I’d really like him to get his hand off me because he doesn’t know me and I’m already having personal-space issues, what with the tubes and the IV.
“Chill, Eve,” he tells me, which I find annoying. The first phrase that comes to mind involves the word “off,” preceded by a word I have absolutely no chance of pronouncing since it includes the letter “F.”
Not in the mood to meet new friends.
In the mood for more painkillers.
Also, my mother calls me Evening and my friends call me E.V. But nobody calls me Eve. So there’s that, too.
“Please reconsider, Dr. Spiker…” The doctor trails off.
“Let’s get this show on the road,” says the guy named Solo. He’s about my age, a junior, maybe a senior. If he does work for my mother, he’s either an intern or a prodigy. “Will you be coming in the ambulance, Dr. Spiker?”
“No. God knows what microorganisms are in that ambulance. My driver’s waiting,” my mother says. “I’ll need to make some calls and I doubt the back of an ambulance is the place. I’ll meet you at the lab.”
The doctor sighs. He flips a switch and my contraptions still.
My mother kisses my temple. “I’ll get everything set up. Don’t worry about a thing.”
I blink to show that I am not, in fact, worried about a thing. Not with the morphine drip taking the edge off.
Solo hands my mother her briefcase and phone. She vanishes, but I can hear the urgent staccato of her Jimmy Choos.
“Bitch,” the doctor says when she’s out of earshot. “I don’t like this at all.”
“No worries,” Solo says.
No worries. Yeah, not for you, genius. Go away. Stop talking to me or about me. And take your hand off me, I’m nauseous.
The doctor checks one of my IV bags. “Uh-huh,” he mutters. “You an MD?”
Solo makes a half smile. It’s knowing and a little smug. “Just a gofer, Doctor.”
Solo gathers up my bagged belongings and my backpack. Suddenly I remember I have AP Bio homework. A worksheet on Mendel’s First Law. When a pair of organisms reproduce sexually, their offspring randomly inherit one of the two alleles from each parent.
Genetics. I like genetics, the rules, the order. My best friend, Aislin, says it’s because I’m a control freak. Like mother, like daughter.
I have a load of homework, I want to say, but everyone’s buzzing about purposefully. It occurs to me my biology worksheet won’t be all that relevant if I’m dying.
I believe death is on the list of acceptable excuses for missing homework.
“You’re going to be fine,” Solo tells me. “Running 10Ks in no time.”
I try to speak. “Unh onh,” I say.
Yep. Can’t pronounce “F” with a tube in your mouth.
Then it occurs to me: How does he know I like to run?
– 3 –
SOLO
So. This is the boss’s daughter.
I’d seen pictures of her, of course. You can’t go into Terra Spiker’s office and not see photos of her daughter. My favorite’s this one where Eve’s crossing a finish line, all sweaty and flushed, with a killer smile on her face.
I glance down at the stretcher. Eve’s got a serious bruise coming up under both eyes. Still, you can see the resemblance to her mom. High cheekbones, big, deep-set eyes. Tall, slender.
That’s about it for similarities, though. Terra’s a total ice queen bitch: frosty blond hair, calculating gray eyes. Eve … well, she’s different. Her hair is sun-streaked gold, and her eyes are this mellow brown color.
At least I’m pretty sure they’re brown.
They’re a little wobbly at the moment.
There’s not a lot of room on the narrow bench in the back of the ambulance. I nearly go flying when they pull away from the emergency room and crank on the siren.
I grin. “Floor it, dude,” I yell to the driver.
The doctor sitting on the other side of Eve’s stretcher sends me a what the hell? scowl.
I know it seems wrong to enjoy this, but still: the siren and the zooming through the streets of San Francisco while all the other cars scatter? Very cool.
Besides, Eve’s going to be fine.
I think.
We’re at the bridge in no time. The bridge. The Golden Gate, still the best, never get tired of it. I fantasize sometimes how great it would be to ride a longboard down the cable. Yes, there would almost certainly be a long plunge to a hideous death. But before that it would be amazing.
I sit with my elbows on my knees, trying to hunch my shoulders forward a little. I have good shoulders, might as well reveal them. I know she’s checking me out. Fair enough, because I’m checking her out.
“Ah ahhh ahhhh!”
Eve cries out suddenly. She’s in pain. Bad pain. So it’s possible she’s not really checking me out.
“Doc,” I say, “can’t you help the girl out?”
He leans over to check the IV tube. It’s gotten kinked, the flow cut off. He straightens it and tears off strips of white tape to hold it in place.
“She’ll be better in a second.”
“Cool,” I say. I lean in close so she can hear me. “I got him to crank up the morphine,” I say, speaking loud and slow.
Her eyeballs kind of roll toward me. She doesn’t seem to be focusing very well. And for a second I think, whoa, what if I’m wrong? What if she actually dies?
All of a sudden it’s like I want to cry. Not happening, obviously—crying, I mean—but there’s just this sudden wave of sadness.
I shake it off as well as I can. But once you start seeing the Big D, the Reaper, sitting beside you, it’s very hard to stop.
“Don’t die, okay?” I say.
Her confused eyeballs are looking for me. Like I’m a target and she can’t quite line up the sights.
So I get close again and I kind of touch her face and aim her head at me. Unfortunately, I lean my other hand on her leg—the wrong one—and there’s some yelling from Eve and from the doctor.
Which makes it impossible for me to say what I had planned to say to reassure her: Don’t worry. I’ve seen things. I know things.
Your mom has powers.
She won’t let you die.
– 4 –
Operation? What operation?
They tell me it lasted fourteen hours.
I wasn’t really there. I was in a weird landscape of dreams, nightmares, and memories—with a little shopping thrown in.
I’m pretty sure I had an extended dream where Aislin and I wandered around the big Westfield Mall downtown on Market Street. Of course, it could have been a memory. It’s hard to keep track of the difference when your blood flows with whatever drug they use to separate your consciousness from your senses.
My new doctor, the one who arrived with the private ambulance, has on a lab coat that reads:
Dr. Anderson
Spiker Biopharmaceuticals
Creating Better Lives
It’s a chic low-sheen black. He looks like he should be foiling my hair, not checking my pulse.
Solo keeps staring at me. Not a she’s dead meat stare. More like he’s an anthropologist who’s just discovered a new tribe deep in the heart of the Amazon.