Jumped In (19 page)

“All right, Mr. Graves.”

I turn to go but he catches me by the arm again and says, “Wait, son.” He goes to the kitchen and gets some zucchini bread. It takes him forever, but eventually he hands me a big huge square. I can feel the heat through the foil. “Take it to Leyla.”

He hands me a smaller chunk wrapped in a paper towel. “One for the road,” he says.

Tre and Quintel are waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. I tell them what's going on. They say they'll keep checking in on Graves until they know everything is okay.

We pull out our phones and exchange numbers. They thank me. I thank them back.

 

LEYLA AND THE TRUTH ABOUT THE SCAR

A
S THE BUS SLOWLY MAKES ITS WAY THROUGH A DOWNPOUR
, I think about what
I
was doing on
F
riday night a month ago. By this time, in the early evening, I was buried under my covers, trying to sleep. Trying to block out life. Completely alone.

Now I'm working side-by-side with the go-to girl. And Carlos Díaz. Are you kidding me? And Rupe? My long-lost buddy. And now I'm crossing town looking for Leyla Ibrahim. Who the heck is Leyla Ibrahim? And whatever she tells me about Luis, I gotta go tell Graves and Tre and Quintel and Mrs. Peña and Cassidy. A month ago, I thought I hated Cassidy and I was scared of Luis. And I didn't really know the rest of them.

The bus stops in front of Highline Hospital. I hold my jacket up over my head to keep dry and make a run for it. The information booth is just inside the door. The old volunteer guy tells me Leyla works on third floor north. When I get up there, I ask the nurse for Leyla Ibrahim. She whips her chair back and shouts, “Leyla, you have a visitor!”

Leyla's young-looking. She wears a maroon headscarf, which frames her round, warm face. She smiles a serious smile and says, “How may I help you?”

“I'm Sam, a friend of Luis Cárdenas from Puget High School. He's been missing for a week, and Mr. Graves, this old guy—a friend of Luis and his mom—told me you might know what's going on.”

“Yes, Sam, and please say hello to Mr. Graves for me when you see him. Come this way.”

I follow her to an orange couch in the waiting room. Some little kids are on the floor wrestling and watching cartoons on the TV set. I try to block out their giggles.

Leyla's eyes look up into her head for a second. She's searching for words. This feels serious in a way I know I'm not ready for.

“Sam, how long have you known Luis?”

“A couple months. But I've only known him well for a few weeks. We were working together on this project at school.”

“Luis and his mom are very close friends of mine. When Luis was younger, he was in the hospital for a long time. I saw his mother every day.”

“Why was Luis in the hospital?”

“Have you ever noticed that Luis has a scar on his neck? He had a cancerous tumor removed when he was eight years old.” She says all this stuff about how great Luis and his mom are. I only hear half of everything she says because I'm stuck back on the words
cancerous tumor.

“Where is Luis? What's going on?”

“Last Thursday, Leticia said she found him in bed, home early from school. He was clutching his head. He told her the pain had been coming and going for a few weeks. He didn't want to go to the hospital and even made Leticia wait for him to finish some kind of project and promise him she'd drop it off at school in time. She brought him in for an MRI. They found that the cancer had returned and it had spread. They took him to Seattle, to Children's Hospital. That's where he is now.”

“Is it okay for people to see him?”

“I'm not sure if they're accepting visitors. It's very serious, Luis's condition. You understand this, right?”

“I gotta go.”

I realize I'm still holding the zucchini bread.

“Here. This is from Mr. Graves.”

“Sam, you're a good friend,” she calls as I bolt down the hall.

 

SPILLING MY GUTS

I
'M SO PISSED AT MYSELF
.

Pissed for having been angry with Luis. Pissed at myself for thinking the worst about him. I can't get the image of his scar out of my head. Not just the scar, but all the crap I imagined about it.

I hate myself for the time I spent thinking those things.

Mostly I'm upset that my first friend in a long time is so sick that he might die.

Couldn't he have warned me? Couldn't he have said,
Don't get too close and please don't care about me because I might not be around for long
?

And are we even friends? Really? Why should I feel all these things about someone I barely know? Should I even go to Children's Hospital? Would I just be in the way?

I decide I need to tell Luis thanks. I wanna let him know that saying that poem in front of the class made things different for me. It made it better. And if I can't talk to him, I'll tell his mom.

I wait for the bus.

It takes forever.

I'm freezing. When you live around here, you know about the cold layer of wet that gets in beneath your clothes—beneath your skin—and wraps you in a chill that you can't get rid of because no matter where you go or how much clothing you put on, you're wet.

I finally get on the Metro. It takes me down Pac Highway. When I get close to the spot where Luis dropped me off that night, I swear I can see him up ahead, jumping up and down. Yelling at me with that smile. Making the circle like an idiot.

I make the circle in the steam on the bus window then pull the window down and squeeze through so I'm half hanging out of the bus. As we pass the spot, I wave at him and yell, “Three-sixty, Luis! Three-sixty!”

I climb back in and the driver asks me if I'm okay.

I tell him I feel a little better.

The bus drops me off.

I head down the hill and walk in the door, shaking, soaked from head to toe.

Ginny and Bill are freaked out. They wanna know what's going on.

Through chattering teeth, I tell them the whole story.

I come clean about the fact that I've been a complete slacker at school.

I tell them how Luis moved into my classes and that everyone, including me, was scared of him and thought he was a gangster. I tell them what Carlos said about Luis and his family. I tell them what Mr. McClean thought about Luis and about me.

I tell them how much I'd hated Cassidy for calling us
Luisandsam
and for getting after us all the time. I tell them about the slam poetry assignment and how it was Luis's idea to do it and about how hard he pushed me and about how hard we worked on it.

I tell them about the fight at school. How I assumed that Luis was a part of it and how that made me just as bad as everyone else. I tell them how mad I was at Luis when he didn't show up for the slam.

I tell them about the coffee and Luis's CD and about how it felt to hear my voice echoing off Ms. Cassidy's classroom walls. I tell them how I cried when it was over. I tell them how Cassidy cried too, and about how bad I wanted them and my mom to know what I'd done … and mostly how I wanted to tell Luis and to thank him.

I thank Ginny and Bill for the pizza and ice cream for my birthday.

I tell them how I've been trying to find Luis, searching with Julisa and Rupe and Carlos, and I tell them about what Mrs. Peña and Mr. Graves had to say. I tell them about the banana bread.

I tell them about Leyla and that she said Luis had to finish schoolwork before he'd let his mom take him to the hospital. I figured that was when Luis recorded the poem and wrote me the note. And I tell them that tomorrow I'm going to Children's Hospital to see him.

Bill leaves the room.

Ginny puts her hand on my shoulder. “Go
now
, Sam.” She hustles into the kitchen.

Bill comes back with his car keys and his coat on. He holds a dry jacket by the shoulders for me to slip into. We head for the door and Ginny hollers for us to wait a second.

She comes out of the kitchen with a thermos of coffee, puts it in my hands and scoots us out the door.

 

NO WORDS

B
ILL HITS THE GAS PEDAL HARD AND WE'RE OFF TO
C
HILDREN'S
H
OSPITAL
.

I blast the heat. It doesn't help.

That layer of damp has taken hold and it isn't going anywhere.

We don't say a word the whole way. No sound but the pounding rain and the squeal of wipers bouncing back and forth.

 

MY FRIEND

W
E ARRIVE AT
C
HILDREN'S
H
OSPITAL
and follow the choo-choo train mural down a long hall to the elevator and up to the sixth floor, and we end up in a waiting room with puffy white cloth clouds billowing down from the ceiling.

Leyla said Luis was in room 634.

We get there, and the bed is empty.

No one's in the room.

A nurse comes by. I ask her about Luis, but she says she's just started her shift. I walk into room 635 and see a little girl, hooked up to all these tubes and monitors and stuff. She's sitting up, eating. Her mom is feeding her some orange Jell-O, and her dad is reading the newspaper.

I probably shouldn't bug them, but I can't help it. I wanna know what's going on. “Do you know anything about Luis, the kid who was in the next room?”

The parents' eyes get wide. They look at me like they wanna say something, but they just can't.

My grandpa puts his hand on my shoulder.

The little girl says, “Luis is up in heaven. He was my friend.”

The mom has a tear running down her face. She doesn't wipe it away. Just lets it roll.

The dad hides behind his paper.

I look back at my grandpa and he's biting his lip.

The little girl closes her eyes.

I just wanna scream and break stuff, but I'm stuck frozen in rain-soaked clothes.

“Come on, Sam.” My grandpa walks me down the hall with the puffy white clouds, down the elevator and past the stupid train mural, out to the car.

What do you do next?

We drive home.

Half an hour of windshield wipers back and forth.

Sweesh-sweet.

Sweesh-sweet.

Concentrate on the wipers.

Sweesh-sweet.

Sweesh-sweet.

I count each wiper squeak, hoping the numbers might fill all the space in my brain and keep me from thinking, keep me from feeling anything.

It doesn't work.

As we get out of the car, my grandpa puts his hand on my shoulder. “I'm sorry about your friend, Sam.”

I can't say anything.

I go to bed and stare at the shadows. I listen to the rain pound the roof and I shake with the wet cold that won't leave me. I can't believe this is really happening. I slam my fist into the wall and cry until the tears don't come anymore.