryce of five years ago? She guessed that it was hard to really see yourself, the same way divers could never see their own splash.

So who was she now? As she scooted closer to her sister on the couch, Bryce decided that it was time to find out.

hunder rattled outside the tall windows of the library, spilling into the tap-tap of raindrops hitting the glass. Bryce drifted through the medical aisle, flipping through books full of the anatomy of the brain. Which part did dreams come from?

Were all her visions real?

Before the bachelorette party, she had seen herself dive. She didn’t know if it was a memory or a premonition, but now she needed to know if she could really dive again. Did she have the ability to improve even more? She’d never be an Olympic athlete again—her body had already missed the point where it could have peaked—but she didn’t want to be distracted by old goals. She wanted to make new ones. And it wasn’t just about her body, either. She wanted to start everything again. It wasn’t like before, when she wanted everything
back
. Bryce just wanted everything. Period.

Bryce remembered the first day she realized the visions she saw were real. The strange power she felt as she came to that conclusion. The hum that went through her body as she connected the Carter of her dreams to the one that stood before her.

Carter.
She hadn’t seen him since before the bachelorette party. It had only been a few days, but it seemed like forever. She looked at her phone. Nothing.

He’d always just been around. Sometimes she’d wanted him there, sometimes she hadn’t. But today she wanted him. And she would have to do something about it.

She dialed his number, holding her breath after each ring.

“You’ve reached Carter Lynch. I’m unavailable at the moment, but please leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”

“Carter, it’s Bryce.”

She found herself smiling at the sound of his voice. The librarian gave her a stern look.

More quietly, she said, “I’m at the Vanderbilt Library. Do you want to come here? I figured you might be on campus somewhere. I mean, I don’t just need a ride. I want to see you.” Bryce paused. “I wanted to thank you for the gift, by the way. My phone is dying, so just come if you can. Bye.”

She sat at one of the enormous oak tables and watched the light change through the stained-glass window. She watched the students walk around with their textbooks and messenger bags. She might have been one of them in another life. Maybe she still would someday. She’d have to do something with herself soon enough. She never liked school, but she liked reading.

Maybe she could become an English teacher, like Mr. Schefly, who she’d had junior year. When she had to miss class because of tournaments, he told her she didn’t have to do the regular assignments. He told her she could write about diving instead. But she usually chose to do the assigned work. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to write, it was that she wanted to keep diving to herself. She feared that if she wrote about it, she’d be giving something away.

She watched the clock. Her phone had died.

She wandered through the shelves, looking for him.

It had been three hours, and he hadn’t come.

She went outside, walking around the building, jumping at the sight of every tall, dark-haired guy. There were a lot of them, but not the one she was looking for.

Bryce sidled up to a pay phone, thinking she’d call home. As she put in the quarters and picked up the receiver, she heard, “Hey.”

He was behind her.

She hung up the receiver, barn swallows flying in her stomach.

He walked up to her, his hands hooked on the straps of his backpack. “Hey.”

“Hey.” She pulled off her hood, feeling her hair wind up in coils in the moist air.

“You should really charge your cell phone,” he said.

“I suppose.” They stood in silence for a minute, looking at each other. “But isn’t it more fun this way?”

“I suppose,” Carter echoed her.

Bryce laughed. And when the laugh faded, she laughed again. Together, they walked to his car, standing much closer than they had to be.

ryce sat in Carter’s car with orchids in her lap, orchids to the right of her, orchids in the back. Such is the life of someone who knows a lot of people in the Vanderbilt Medical Center.

The past few days, Carter seemed to always be leaving her to go to the hospital. He had always done that, of course, but Bryce had never really thought about where he was when he wasn’t with her. It got her thinking of all the people she knew there, the people she hadn’t spoken to since she left.

One bouquet was for little Sam (but mostly for Vandalia, his nurse, who often mentioned in a loud voice how much she loved flowers), one was for Jane, who she hadn’t seen since the CAT scan blowout, and the last one, the one in the back, was an apology to Dr. Warren.

Bryce was trying a new thing. Not just thinking good things, but doing them. So many people had helped her, and if she couldn’t be a good girl who did whatever they said, the least she could do was say thank you for all they’d done. Now it was just a matter of convincing herself that setting foot back in the hospital was worth it.

“You ready?” Carter pushed a couple blossoms away from his cheek.

“No,” she sighed, but she unhooked her seat belt and opened the creaky door.

They seemed to glide through the halls of the neurology wing, at least compared to the way she used to move through them. Jane was too busy to chat, but when Bryce handed her the flowers, she gave her one of those soft but strong hugs that Bryce loved.

Sam looked as peaceful as a painted angel, so Bryce left Carter to read him a couple of chapters of
The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn
, and headed toward Dr. Warren’s office.

Dr. Warren was out, but the door was open. There was barely room to set down the orchids. Her desk was covered in pages and pages of type, pens and highlighters scattered across it.
GRAHAM, BRYCE
was at the top of every single sheet. Her heart beat faster.

She scooted a thick stack to the right and set the flowers down.
What, am I her only patient?
No way. Dr. Warren was the head of the department.

Bryce was curious. She picked up one the papers, an image of a brain.
My brain
. There were red circles around certain spots. Bryce could imagine Dr. Warren poring over her desk, scribbling notes on the scanned image, her normally stoic face twisted with worry.

She backed into a corner of the empty, daylit office. Something must be wrong.

But something was always wrong.

Her stupid brain. Things came out of it that constantly baffled her. Strange visions. Impossible sights. Crazy thoughts that made her do foolish things. She swallowed with a dry mouth and walked into the bright hallway to find Carter.

She could hear his voice coming through the doorway of Sam’s room. He was speaking in a steady rhythm.

“‘…she went on and told me all about the good place. She said all a body would have to do there was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever. So I didn’t think much of it. But I never said so. I asked her if she reckoned Tom Sawyer would go there, and she said not by a considerable sight. I was glad about that, because I wanted him and me to be together.’”

Bryce stepped inside. He looked up. “Hi,” she whispered.

Carter smiled, and it took away the balled-up feeling in her stomach. “You don’t have to whisper,” he said.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. You should just talk to him as if he was awake. I mean…” He stopped, getting a funny look on his face. “I never whispered to you. And look where you are now.”

She understood. She remembered. She sat down in one of the patterned hospital chairs next to Sam. “Hey, Sam. Are you liking
Huck Finn
?”

He would be thirteen by now if he woke up, but he looked young, like a little-boy version of Carter. Handsome. Adolescence would have been kind to him. His face was light, unbothered.

“I loved it when I read it for English class. There are supposed to be all these metaphors in it, about politics and stuff. But I just liked it for what it was.”

“That’s strange,” Carter muttered. “His heart rate’s going up.”

Bryce could hear it, too. The beeps went from slow and sleepy to a jumping quick. Bryce looked closer at Sam. His eyelids twitched. Her heartbeat began to match his. Heat shot from her spine into icy-hot streams of pain, but she gripped her chair. She couldn’t feel her hands or feet, but she would not fall over; she knew she was seeing something else.

A riverbank.

Rushing water, two boys in handmade overalls running ragged through the trees in the humid summer air. It was vaguely familiar, but immediately Bryce knew this dream wasn’t hers. Why was she there?

The boys yelled to each other in honey-dripping drawls, the sound cutting in and out like a shortwave radio, something about running from bandits, making an escape on the river.

She smiled at their game. She used to play games like that.

Then she realized, these weren’t her dreams—they were Sam’s dreams. His mischief-making, Huck Finn dreams. The boys tripped to a stop and tumbled down the bank. Their faces turned back up toward Bryce, red-cheeked and beaming and out of breath—the faces belonged to Sam and Carter.

The room returned. Bryce’s heart and head were pounding in pain. Her forehead was beaded with sweat. She felt the blood flow back into her limbs, reviving them.

Carter was looking at his sleeping brother and seeing nothing else, the book open in his hands. Whatever would happen to Sam, Carter was making it better. He was taking Sam on adventures. Tears pricked her eyes.

When they were out of the hospital, the automatic doors barely whisked closed, Bryce wrapped her arms around Carter. And then she lifted her chin up and kissed him, hard.