Wicked Restless (Harper Boys #2) (15 page)

I suddenly wish I had worn something prettier—something that would at least give them something to look at rather than the black pants and navy blue blouse with the thin gold necklace dangling between the pockets. I’m with it enough to remember the pencil in my hair, and I pull it out quickly, tucking my twist of hair to one side over my shoulder. I didn’t even wear tall shoes. I’m in flats, because I was afraid I would have to walk up steps to the stage. Seems my youth and upbringing has worn off on me—always minimizing hazards.

I don’t know why, but when I step to the podium, that thought rushes through me. That word—
hazards
. And then all I can think of is that day with Andrew, of skating, and the time I let go of his hand and stood on my own. The day I laughed at hazards, and begged my parents to let me just have this one thing—a day to be young on the ice with him. When I look back out over the crowd, my nerves feel in check. I place the cards flat in front of me, no longer feeling the urge to have to look at them. I know my story. I know it well.

“My name is Emma Burke, and I was born with a congenital heart defect. Usually,” I pause, smiling at the thought I just had, “I have to really dumb it down for people when I explain it to them. But this isn’t that kind of room, is it?”

I wait for a few seconds as the crowd gives in and laughs, a sense of comfort settling into my chest. I glance back at Miranda, who smiles in support, nodding—acknowledging all she and I have been through together.

“I was diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. For those of you who are here with your medical-jargon-loving dates and aren’t quite sure what that means—basically, I was born with half a heart. One side worked…and the other was more than just lazy.”

I get a few more chuckles from making fun of my stupid infant diagnosis. It owes me a few laughs—it’s stolen enough over the years.

“By the time I was eight, I had three surgeries. Yep…” I say, pausing, lips pulled together in an accepting smile. “All the big ones. You know…Norwood, Glenn, Fontan…Larry, Moe, Curley…”

The audience gives in completely now, their laughter the kind that people passing by outside could hear. I glance up and into the eyes of my new friend, the one with the sexy tie and touchable beard. He’s smiling and laughing, too. For some reason, that makes me feel even more comfortable.

“Things were going well. I had a forever-good excuse to get out of running laps in PE. I had to get some exercise, but never anything like running. I could do less vigorous things, like simple tumbling or dancing. I’m horribly uncoordinated, so trust me—dancing was not too much for my young heart to handle.”

Out of nowhere, my arm chills at the memory of Andrew’s elbow looped through mine; my mind hums the sound of the fiddle that played over and over for that glorious week we had square dancing. Even as I stare back into the smiling eyes of my new friendly face across the room, my memory is pulling up the dimples and messy hair of the boy I met when I needed someone most. I don’t think of the him I know now, but rather then—when he was…everything.

“For a long time, I was surviving and beating odds. Then the fatigue got worse,” I say to a nodding audience. They don’t know my story personally, but they all know how my story goes. Stories like mine—they have fuzzy endings, no spoilers that tell me exactly how my life’s going to play out. I’ve always been of the mindset that my life is what I make of it—even if I have half a heart.

That’s what got me here.

“I was a status two. Not sick enough to get the first heart out of the gate. Not even sick enough to get the tenth, really. And my parents, brother, and I spent a year getting called into Philadelphia, from our home in Delaware, for false hope and rejections. All for a surgery and post-op treatment that we couldn’t afford in the first place.”

“I got scared—plain and simple,” I shrug. “I was fifteen at the time, almost sixteen, and looking at a black hole. I couldn’t get excited for things like driving or prom or the Friday-night football game. My girlfriends were all growing up, getting boyfriends, figuring out who they were, but I
knew
who I was. I was too busy being both frightened and hopeful of moving from status two to status one. That fear consumed me, and it could have paralyzed me. Instead…I wrote a letter.”

“I don’t know how many letters Dr. Miranda Wheaton gets. All these years, I’ve never actually asked her,” I say, turning to face my saving grace, my brow pinched as I shake my head at her in question.

She raises her shoulders as she smiles and whispers, “It’s a lot.” I laugh to myself, turning back to my podium.

“She says
a lot,”
I say, garnering a few chuckles from the crowd. “Well, I don’t know what it was that convinced her to open mine, read it, and then fly all the way to Delaware to meet with me and my parents in person, but I’m sure I’ll never be able to repeat the magic of those words in my letter again. I hope I never have to.”

“I was Dr. Wheaton’s twenty-first donated surgery. As she said when she met with my family months before it actually happened—the wait for a new heart would still be long. And there would still be false starts. But Chicago was where I needed to be.

“So we moved. And I homeschooled for the first few months in the city while my parents looked for work, and a suburb we could afford. I spent those early weeks waiting for the call—for a heart—at home. But part of being a status-twoer, is not being sick enough
not
to want to leave your house—or, if you’re a teenager, to be somewhere with friends. So I went to school, and life…it went on—the safety net of hope that Dr. Wheaton swore would come there to catch me when I fell.

“On November first of my sophomore year of high school, that net…it worked,” I smile, no longer registering the fact that I’m in front of anyone at all. “There was a heart, and it wasn’t right for anyone above me. But it was perfect for
me.
I was pulled from school, and in surgery in less than three hours.”

“Dr. Wheaton is sitting up here next to me tonight, thanks to her generosity. I don’t take it lightly, and I hope one day I get to stand at the operating table with her, assisting and learning, as we give a gift like this,” I say, my hand clutched against my heart—my second heart, “to someone else. It is an honor, distinguished guests, to present to you Miranda Wheaton…this year’s recipient of the S. Holden Taft Award.”

The applause erupts quickly as everyone gets to their feet. Dr. Wheaton hugs me as we exchange spots. When I get to my seat, the enormity of everything catches up to me, and breathing begins to feel difficult.

It’s a panic attack. I know them. I don’t have them often, only when I let myself really stop and think about…well…my life. Usually, I’m just working hard, studying, applying for something—pushing. Always pushing. It’s when I stop that I realize—
holy shit, I’m alive
.

I’m sitting in a chair at the end of the row, so as Dr. Wheaton begins her talk, I excuse myself to the small curtained area to the side of the stage, and around to the wall behind the rows of dinner tables. There’s a water station, and my hand is shaking as I guzzle cup after cup.

“You probably need to breathe more than you need to drink,” he says. My IT guy is also my emergency medic. So far, he’s getting all the hero roles, and I’m only technically-inept and skittish. I should be more embarrassed, but I’m to overwhelmed, so I nod in agreement, handing the small paper cup to him and raising my arms above my head to open up my lungs.

“Breathe in until she looks to the left,” he whispers, now leaning against the wall next to me. I glance from him back up to Miranda, noticing that he’s right—she has a pattern to her speech. She starts at one side of the room, then switches topics, takes a breath and moves to the other.

I breathe with her on every turn—in several seconds, out several more. Eventually, this routine becomes kind of funny, and it makes me giggle. I breathe through it though, still feeling flutters in my belly from nerves. Unless…the flutters are from something else.

“When I had to give my first dissertation…this is how she told me to deal with the room,” he whispers next to me. “Divide it in half to make the crowd smaller. Thing is, I gave my dissertation to a table of seven people. Not a lot to divide, and frankly…I would have given anything for it to have been more crowded or noisier.”

I look at him, still breathing, but now on my own.

“When it’s a small room like that, you can totally hear when someone writes something down. Screws with your head,” he smirks. He’s playing it cool as if we’re just two people who like to stand off to the side—as if this is where we’re supposed to be.

I turn my head to watch the end of Miranda’s speech. She touches on the topic of me once more—at the end—when she lets everyone know about how I wrote her a second letter, after my surgery, telling her I had every intention of walking in her footsteps. She makes a joke of it, of how I was right, and it didn’t live up to the first one I wrote. But then she talks about how I beat out more than seven hundred other applicants for her mentorship, and my smile slips, because I’m sure everyone’s thinking about how I probably didn’t deserve the slot, that she picked me because she felt bad, or she thought I had a great story. Sometimes I let that doubt eat at me, and I feel a little inadequate. It gets a lot of applause today, though, and most of the room turns to look at me, so I plaster the smile back in place.

“Just keep breathing,” my mystery friend whispers from behind his hand as he pretends to run it over his beard. When the dean takes over at the podium again and begins recognizing others in the audience, my friend nudges me to get my attention, then nods over his shoulder, toward the double doors to the right of us. I follow him out quietly, and allow myself to sigh loudly, my lips flapping and making a motorcycle sound.

“Wow, you were really holding a lot of that in, huh?” he chuckles.

“I guess I was,” I say, feeling the threat of my chest tightening again now that we’re out in the hallway alone. I look down at my hands, which are clutching my purse hard, my knuckles white. I breathe out a short laugh and relax my hold.

“I’m Graham, by the way,” he says, his palm out, waiting for mine, which is clammy, and I’m embarrassed to touch him, but I do anyhow. When our hands meet, I notice more than I probably should just from shaking someone’s hand—like the fact that there’s a callus at the base of his fingers, and his nails are kept short, and his palms are unusually warm for the coldness of the room.

“Hi, Graham. I’m…Emma,” I start, squinting my eyes as I cut myself off with a shake of my head. “You know that already though, I guess.”

“Yeah, I got that from your speech,” he chuckles, leaning into me enough that his arm brushes against mine. “Which…nice job, by the way. I think you might have stolen her thunder.”

“Thanks,” I say, my face flushing and my lips twitching with the pressure to smile. The doors next to us push open before I can say anything else, and the crowd begins to exit a few people at a time, many stopping to congratulate me along the way. I’m not sure why—I didn’t win the award. I’m gracious anyhow, though, and Graham stands next to me the entire time.

“Well…what did you think?” Dr. Wheaton says as she steps through the doors last. Her eyes flit from me to Graham and back again. I open my mouth to speak, but before I can, Graham responds.

“It was better than your last speech. You still do the side-to-side thing, you know,” he says, his hands comfortably hung from his thumbs in his pants pockets, his head tilted at her in a friendly way. Something in his eyes is off, though, like while they may be familiar with each other—he’s also challenging her, maybe even baiting her a little.

“Graham, when you’ve been doing it one way as long as I have, you don’t change,” she answers, her mouth twisted, almost as if she’s scolding him.

“Yet you can learn the latest surgical techniques and master them,” he chuckles, nodding before turning his head away. “Funny what old dogs
can
learn.”

There’s a flash of displeasure that crosses her face, but the consummate professional, she quickly masks it, her deep red lips smiling.

“For now. Until I teach someone else,” she says, directing the focus to me. I feel her eyes on me, and my head starts swimming with a little bit of fear and pride all at once.

“Better her than me,” he says, tossing a laugh out, still looking away from her.

“So how do you two know each other?” Miranda asks. I feel my stomach drop, suddenly nervous as my brain slowly starts to put their relationship together. Standing next to one another, it’s painfully clear—but apart, I guess my nerves blinded me.

“I just met her tonight, but…” Graham says, leaning toward me again, his elbow jutting out just enough to touch my arm. I catch Miranda’s eyes as they see it, and I can’t tell if the expression on her face is one that approves or not. “I was gonna see if I could convince her to meet me for coffee tomorrow.”

My eyes grow wide, and I feel like I’ve been thrown into some sort of sick and twisted test. I look to Dr. Wheaton, thinking I probably need her approval, or that maybe she’ll give me an out, telling him it’s not appropriate.

“Just make sure my son picks up the tab,” she says, bending toward my ear.

“Oh, yeah…right,” I giggle. It’s not a cool giggle, but a messy, nervous one, that turns into a choking kind of cough that leads me to have to excuse myself as she says goodbye to her son—her hot son…the one that just asked me out…in front of her…after having an awkward pissing match with her in front of me on top of it all. I’m really not sure if coffee with Graham is a good idea or not, but I’m not sure I have a choice in the matter now.

I spend longer than I need at the drinking fountain, until she’s walking out the main door with the dean and a few of her colleagues, leaving me with Graham, who’s somehow still calm and confident-looking. I don’t think his hands left his pockets once.

“So…coffee?”

The way he sucks in his top lip and raises his eyebrows is, well—it’s adorable, even if his clear need for dominance is a little off-putting. And it also seems to have rendered my tongue useless, because more than a few seconds have passed without an answer from me, and he’s starting to bunch his brow. And now he’s looking at me like maybe I’m a little off.