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Authors: Joyce McDonald

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BOOK: Shades of Simon Gray
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Simon stood up so suddenly he had to grab the back of the couch for balance. “I’ve got to get home,” he said. He crossed the room to the French doors that led out to the patio.

“Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” Liz prodded. “I mean,
really
wrong.”

Simon gripped the doorknob. “Nothing’s wrong.” His voice was flat.

“The smartest kid in Bellehaven High wants to drop out of school and that’s not something wrong?”

Simon stared across the room at her. For a few hopeful seconds she thought he was going to tell her what was really on his mind, when suddenly the movie roared into the awkward silence. Instead of hitting the Pause button again, Liz turned off the TV.

“Maybe I don’t want to go to college. Maybe it’s that simple,” he said.

Liz began nervously twisting a jagged strand of hair. It wasn’t “that simple” at all, and she knew it. But she wasn’t sure how to get Simon to talk about what was bothering him. And in the end, she said exactly the wrong thing. “There’s more to it than that,” she said. “I know you, Simon.”

He yanked open the door and looked over at her. His eyes were hooded, unreadable. “You don’t know me at all. You just like to think you do.”

Liz felt as if he’d given her a karate chop across her windpipe. For the first time in their friendship, she didn’t have a clue what was going on in Simon’s mind. And now it appeared as if she never had. So she let him go. Let him walk right out the door.

Now he was in the hospital, in a coma, and might never come back to her.

Someone had grabbed Liz by the elbow and was attempting to help her up. She stared up into the puffy red face of Mr. Prendergast. His tie flopped awkwardly against the top of her head as he struggled to get her to her feet. Liz was all too aware that she was a little overweight, that the size ten jeans she’d bought a few months ago were getting difficult to zip up, but Prendergast’s
grunting made her feel like a whale. She shoved him away. “I’m fine,” she said, scrambling to her feet.

Mr. Prendergast had already called Clyde Zukowski, the custodian, who showed up with a bucket of disinfectant and a mop. He scratched the white stubble on his pockmarked face and glared at Liz as if she were Typhoid Mary, carrying some insidious disease that might wipe out the entire school population if he didn’t get this mess cleaned up fast.

Before the first-period bell rang, Mr. Prendergast had written Liz a hall pass, handed her her backpack, and sent her off to the nurse. But Liz walked right past the door of the nurse’s room, ducked below the glass window of the main office so Angela Beckett, the principal’s administrative assistant, couldn’t see her, and slipped out the front door of the school. She was going to the hospital. And she was going to pull Simon out of this coma if it took every last ounce of will she had.

The clock above the waiting room door ticked toward eight-thirty. If she had been in school that morning, which wasn’t going to happen, Courtney Gray would have been facing a history test. This was the only good thing that could be said for the moment. She was here, in the hospital, and would not be sweating bullets over Mr. Meehan’s exam in first period.

Her father was in the intensive care unit with Simon. She and her father had been at the hospital since twelve-thirty in the morning, after driving through a nightmarish
plague of peepers until they reached the outskirts of town, where suddenly, miraculously, the roads were clear again. The flood of frogs, their incessant chirping, like an onslaught of half-crazed, half-starved baby chicks, had made the journey to the hospital seem all the more surreal. Still, she would have traded this real world, where her brother lay broken and bruised, for that unreal world, frogs and all, in a heartbeat.

Standing by the foot of his bed, Courtney had stared down at her brother’s battered face. Lips that didn’t twitch, eyelids that never fluttered. A bruised, swollen face. A body full of tubes. Clear plastic hoses of various sizes running up his nose, into his mouth, and into his arm, all hooked up to an array of intimidating machines: a respirator to keep him breathing, a monitor with its colored lines bleeping across the screen to let everyone know Simon was still among the living—although barely—and bags of dripping fluids that hung on the IV pole. She was allowed only ten minutes with him, although she had left the room before her visiting time was up, left because she couldn’t stand it another minute. She had headed straight for the waiting room around the corner from the entrance to the intensive care unit.

There were two waiting rooms, side by side. In the larger room were a TV and a table with a coffee machine. Courtney would have preferred this to the other room, which was not much bigger than a walk-in closet and held only six chairs. But a man and two boys were in the larger room, watching cartoons. She was in no mood for the Road Runner.

She had tried the main waiting room across from the cafeteria. It was large and bright, but the huge sprawling palms reminded her of something out of
Little Shop of Horrors
, and to make matters worse, a woman with three small children was leading her kids in some song-and-dance routine. Courtney thought if she heard the woman sing, “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands,” one more time, she’d have to swat her with a rolled-up magazine.

In desperation, she had returned to the cramped, cheerless room with six chairs, all upholstered in a faded beige fabric and soiled with stains.

Someone was paging Dr. Greenberg. The woman’s voice echoed over the PA system, rumbled like a bowling ball down the hallway. Courtney held her breath. Dr. Greenberg was Simon’s doctor.

For just the briefest moment Courtney thought about going back to the ICU to find out why the nurse was paging Dr. Greenberg. But for some reason her body didn’t want to cooperate. She couldn’t seem to make herself get up. She’d had about enough of this. She wanted to go home.
Now
. And she wanted to take Simon with her.

Instead, she stared down at her hands, ignoring the red raw rims around her cuticles, so that she didn’t have to look at the hospital’s mission statement—the only thing mounted on the bare walls—for the thousandth time. She noticed a spot of tomato sauce the size of a fifty-cent piece on her T-shirt, right above the blue bird made of sequins. She ran her hand through her spiky blond hair, realizing as her fingers became tangled that she’d never
bothered to comb it before they left the house. She hoped no one she knew showed up. She looked like hell.

This was all her father’s fault. If he hadn’t been standing in the doorway of her bedroom barking orders at her, as he always did, yelling for her to “get a move on,” Courtney would have had time to pick out something decent to wear instead of grabbing wrinkled jeans and a stained T-shirt from the pile of dirty clothes on her floor.

Right now she wished she had brought a sweater. The hospital was cold enough to give her frostbite, even though it was eighty degrees outside and the air was so heavy you could drown in it.

Courtney reached for a magazine, opened it, and laid it against her chest to hide the tomato-sauce stain. She slid down in her chair, crossed her legs at the ankles, and leaned her head against the wall, right over someone else’s oily stain. Fragments of history—facts temporarily wedged into her brain from cramming the night before—skipped through her mind at random. She tried to second-guess the questions Mr. Meehan would have on the test. What is the Emancipation Proclamation? In what year did Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address? Give three reasons why the country went to war. They had been studying the Civil War this marking period. Right now it was a whole lot easier to think about a war that had torn apart the nation than about her brother.

Although she would never admit it to anyone, sometimes Courtney thought Simon was all that stood between her and the loony bin. He was the buffer between her and their father. Her father drove her nuts. He was always on
her case about something these days. She spent a good deal of her energy finding ways to avoid him.

The past Thursday, two days before the heat wave struck, Simon had come across her smoking pot behind the garage by the woodpile. He stood there with his hands in his sweatshirt jacket, looking more like one of her freshman friends than a high school junior. But he didn’t freak out or anything when he saw her. Not like their dad would have. Instead he sat down on the ground next to her, leaned back against the garage wall, and stared up at the overcast sky.

Courtney’s instinct was to squash the joint into the mud and claim it was only a bidi, mango flavored, not even a real cigarette. But she didn’t want to waste good pot. Instead she kept her gaze aimed straight ahead, as if she hadn’t even noticed Simon.

Beyond their backyard was an open field, and beyond that, the cemetery where their mother was buried. A large sycamore spread its bony arms above some of the headstones as if it wanted to gather them all up in one swoop. It was too early for leaves, although buds had begun to appear.

When the joint was too small to hold anymore, Courtney squeezed the lit end with her thumb and forefinger in short, quick nips, then put the roach in her pocket.

With his eyes on the distant headstones, Simon asked, “Does it help?”

No one but Simon could know what it was like living with their father since their mother had died. It was like living with a human land mine—the slightest little thing
could set him off. And no one but Simon would understand why she was smoking pot. “Yeah. It does.” Courtney dug her fingers into her scalp and rubbed the top of her head violently, as if she were trying to trench through to her brain. “Sometimes.”

Simon nodded but didn’t say anything more. That drove Courtney nuts.

When she wanted to get on his nerves, she called him Simon the Good or Saint Simon. For as long as she could remember, he’d never gotten in trouble for anything. Nothing serious, anyway. It wasn’t normal. “It’s not like I’m addicted, you know. I’ve only tried it a couple times.”

When Simon didn’t respond, Courtney turned to him with a thin half smile. “Like you don’t have any escape hatches.” She lifted a rock by her thigh, bounced it up and down on her palm a few times, then flung it into the open field. It made a dull thud as it landed in the damp earth. “You want to talk about addictions? What about all the time you spend at the computer? I can’t even get near it. Not even when I’ve got a paper to write.”

“Who said I wanted to talk about addictions?” A cold wind seemed to rise out of nowhere, setting the sycamore branches flailing in a frantic motion and rustling the cornstalk stubble in the open field. Simon pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head.

Courtney thought he looked like a monk.

She knew he wouldn’t argue with her. Not like he used to. He never even teased her anymore. Not since their mother had died a year ago from a staph infection after a routine appendectomy. Nobody had seen it coming. It just
happened. One minute she was fine, excited about coming home the following day, and three days later she was gone.

That was why Courtney hated hospitals, hated doctors, hated nurses. She didn’t trust them. But most of all, she hated being there, in that place, waiting to see if they were going to screw up on Simon too.

I
T WAS NOT UNUSUAL FOR PEOPLE WHO WERE OUT
for a Sunday drive, weaving down narrow country roads past dairy farms and fields of corn, to suddenly stumble upon the town of Bellehaven. Expecting to find a continuous expanse of fields and farms, they were rarely prepared for what met their gaze when they crested the steep hill and found, spread out below—as if it had materialized out of thin air like the mythical town of Brigadoon—Bellehaven, with all its Victorian homes nestled among ancient oaks and maples, hidden where no one could ever find it unless they wanted to, or unless they just happened upon the town by accident. If you weren’t expecting anything to be there, the very sight of it could take your breath away,
especially in the spring when all of Edgewood Avenue was shimmering with crabapple blossoms.

It was still too early for blossoms, although the unusually warm weather had teased little buds from the branches.

BOOK: Shades of Simon Gray
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ads

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