Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781785351877 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Collective Ink |
| Publication date: | 09/29/2017 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Age Range: | 13 - 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Soundtrack: 'Nothing from Nothing' – Bobby Preston
Let's start with the tree.
It was a cottonwood, a wild tree, native to Kansas, not something imported, like a maple or an oak. It was older than the road, and it crowded the curve. But it wasn't dying yet. Cottonwoods die secretly, getting more dry and hollow inside ... you usually only find out when they drop a limb on your head. This tree was still healthy.
We hit it at about twenty miles an hour.
Kim's face whacked the top of the big steering wheel and her breasts hit the bottom of it. She broke her nose in two places and hurt her neck and her back. Her breasts were hideously bruised and later went all bumpy, purple and green.
I seemed fine. Everyone says I seemed fine. Evidently, I talked to people and everything. I don't remember any of that.
I remember Kim had picked me up from ballet class in her mom's fancy new LTD. I remember stopping to get Icees from the 7 Up mini-mart. Icees are like Slush Puppies – tiny bits of ice suspended in sugary goo. I know it was 1974 and I know it was America, but even back then and back there, we knew something about nutrition. Having Icees before school was just plain naughty.
That means they were my idea.
I was buckling my shoes when Kim turned the corner. Her Icee started to slide. She was terrified of spilling Icee on her mom's fancy new velour upholstery. So she grabbed for the Icee and forgot to straighten the wheel ... and, just for a moment, I looked up ...
How can I explain how slowly we headed for the tree? I had time to notice everything, the rough grain of the grey bark, the look of fear on Kim's face. How the sun was beginning to warm the earth. A meadowlark swinging on a strand of barbed wire, its little throat puffed out with singing.
And then my memory goes black.
I remember one moment after the accident. I was crawling up to the road on my hands and knees. The LTD's engine was still running and the wheels were still turning and that Bobby Preston was still singing, 'Nothing from nothing leaves nothing', on the radio.
Then it all cuts abruptly to black again, like a badly-made film. Later, I found out that's what happens when you go into shock. You might still walk around and talk, but you aren't actually processing.
Evidently, we were weaving like drunks all over the road when Bobby drove by, headed to the same play rehearsal. Nobody else was driving around before seven-thirty in the morning, just high school kids like us, with before-school sports and clubs.
It was legal in Kansas for fourteen-year-olds to drive to school and to work and home again. Farm kids could drive around their own land at twelve. All this time later and half a world away, the idea of kids zooming around in tons of metal seems a bit odd. But it seemed normal to me then. So it was normal that Bobby rescued us in his very own snazzy white Monte Carlo with maroon vinyl upholstery.
I had known Bobby and his family forever. They were the local funeral directors – and he lived near the graveyard. He loaded us into his car, dropped us off at my house, and then continued on his way to the play rehearsal. He waited until after the rehearsal to tell people at school about our accident.
Bobby was calm and cool like that: He had always seemed a little cold inside to me, as if he climbed into a refrigerator every night and slept with the family clients.
I had kissed him once during a spin the-bottle game and absolutely nothing had happened except our lips pressed together briefly. He'd reacted with a kind of mild disgust. My feelings would have been hurt, if ten seconds later Jack Clary and I hadn't started investigating the deep mysteries of French kissing.
One of the things I remember about the accident was worrying about Bobby's car – he wouldn't let any of us eat or drink in it. As I helped him half-carry Kim into my house, I remember worrying about blood stains. I only relaxed because I suddenly thought that Bobby's undertaker family probably knew all about how to get rid of bloodstains.
In the next scene, I was sitting on the stairs to my mom and dad's bedroom in the old, higgledy-piggledy house we'd bought two years before. Parts of it were built in brick, parts of it were wood construction. It used to be made of turf ... it was that old.
It had some funky features. The kitchen and the porch had been built before there was mains water, so there was an old well in the porch, which was now the dining room. It was still there, hidden under a square of carpet, and I used to freak out my friends on sleepovers by prying it up and telling them it had a ghost living in it.
I just said it was my mom and dad's bedroom. But that day, it was really only my mom's bedroom. A month before, Dad had dumped us. He'd done it to me and mom together. There was none of the mom and dad sitting on the sofa and explaining it lovingly to the child. There were full-blown rows and plates thrown and nasty things said and I was right in the middle of it, with words like 'unworthy' and 'ungrateful' and 'unsalvageable' being thrown at me.
There were tears and snot and holding onto his legs and begging him to stay while he wrenched himself away and ran to his car. It had been properly horrible.
He'd seen me twice since. Both times he'd wanted to see a proper young lady in tights and a smart dress and instead had seen me with my enormous frizz of nearly black curls and wearing jean shorts, flip-flops and band T-shirts. Both times, he'd carefully explained why I was sending the wrong messages. He talked to me about my mother's politics and why order and respect were so important. He said that 'freedom' was actually anarchy and that identifying with Vietnam protesters, women's libbers and black activists was dangerous and wouldn't get me anywhere in life.
Also, he said repeatedly and with a kind of weary patience, if I couldn't brush the curls and frizz out of my hair, I should keep it cut short.
On both outings, we'd ridden home in total silence.
So the day we hit the tree was already a bad time. The dining room carpet smelled funny, because mom didn't have time or energy to sprinkle the sprinkle stuff and vac it every other day like she used to. It smelled like old people. Kim was lying on it, with her head nearly at the kitchen and her feet on the cover for the well.
I sat on the stairs, watching two policemen try to stop Kim's nose bleeding. They'd seen the wreck, found my address in my handbag and had tracked me home, sure that the people who'd walked away had been injured. They were good cops – they'd done that even before they knew I was Major Eugene DuLac's daughter. Now that they knew, they were being even more careful.
I asked my mom for a bit of kitchen roll. They were using loads on Kim, but I just didn't feel up to getting some for myself.
She brushed by, rushing for something else they thought Kim needed, and said, 'Get it yourself, Coco. Kim is really hurt!'
But I had wanted some kitchen roll because I knew I was about to cough. And I could tell, from my long experience with chronic bronchitis and regular pneumonias, that this was going to be a productive cough, a really productive cough, and I wanted something to spit in.
And then I couldn't hold it back any longer. I coughed. And parts of me came up onto my hand. A gush of blood seeped through my fingers and trickled onto the light blue carpet. I tried to stop it, but I couldn't.
Everyone then turned from Kim to me. For the first time in my life, I didn't actually want to be the centre of attention. I wanted to go back in time to just a few minutes before, when Kim had been the sick one and I'd been the well one who everyone ignored.
My mother thought very fast. She pulled the radio from the nearest patrolman's belt and said, 'Dispatch, this is Diane DuLac. Get me Eugene, quick. His daughter is dying.'
I heard my dad's voice inside two seconds. He sounded pissed off, so mom talked fast.
'We're waiting for the ambulance, but she's already having trouble breathing,' mom said. The latter part of this was news to me, and it made me feel concerned.
I could hear Dad start his siren. 'I'm on my way,' he said.
The patrol car was back at the tree, red lights blinking so that none of the rush hour traffic would hit Kim's mom's ruined new LTD. Before the two cops with us could decide if they should run back to get it, Dad had already arrived, bundled us into his car, and started racing to the hospital.
Kim came, too, I think. All I really remember is mom holding me and us tearing through Kansas City. Dad knew the way to everywhere, always the fastest way. It was one of his things. He'd get cross at mom if she took the long way anywhere, even if he hadn't been with her and had only heard about it.
Knowing Dad was taking me, I kind of relaxed. I knew I'd get to the best hospital as fast as humanly possible. I didn't have to worry about that side of things.
No one had to tell me by then that I was having trouble breathing. My larynx was too busy falling apart to do much of its work of carrying air from my mouth (I was gasping, so my nose wasn't really relevant right then) down into my lungs. By the time we got to the emergency ward, and my dad had left the car in the ambulance place and run in with me in his arms, little pockets of air had started to gather under my skin. I thought they looked like frogs or mice, hopping and crawling in lumps around my shoulders and chest.
The next thing I remember is sitting on a blue plastic chair in a hallway. There had been a gang knife war the night before and the operating rooms were dirty. They were hurrying to clean one for me. I was getting very, very weak. I got a rather familiar feeling about the problems my body was having. I didn't care anymore. I just let it go ...
I had done this before. I had come this close to death when I was just a kid ...
Three summers before I was dying on the plastic chair in Kansas University Medical Centre, I had invited Mari LaBeouf to come swimming at Sun and Surf Country Club.
'Country Club' was a bit of an overstatement. It was a suburban swimming club, with a bar and a grill and a nice big pool with a diving area and a kiddie pool. There was a putting green, I think, and they were putting in a driving range. Still the 'Country Club' part was about as accurate as the 'Surf' part, and we were 1200 miles from the nearest coastline.
Anyway, all my cousins were members, and half my friends, and my hair was never really dry from May until September. One of my cousins was on lifeguard duty the day Mari came to swim.
'Can you swim?' I asked her.
'Oh, yes,' she said.
Reassured on this point, I suggested we play a game. You walked along the slope towards the deep end until you couldn't touch any more, and then you swam to the side. I was tall for my age and Mari was a shrimp. We walked side by side until she couldn't touch and then I carried her until I couldn't touch.
'Okay, swim!' I cried and dropped her.
She couldn't. She panicked. She held onto me and tried to climb to air as I went down.
I came up twice and screamed and waved to my cousin, who glared at me and avoided my eye.
It wasn't his fault. Nobody looks at eleven-year-old girls screaming and messing around in water.
And then I didn't come up any more. I gave Mari an almighty push to the side with the last of my strength. I didn't see why she should die, as well. I then started to drift, down, down, to the cool aqua quiet of the bottom. I was quite content. My resentment towards Mari had gone. It wasn't her fault that she'd lied about swimming. She'd just been trying to impress me. Or had been afraid I would go off and leave her if she'd confessed she couldn't swim a stroke. The sad thing was, I would have gone off and left her. Like a shot.
Everything seemed very clear to me, under the water. I understood all kinds of things.
And then my cousin finally figured it out and saved my life.
All of this I remembered in seconds, sitting on the royal blue plastic chair in the hospital corridor, while everyone rushed around to try and get me into an operating room. And because I'd remembered it, I knew what that feeling of remoteness meant – it meant I was about to die.
I stopped breathing.
'She's stopped breathing!' my mom immediately shouted.
There was a great deal of lifting and bundling.
I was suddenly looking up and moving so smoothly that I knew there had to be wheels involved.
They took me to a small room – I knew because the ceiling was a small rectangle. It was one of those drop ceilings on grids, with metal strips holding up squares of white Styrofoam.
After they put me down, all the hands and voices disappeared. I could hear people shouting out in the corridor and scurrying around, but I was left alone for a moment in the antiseptic little room. And in that moment, as I kept looking up at the ceiling, the corner square dissolved. And then more squares faded ...
They just kind of went away, as if a projector had been switched off. Lying there, I had this immediate understanding that the entirety of the world I knew was an illusion. The world I had known wasn't really real: there was a 'realer' real behind it.
I got up and floated to the corner of the room to have a look.
There wasn't a particularly bright light or an angel with white feathery wings. But there was something, and the something felt like somebody. And there was communication, but not in words.
As I passed the ceiling and saw there was space behind it, I was burning to explore. I was all like, 'Let's go, Dude.'
But the somebody thing let me know that was bad manners. I had to say goodbye to my body, evidently. My 'host.'
I can't tell you how depressing it was to discover that a) there was still going to be manners after death and b) I was still not going to be very good at them.
Reluctantly, I turned and looked at the lump of meat on the gurney.
I've always thought my body was rubbish. It has zero hand-eye coordination. It's ridiculously prone to illness. It was lanky, and at that adolescent stage, I looked a lot like a stick insect. And my hair. It was just ... wrong. Even now, I usually try not to look at my hair.
I was just about to say, 'Right, done it, let's boogie,' to the somebody-thing when my attention was drawn back to the room.
It was an OR nurse, all scrubbed up and masked and everything. She was screaming a swear word and hitting herself on her forehead, with knuckles. She was crying, bawling with frustration. And it was all about me – because I was dying. Well, because I was dead, I corrected myself.
Silly old moo, I thought. I was fine. I was feeling better than I had in ages. Being dead was a whole lot nicer than being alive.
I went down to tell her. I put what felt to me like an arm around her and said, 'Hey, it's fine. I'm fine. Don't worry about it. It's not a problem.'
And that's when all the people ran in. They cut a hole in my neck below my larynx so that I could breathe and started my heart.
It happened so fast.
One moment, I was all blissed out and comforting the nurse.
The next thing I knew, some idiot had stuck a grappling hook in my ribs and slammed me back into the gross, bloody lump of meat on the table. The pain and the shock of it meant I wasn't conscious for long.
But that was long enough to register one thing – utter and consuming rage. I was so peed off, I can't tell you. For years, every time I thought about it, it made my heart beat faster, my hands shake and my body sweat with anger. I felt total, complete, and palpably radiant fury.
My life had been saved.
Lord, was I ticked off about it.
CHAPTER 2
Soundtrack: 'Carefree Highway' – Gordon Lightfoot
I woke up like you do when you're sick or were very, very tired. Like I do now if I've had too much wine the night before. In fact 'up' didn't really come into it. I woke down, like I was at the bottom of a deep well. Up was somewhere else, and I already knew getting there was going to be difficult.
I lay with my eyes open just a slit ... It was too much effort to open them fully and it was too much effort to hold them closed. I hurt everywhere. Not just my neck, which felt bulky and uncomfortable, but everywhere. My feet hurt (I found out later I'd arrived at my house with just one shoe). My legs ached (they always did if I laid in one place for too long). I'd snapped a hip flexor at eleven, and if I didn't lie just right my hip really started to hurt. I wasn't lying right, and it was hurting. But I couldn't even think about moving to make it stop.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Hospital High"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Mimi Thebo.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.