“I’m going to stay with her during the tests.” For a few moments as Mick’s eyes bored into me, I was sure he was going to refuse, yet again, as he had every other time I claimed it was my responsibility to know what my team was suffering from so I could help, or adapt, or just sit with them so they weren’t alone.
“Why?”
“Because she’s scared, that gel, whatever it is has blinded her, and she doesn’t like doctors, and whatever the fuck is going on you know damn well she doesn’t want to be alone with a bunch of doctors and nurses in a hospital.” I’d paused to draw a breath so that I didn’t let loose with all the emotions that had suddenly boiled up inside of me. “Because she’s my fam . . . she’s my friend.” Mentally I tacked on annoying fucking childish sister, but I didn’t think that would help my cause. After the catatsrophe of a few weeks ago and the lecture on relationships, I was unsure what would help or hurt my argument.
“Go. I’ll ask them to include you as much as possible.”
I stuck out my arm to help guide her, taking her from Chayton with a nod, so that she didn’t have to lean on one of the nurses and pretended that Mick hadn’t been going to say no again.
I didn’t have time to wonder why he’d agreed this time and none of the others.
Maybe I should have gone to eat with the others instead.
I paced back and forth in the small room outside the radiology chambers, debating about whether or not to text Mick. I was supposed to be participating in the tests, at least watching, especially the tests to see if there had be any permanent damage internally, since no one really knew if the chemical substance had been able to enter her body through the eyes, or the pores of her skin. Not fucking being sidelined as soon as they detected an anomaly, a fucking neurological anomaly at that! I’d pulled my phone in and out of my pocket a dozen times in the last few minutes.
Finally, I started typing an angry text, deleted it, and though it saddened me, I started typing one to Waverly instead, Downs’s words from Friday echoing in my ears, but I shoved it back in my pocket when Dr. Nunez exited the room. Damn, he was a handsome man, but right now that thought flicked across my mind and was gone. I loomed over him, even though he stopped a few feet away.
To be fair, it didn’t seem to bother him, my looming, and in a calm, methodical voice, “We’ve discovered the source of the anomaly.”
I braced myself, wondering if I was going to lose yet another friend to the bowels of research like Z.
“More precisely, additional scans determined that Barbe is not the source of the neurological anomaly we were picking up.”
I slumped in relief, a sigh escaping me, thanking the spirits as a I raised my eyes to the ceiling.
“Lukas.”
At my name, I looked back down at him, “Yea, doc?” The softness in my voice and my more usual use of the honorific a reflection of my relief.
Did I imagine a slight hesitation? I must have detected something because I could feel myself tense again as he started to speak, “I need you to go with Nurse Arnoldy so she can prep you for tests. The anomoulus reading was an echo from you.”
The slender nurse I recognized as a friend of Alani’s opened the door along the other wall, and for just a moment, time slid sideways.
I sat next to her as the door opened, and the stocky nurse pushed an empty wheelchair out, and began helping my mom into it. I sat there for a moment, with Stern’s Introduction to Plant Biology in my lap, before I jumped up helping my Mom manuever into the chair, taking her cane from her before sitting back down. Even at age eight I wasn’t that much smaller than she was, and not because she was short. Nurse Tani smiled at me, saying, “Just a few more tests dear, don’t you worry none.”
I blinked and the memory faded, and I sat down into the chair, my mind flooding with questions and my mouth refusing to speak any of them.
Last Dreams 