Alive Read online

  I looked it up. The term refers to an experiment performed by Ivan Pavlov. Every day, Pavlov rang a bell at the exact same time he presented a group of dogs with food. In time, the dogs began to salivate at the ringing of the bell, whether or not the sound was accompanied by a side of Kibbles ’n Bits. They’d been conditioned by the anticipation. In other words, I’m the equivalent of a German shepherd with a drooling problem.

  Yeah, it’s not the most flattering comparison.

  Two minutes to go.

  I try to laugh along with the laugh track, but it’s hard to concentrate on the silliness, you know, to really buy into it. In another minute, I know why.

  It starts out small. An itch under my ribs that gradually becomes discomfort. That discomfort spreads from my back all the way through the top of my intestines. My breathing gets heavy. While I can still move, I tear down my covers and crawl underneath. Cradling my pillow, I pull it against me as if that will be able to stop the thing that’s growing inside.

  A deep breath.

  Five oh eight.

  That’s when it hits. The pain spikes through my entire body and races up my neck and into the base of my skull, a white-hot light that blinds me. It scorches everything it meets. Incinerates my insides. My back arches. I scream into my pillow.

  I’m torn in two pieces, and out from the brokenness pour words. Only I can’t make them out. They’re hushed—no—muffled. I strain against the pain. Against the pressure in my ears.

  Waves lap at the edges of my mind and I try to haul myself out. But nothing washes away the pain. And the words hover out of reach.

  The moment lasts seconds and forever and not at all. All I can see is the light, glaring and dazzling.

  It hurts. God, it hurts.

  Tears streak my face and soak my pillow. As the light backs away from the edges of my vision and of my mind, the pain subsides, dwindling until it fades into a pinprick in the cavern of my chest.

  And then it’s just me left at the end. Slumped and ragged.

  “Cross, Cross…Come in, Cross!” My eyes flit up from my turkey sandwich on pita when Henry snaps his fingers underneath my nose.

  It’s been a week, and I’m worn down by the process of trying to catch up. There’s never enough daylight, sleep, energy, concentration, never enough time to break even on all the work I’ve missed. Henry’s binder taunts me from under the nightstand in my bedroom. One tiny peek? I’m just stubborn—or stupid—enough to resist.

  I’ve been picking at my food for twenty minutes and Brynn’s already accused me of being anorexic twice. It’s not like I’m trying not to eat. I just haven’t been hungry since the transplant. It’s most likely a totally normal side effect and Brynn just hates that I’m finally skinnier than she is.

  “Huh?” I say thickly. I’ve been doing that blank stare–y thing again, and Henry’s looking at me across our lunch table, eyebrows raised, clearly waiting for me to say something. Anything.

  I clear my throat. “Sorry…can you, um, can you repeat that?”

  Brynn snorts but doesn’t look up from her math book. She’s scribbling down the last few answers to an assignment due today. Her hair’s still wet and wadded up into a bun and she’s bitten the drawstrings of her sweatshirt until they’re a darker color of red at the ends. Lydia’s sitting with us today, too. Lydia’s a floater. She sits with us some days and with another group other days. Technically, she’s Brynn’s friend from swimming. She’s kind of quiet in a way that seems purposeful, and I sometimes wonder if she hates standing out as the only black girl in our school. For someone who barely talks, it’s funny that she’s the one who feels the need to split her time between social groups.

  “Sorry.” I kick Brynn under the table. “I was to-do-listing in my head.” Brynn holds up her middle finger but keeps her eyes on the glossy page, muttering numbers under her breath. Charming.

  Henry removes his baseball hat and flips the bill backward. It’s a nervous habit of his, backward, forward, backward, forward. I’ve watched him do it a million times in Calc, which I know for a fact is definitely not his thing.

  “We’re all going to do something tonight.” His glance flicks over to Brynn before returning to me. “You wanna come, maybe?”

  He said “we,” which means he’s not asking me out again. It’s a friends thing. Friends are good.

  Brynn slides her textbook off the table and rams it into her crammed backpack. “He’s asking if you’re officially off house arrest.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” I ask. “And go do what?”

  Lydia giggles, her lips parting into a wide, sheepish smile. Brynn stares at me like I’ve sprouted tentacles out the top of my head.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  Brynn exaggerates a sigh. “Do we have to put all our cards on the table?”

  I look to Henry for help. He shrugs. “She’s right. We can’t let you become a hermit. Not on our watch.”

  “But—”

  “Stel.” Brynn slaps her forehead. “We’re trying to surprise you, moron. That’s it. You’re coming.”

  A smile tugs at the corners of my lips. “Fine. You guys are so strict.”

  “You ready?” Lydia asks me. We have the same period after lunch and usually wait to walk together. She shuffles a stack of notes she’d been looking over and places them in a red folder.

  “Be ready at eight,” Brynn calls after me. “We’ll grab you on the way.”

  “On the way to where?” But she’s not listening. She’s already turned her attention back to Henry.

  Lydia and I walk to Anatomy. Each time she speaks I have to strain to hear her over the school’s normal hustle and bustle.

  “Are you coming?” she asks.

  “To what?”

  Her giggle is melodic and she looks at me only out of the corners of her eyes, through a feathery arc of thick eyelashes. “To Michelle Boerne’s.”

  I realize I must have missed a chunk of her conversation, but I put together that Michelle’s having a party either next Friday or the Friday after that.

  “Oh. Sure, I guess so.” It’s not like I’ve got plans for any Friday night in the near future. Lydia smiles, but her eyes are trained right back at the ground and I know I won’t be getting much more out of her. Still, I take this as an invite. Or at least close enough.

  Somewhere between the cafeteria and our classroom it occurs to me that Lydia, who tends to total only three sentences every hour, is probably my third-best friend in the world right now.

  Inside Ms. Birkbauer’s anatomy class, Lydia and I weave our way through the rows of empty lab tables and find a two-top near the back of the classroom, where the beakers are lined up next to the sink.

  At the front of the classroom Ms. Birkbauer gets up from her computer credenza and rings the teacup-size bell she keeps on her desk. “As you get settled, please retrieve the pig hearts we were working on earlier this week. We’ll try to finish up with the dissection today so that you all can have plenty of time to write your lab reports by next week.” Plenty of time? As if.

  Lydia shudders. “Ew, that stuff smells like brain juice.”

  “Brain juice?” I giggle and get behind her in the line forming behind the refrigerated case. “Is that a smell you’re well acquainted with?” I ask.

  She levels her chin, moving one step forward in the line. “No, but I think that’s like what Hannibal Lecter preserves the brains in before he eats them. You know?”

  “Okay, disgusting. I prefer my brains preservative-free.” I slide the covered tray marked cross from the thin refrigerator shelf and trail Lydia back to our lab table.

  “I don’t care either way, as long as there’s no gluten.”

  I snort. That may be the first funny thing I’ve ever heard Lydia say. I set the tray down on the black countertop. The smell hasn’t fully hit me with the lid still on, but I know exactly what Lydia’s talking about, only to me it smells like sickness and old people. Or maybe like those big morgues
where they perform autopsies.

  I dig out the lab sheet from my backpack while Lydia doles out toothpicks for the two of us. I’m not sure what they’re for, but they’re on the supply list, so I set mine aside in a neat pile. “‘Step one: Locate the aorta,’” I read from the sheet. That should be easy enough, I think, remembering what it looks like from our textbook. “‘Step two: Locate the veins.’” Okay, slightly more difficult. “‘Step three: Cut the heart in half to expose the chamber.…’ Shall we?”

  She shrugs and we both remove the lids from our containers, revealing the sad, limp, yellowed hearts. I wrinkle my nose at the smell and pull plastic gloves over my hands.

  Gently, I poke my finger against what I think must be the aorta and then walk my fingertips over to the different veins, making chicken-scratch notes in my black-and-white-speckled composition book about each of their locations—interventricular, sulcus, brachiocephalic. They’re embedded in the fleshy heart like shallow grooves in a shriveled-up brain.

  Pinching the scalpel between two fingers, I roll the heart onto its side and pick the spot closest to the center. “‘Cut the heart down the center to reveal the chambers,’” I read under my breath. The scalpel sinks into the organ. There’s a glitch in my vision and the world in front of me rocks, knocking me off balance. The blade narrowly misses my fingers as it slices vertically all the way through. Cradling my forehead, I shake my wrist out, alarmed at what a close call it’d been.

  That’s when I notice slick, red liquid leaking onto my gloved hands.

  I choke once. This time the lab table in front of me seems to jump sideways. I stumble right, then stagger back. It’s like trying to walk in a fun house.

  As I hold onto the black countertop for balance, my head swims. I rub my eyes. It’s fine. Totally fine. Deep breath. The scalpel sinks deeper. Metal through puffy flesh.

  Blood sprays up at my face. Several droplets dangle in my line of vision. They cling to my hair. Gagging, I cover my mouth.

  Only, my wet fingers slip across my skin, leaving warm patches of blood on my face. Blood that pours out onto the table.

  Quickly, I flip the pages of my textbook to the diagram. Bloody fingerprints appear on the white pages. My ears fill with a singular, high-pitched ringing. At the beginning of the chapter is an illustration of a pig heart side by side with a human’s. The shape of the human organ is abstract, odd, irregularly contoured, like an asymmetrical trapezoid. But the pig heart has the familiar curves of a valentine.

  I look from the page to the flimsy tray, then back again. Even though the textbook has only a drawing, the scholarly version bears no resemblance to the gaping organ in front of me.

  My chest contracts like a little kid has slapped his hands on either side of a blown-up plastic baggie causing the air to burst out in one loud clap. Impulsively, my hand clutches at the spot over my heart.

  As if in return, the bleeding arteries throb. Another round of hoarse gasps. The classroom’s spinning so fast now, I’m certain I’ll hurl.

  Pain shoots through me like tree branches. I double over. “No,” I mutter. Not my heart.

  Light flashes off the lethal point clutched tight in my plastic-gloved hand. The heart sputters for life out of every open orifice. Gushing and burbling, droplets cascade to the floor. Bile burns at the back of my throat.

  I hear a scream.

  Spots sneak up around the edges of my vision.

  I try pressing my nails into my wrist, but my head’s floating, high over my shoulders, and the screaming won’t stop. It pushes through into a splitting headache and I’m horizontal now. How did I get this way? Down on the floor, I see faces converge around me.

  Hands reach for me. Reach into me. I try blinking. The spots multiply.

  More screaming. The sounds stretches out, spirals.

  “Stella?” The voice is Auto-Tuned, fake. “Stella?”

  It’s only at the last second that I realize where the screaming is coming from.

  Me.

  And by then, it’s too late.

  I nearly stabbed myself. All those years of Mom telling me not to run with scissors and I narrowly miss puncturing a lung when I fall on top of a scalpel. Thankfully, the only thing punctured was the right side of my shirt, which I can confirm firsthand is much easier to replace than vital organs.

  “I’m going,” I say.

  “You’re not.” Mom flattens her palm against the kitchen table and leans toward me. The breakfast nook in our home has morphed into the negotiating room, and I’ve been told that, back in the day, my mother was a force to be reckoned with when it came to closing a deal. Good thing I’ve brought my A-game.

  My dad, who shaved his scruffy beard since his return to work, wraps his arm around her. “Your mother’s right, Stella.”

  I lean back in the stiff wooden chair. “Why?”

  Mom scoffs. “Do we really have to explain this to you? Two hours ago you were writhing in pain. And this afternoon? What about this afternoon?”

  “What about it?” What about it? I can barely say this with a straight face. If topics could trend at Duwamish High, this would top the list. Headline news.

  What happened, Stella? I thought you were better, Stella? I can still feel the twenty-six pairs of eyes on me as I was led, red-faced, out of the classroom.

  Dad casts a nervous glance toward Elsie’s room, where she’s supposed to be taking an unscheduled nap. “You fainted.” His voice rasps.

  “So? That could happen to anyone. I hear nineteenth-century girls fainted whenever a hot guy walked into the room.”

  He scratches at the stubble on his neck. “And did a hot guy enter the vicinity that we don’t know about?” Annoyed. Clearly annoyed.

  “Unfortunately no, but—”

  “Well, then do you honestly think that’s healthy?” The last time I saw my dad this flustered was diagnosis day.

  “I’m breathing, aren’t I? It’s all relative.” The key is to come off calm, nonchalant. Healthy.

  My phone vibrates again. This time it’s Henry. It’s his turn to relay the message: We can do this another time. No big deal.

  No, I type once more, while my parents pass exasperated looks between them. I told you. I’m fine. It’s not as if I haven’t already had this conversation with Brynn and Lydia. Passing out in school is embarrassing enough without everyone rushing to treat me with kid gloves.

  “That’s not funny,” Mom says through her teeth.

  “It wasn’t meant to be.” I’d been sent home from school in a rush after the incident in Anatomy. Nobody wants a girl dying on campus. Not that I was in danger of dying. Not really. My heart just went a little wonky.

  And now, according to Brynn, anyone who was in the classroom during my breakdown is being grilled for details, including Lydia. “I had a heart transplant. Given the circumstances, I think things have gone pretty smoothly, don’t you?”

  “Dr. Belkin’s worried about you. And the psychiatrist.”

  “No.” I puff my cheeks out. “The shrink said my teacher was an idiot—okay, unwise—for letting me do a heart dissection weeks after my own transplant. Of course I had a freak-out. It was too close to my own personal circumstances. Pure mental anxiety. There’s nothing wrong with me physically.” I repeat the doctor’s words in my most sensible tone. “I was in the doctor’s office. I know what he said.”

  Major life stressor. I guess that’s what you call it when you almost die then are saved by somebody else’s vital organ. Things are bound to get a little freaky.

  My parents’ lips press into matching straight lines.

  I light the screen on my phone to check the time. My friends should be here any minute and I’m starting to worry that negotiations are breaking down.

  “I’m the one who has to live with this stupid condition.” I hate to do it, but I reach for the trump card. “You guys can’t put me in a freaking glass box. Otherwise what was the point?”

  “Watch your tone,” Mom snaps.
/>   Dad removes his arm from around her shoulder, which sends my heart skipping with hope. He puts his hand over hers. “Maybe she’s right, Donna.” I knew it.

  Her eyes threaten to burn crop circles into his forehead.

  “What?” He shrinks back, pulling his hand with him.

  There’s a long silence. Followed by an equally long honk coming from our driveway. I hold my breath.

  When Mom peels her glare off Dad, her jaw is stiff. “If you and your father have decided…” She trails off.

  My chair screeches across the tile. “Thanks,” I say. And before she can change her mind, I shove my phone into the back pocket of my jeans and head for the front door.

  Outside, Brynn’s behind the wheel of her silver Jeep Cherokee. The heel of her hand is still jammed against the horn. I make out the heads of Lydia and Henry in back. Shotgun’s reserved for me.

  I cover my ears the rest of the way to the car. She doesn’t quit until my seat belt’s buckled.

  “Was that necessary?” I ask.

  She shrugs. “Thought there might be some parental tension to diffuse.”

  I slump against the headrest. “You’re right about that.”

  Lydia pops her head between the two front seats. Her hair has been pulled into two French braids that weave down either side of her part. “How are you feeling?” Her braids smell like mango. She witnessed my entire meltdown. I cringe and pray that I didn’t do anything more humiliating than scream. As if that’s not mortifying enough.

  I try to offer a smile. “Fine. A little shaky maybe, but mainly I wish everyone would quit asking me.”

  She disappears into the backseat, muttering something about being sorry, and I feel a stab of guilt for brushing her off, especially since Brynn told me she’d been tight-lipped when anyone asked her what happened in anatomy today.

  I look back at Henry. “Cat got your tongue?”