Give my head a rest.
I wish. I want to tell him that my head feels infinitely better out there than it usually does at home, even after getting bonked by my board. Surfing allows me not to think. Only feel. The icy water. The wind on my cheeks. The movement of the waves beneath my body. In fact, the ocean is pretty much the only place I want to be right now. I refuse to let one weird moment ruin it.
Kai stands and offers his hand to help me up. I take it. And now, it’s all I can think about. What would that hand feel like in my hair? On my face?
“Thanks,” I say, rising to face him. He’s eyeing me with an intensity that makes me panic slightly, afraid that he can somehow read my mind.
“Ouch. You should probably put some ice on that when you get home.”
Touching my temple, I feel a bruise starting to bulge under the skin.
Ahh. Mystery of the intense look: solved.
“Yep. Ice,” I say, nodding.
I look out toward the horizon, where the ocean meets the sky. The afternoon sun is breaking through spaces in the clouds. It’s beautiful and looks like the kind of thing a person might post on Instagram, with an inspirational quote. But in my case, it just reminds me that I’ve lost track of the time and I’m #late.
“I have to go,” I tell Kai.
Being late used to make my parents, at worst, slightly aggravated. Now, if I don’t show up when I say I will, I know they’re worrying about the heart. Is it still beating? Am I lying on the ground somewhere, grasping my chest? I realize I had better come up with a plausible explanation for the welt on my temple (Falling library book? A run-in with a swinging locker door?) and I still need to stop at my neighbor Mrs. Linney’s house to feed her cat, water her roses, and safely stash my surfboard in her backyard shed. Her summer in Europe is convenient for a girl with secrets.
My phone is in my backpack in the truck of my car — a used Honda that my parents originally intended as a graduation gift until it became more of a we’re-glad-you’re-still-alive gift. I make a mental note to text my mom that I’m running behind. But as I pick up my board, something occurs to me: I hadn’t noticed another car near the path on our section of the beach when I parked earlier.
I turn back toward Kai.
“Need a lift?”
“Nah,” he says. “Thanks, though.”
“Where do you live, anyway?” I ask, wanting to know just one thing more about this boy who minutes before was leaning over me, close enough to kiss.
“Nearby,” he says. “See you next Wednesday.”
I swivel my chair in front of the computer monitor in the school library and poise my fingers over the keyboard. I’m supposed to be working on a research paper for my AP Physics class — the one I didn’t get to complete last December when I was busy getting my heart cut out — but instead I’m doing the thing my dad is always warning my mom and me that we should never do: Googling health advice. “The internet is a house of horrors for hypochondriacs,” he loves to say. I wouldn’t consider myself a hypochondriac, but where else am I supposed to track down answers without having to actually talk to someone? Like, for instance, my mom, who, due to her for-real hypochondriac tendencies, would probably rush me to the hospital the minute I tell her that I bashed my head — while surfing! — and then hallucinated a bunch of stuff that doesn’t even make any sense. So, yeah, that’s not going to happen.
But I can’t stop thinking about yesterday. Was I hallucinating? Those images I saw when I was stuck under that wave are now burned in my brain, but why can’t I remember what they mean? And why do I keep waking up to the same horrible nightmare, with my head feeling like it’s been smashed by a brick? Something is definitely not right. Only this time, it’s with my brain instead of my heart.
I type into the search bar: Heart transplant. Neurologic complications.
Okay.
It turns out that auditory and visual hallucinations are not uncommon for heart transplant patients. That’s somewhat of a relief, I guess. At least I know it’s not just me.
I keep reading. Most commonly, transplant patients have reported hallucinations after surgery, while in intensive care on a ventilator. Interesting. Some people describe these hallucinations as “out-of-body” or “near-death” experiences, but these transient symptoms are likely due to the side effects of pain medications, e.g., opiates or benzodiazepines. Hmm. It’s been more than six months since my surgery. More than six months since I’ve been connected to a ventilator. And currently, I’m not on any pain meds. But I was. Could they have caused long-term effects? My eyes back up to the word transient. Temporary. Short-lived. Fleeting. Maybe the immunosuppressants that I’m taking now are triggering my recent symptoms. I’ll have to double-check the side effects listed on my current crop of medications.
I try another search: Heart transplant. Memory loss.
As I scan through a list of medical journal articles and health reporting, something I’ve never heard of before catches my eye: Organ Transplants and Cellular Memory.
I click on the link and end up on what looks like a patient blog or forum of some kind. I start scanning the first entry. In it, Janet, a sixty-four-year-old office manager and soon-to-be new grandmother talks about how she feels like a “different person” following her heart transplant.
After I started getting back to regular activities following my transplant, on a whim I signed up for an art class at the community center near my house. I’ve never taken an art class in my adult life, and never considered myself a particularly good artist even when I was a child. But as soon as I saw the flyer for “Introduction to Still Life Painting” in the mail, I just knew it was something I really had to do. Once I started the class, my husband was floored by the paintings I was bringing home! He even joked that I’d been hiding my secret talent from him for years and wondered when we could get rich selling my work. When I eventually made contact with my donor’s family, I found out that the woman whose heart I have had been a very successful artist. Some of her works are even sold through a gallery in New York! Now, I don’t know if it’s this cellular memory thing or God’s will, but somehow I think that I must have inherited her artistic abilities, that my eyes and hands are channeling her spirit.
Wait, what?
“Hey, brainiac. Can you look at my trig assignment again?”
I’m knocked out of my trance by the voice of Jane Kessler, who pulls up a chair next to my workstation.
Jane, who I had never exchanged a single word with until I got stuck in summer school, is my new friend here, mainly because I help her with math. She scoots closer to me.
“Well? How about it?” She waves her assignment in front of me. “I’ll buy you lunch?”
I think she’s trying to whisper, but Jane is not very good at speaking in a library voice.
I don’t even know why she’s attempting to be quiet anyway. Nobody here cares — not the weird antisocial kid to my left, who I’ve never seen without Beats headphones attached to his skull, or the girl who talks to herself when she types, and especially not Mr. Adams, who’s hunched over his laptop at the librarian’s station, most likely trying to watch the Giants game on mute.