Adaptation (6 page)

The pool area was crowded with other high school students. Some were swimming, but most were debaters like them, cramming in last-minute research before the big event. It was only the Holiday Inn—thoroughly and efficiently pedestrian in its decor—but Reese remembered the pool as if it had been decorated for a
glittering party. She remembered lights hung in delicate strands around the perimeter, reflected in the water as hundreds of wavering stars. She remembered David leaning toward her, watching her with smiling eyes while she shuffled through notes and charts.

When the pool closed and all the students were forced to head upstairs, David walked her back to her room on the sixth floor even though he was on the fifth. The hallway carpet had a pattern of tiny, brownish-gold diamonds on a background of dark red, probably designed to withstand heavy foot traffic and spills, and Reese found herself staring at it intently as they neared her room. At the door, she shifted her backpack to one shoulder so that she could dig out her keycard, and David reached out to grab the bag before it slipped to the floor.

“Thanks,” she said. She had to open the front pocket of the backpack, and for some reason David didn’t let go of it. She looked up at him, and it was as if some kind of invisible switch inside her flipped. Her skin went hot, and her brain went blank. Her heartbeat accelerated. David’s straight black eyelashes were like the bristles of a fine paintbrush. His cheeks were tinged light pink.

The elevator at the end of the hall dinged open, and a crowd of debaters surged into the corridor. One of them called out, “Just kiss her already!”

The other students snickered, and Reese’s face burned with mortification. David jerked away from her, letting go of her backpack so suddenly, it banged sharply against her knee.

Reese spun around and slammed the keycard into the lock. She burst into the room and shoved the door closed just as she heard David call her name. Laughter ricocheted down the hallway. One of the kids called out, “She’s playing hard to get!”

Reese backed away from the door and sat down on the edge of the bed, dropping her backpack onto the floor. Her whole body shook. For months—ever since he broke up with his girlfriend back in November—her feelings for David had been building up. She had tried to ignore them, because they scared the living daylights out of her—she did
not want
to like someone. She did not want to be thinking about David when she was supposed to be doing something else. Maybe other girls liked that nervous, fluttery feeling in their stomachs, but she hated it. It made her feel out of control.

She had promised herself a long time ago, after overhearing one too many fights between her parents, that she wasn’t going to get involved in anything romantic. It wasn’t worth it. Her parents had divorced when she was nine, but for years afterward they would reconcile and then split up again. Every time things went south—which they inevitably did—Reese saw the way it wrecked her mother. Reese didn’t want to be like that. And that meant she wasn’t going to date anyone, and she definitely wasn’t going to
like
anyone.

She had never factored in the possibility that someone might like
her
. That the pull of that person might overrule her intellectual decision to deny her feelings.

David was knocking on the door, calling out, “Reese? Reese, let me talk to you.”

“Leave me alone,” she said, her voice hitching into a sob.

“Reese?”

“Leave me alone!” she yelled, and finally David went away. She should have been relieved—now he would definitely never be interested in her since she had overreacted like a freak—but
instead she felt as if a dragging weight had been chained to her feet. She stared at her hands as hot tears fell onto her palms, and told herself to get over it. It was better this way. Safer.

The next day, she screwed up royally during semifinals. She could barely look at David, much less concentrate on the debate topic. No wonder they had lost.

She was still stuck in that memory, sinking lower and lower, when a shape flew directly into the headlights.

It was a bird, its wings flapping seemingly in slow motion, two pinpricks of yellow glowing where its eyes should be. “Shit!” Reese screamed.

She slammed on the brakes. The car, moving at sixty-five miles per hour, skidded forcefully down the asphalt. She flew forward, and then the seat belt jerked her back, contracting painfully across her chest. She heard David shouting. The brakes emitted a long, unending shriek.

The smoothness of the highway abruptly ended. The tires struck desert, and she felt the jarring impact right down into her bones. Loose rocks rumbled beneath the car; dust flew up into the high beams. The car had gone off the road, and now it was rolling downhill. Reese pumped frantically at the brakes, but it didn’t seem to make a difference.

There was a jolt so big, her head struck the roof, and the car banged down, hard, into an unseen ditch. It flipped, and her stomach flipped with it. The high beams bounced crazily over the desert. She saw the ground lit by the unnaturally bright lights; rocks smashed against the windshield. Something smashed into her head.

Everything went black.

Reese heard a strange gurgling sound, like liquid
being forced through a pipe. She tried to move, and it sent a shock of pain through her—pain so intense that she screamed and screamed—and then realized that the gurgling sound was the sound of her breath. Was she drowning? Panic erupted in her. She tried to swim, but her body was pinned beneath something hard and sharp, something that cut into her abdomen. The scream in her throat broke into a sob.

The darkness returned.

Next came the light, bright as the full moon, startling as a lightning flash. As it advanced, the ground rumbled, and she wondered if she had been in an earthquake. She thought:
All those stories are true. I’m going toward the light.

The shriek of metal being torn apart exploded in her ears. The entire world rattled. She blinked; all she could see was blinding white light.

A machine groaned, and she heard voices she could not understand. She was suffocating in a haze of pain. She whimpered. Something was wrong with her—with all of her. Her whole body felt distorted, as if she were in a real-life fun-house mirror, and parts of her were swollen monstrously out of proportion. Was she dead? A screeching, metallic roar invaded all of her senses, blotting out thought.

All the pressure that had been holding her body immobile suddenly released. She fell out into the night air. It was cool and dry.

The smell of the desert. Hands beneath her body. Fingers pressed into her stomach, and she cried out. The gurgling sound returned.

She couldn’t breathe.

She felt motion beneath her, around her, but her body was so still. She could not move. She tried to wriggle her toes, but she did not know if she succeeded. Terror engulfed her. She tried to speak, but her mouth would not open. She heard a low beeping sound, like a heart monitor. Someone touched her hand, and she felt a pressure on her wrist. Something cool slid into her, and the world went blank.

A door slammed. Wheels rattled along a tile floor. A fan hummed on. Wind swept over her skin. When she opened her eyes, she could see—but she could not understand what she was seeing.

She was in a yellow sphere. It reminded her of a planetarium, except it was much, much smaller—only big enough for one person. The walls of the sphere undulated in and out as if they were breathing. Was she hallucinating? She could not feel her body. There was no more pain. She felt entirely disconnected, as if her consciousness were the sole part of her that existed. The only sound was the whisper of the wind: a gentle inhalation in the background.

Red cracks began to appear in the soft, rippling walls, arising from nothing and branching out like veins across the surface of an egg yolk. She stared at them in amazement. She spun around and realized that she
could
spin around. She was suspended in the center of this yellow bubble with its red rivers snaking across curved, luminescent walls.

Gradually she became aware of another sound. It was strangely distant, as if it were coming at her through a wall of water. It reminded her of documentaries about deep-sea divers: this sound of half-swallowed, echoing ringing.

The red veins were moving faster. They spread and spread like a time-lapse video of red coral growing, and as the red covered the yellow, she felt heavier and heavier, and the golden glow of the sphere’s walls dimmed and dimmed until all there was, was nothing.

Twenty-seven days later

Reese opened her eyes and saw a grid of grayish-white
ceiling tiles above. She blinked a few times, inhaling shallowly. The room smelled antiseptic, like a hospital. She turned her head to the right; there was a window not far away, but the blinds were closed. Daylight glowed from behind them. To her left was a computer and monitor on a cart, along with some kind of medical machine. Several tubes emerged from it, connected to an IV drip hanging above her head. Another tube ran from that drip to her left arm.

I was in an accident.
She remembered the eyes in the headlights, the car leaping off the road, slamming into the ground. The weight of something terrifyingly heavy pushing against her body. The machine and the lights and the pain—and David.

What happened to David?

Dizziness swamped her, and she closed her eyes. The room seemed to be spinning, and she curled into a fetal position as nausea swept through her.

If she had survived, that meant he had too. Didn’t it?

Her gut clenched. She didn’t want to think about the alternative, and it was several minutes before she had calmed herself enough to open her eyes again. She was now staring directly at the computer next to her bed, and the monitor was dark. Her mouth felt fuzzy, as if there was something nasty on her tongue.

Where am I?

Slowly she pushed herself up to a seated position and then swung her legs over the edge of the bed. The movement made her stomach heave, and she doubled over for a minute, gasping, as she waited for the nausea to subside. She saw speckled gray linoleum below her bare feet, and pale remnants of bruises ran up her left shin and over her knee.

The sight of the bruises sent a cold shock through her. She stared at her legs. The right leg was bruised too, but even more stunning was a long pink scar running diagonally across her knee and thigh. When she touched it, she felt a slightly raised ridge there, and goose bumps rose all over her skin.

She took a few slow breaths. The IV tube swayed. She straightened up and held out her arms, examining each of them. The IV needle was inserted into her left arm just below the elbow crease, held in place with white tape, but otherwise the arm seemed normal. On her right arm, the area around her elbow felt tender, but she couldn’t see whether there were any bruises there. On her right wrist she wore a plastic bracelet imprinted with a code:
PLATO PA83 HOLLOWAY
. She was wearing an
open-backed hospital gown printed with a pattern of tiny blue diamonds.

She looked around the room, hoping that something here would give her a clue to where she was. There were two doors: one closed, the other slightly ajar with a hint of tile floor beyond. She guessed it must be a bathroom. The walls were painted an industrial shade of beige, and the only furniture was the bed and the bedside table that held the computer. She scooted off the bed, stepping onto the floor.

Her feet and legs tingled the way they did after they had fallen asleep, and she hissed with pain as she limped the few steps to the computer. She turned the monitor around, looking for any identifying markers, but there was only a serial code that meant nothing to her. The computer itself was clipped below the tabletop, and she felt around the edge of the rectangular box until she found what must be the power button. She pressed it, and the machine hummed on. For a moment she was elated, but her excitement was short-lived. The first thing that appeared on the screen was a login box prompting her for a password.

She abandoned the computer and wheeled the IV-drip pole away from the wall, using it like a walker as she headed to the window. The pins-and-needles sensation in her legs subsided a bit as she walked gingerly across the floor, but they still felt jellylike. At the window, she tugged on the string attached to the blinds, and they rattled up.

Outside, the sun beamed white-hot over a small parking lot where a lone, dirty Jeep was parked. Past the small, paved surface, the desert rippled with heat. In the distance she saw a long, low building with tan, windowless walls. Far beyond that a
lumpy mountain range defined the horizon, and above it all the pale blue sky seemed almost bleached of color by the sun.

She was still in Nevada—she had to be. This desert looked exactly like the other hundreds of miles of desert she and David had driven through after leaving Phoenix. As she pressed her face to the glass, she caught a glimpse of her eyes barely reflected in the window, ghostlike. She drew back, unnerved, and her reflection disappeared.

Behind her she heard the door opening, and she spun to see a woman in a lab coat entering. She had dark brown hair worn in a precisely cut bob. “I see you’re awake,” she said, an eager look on her face. “I’m Dr. Evelyn Brand. You should be careful with that IV; let me help you get back into bed.”

“Where am I? Where’s David?” Reese asked. Her voice sounded rough, unused.

The doctor briskly crossed the room. The door clicked shut. “You shouldn’t be walking around with that drip attached to you,” Dr. Brand said. She put a cool, dry hand on Reese’s right elbow and firmly propelled her back to bed, pulling the IV pole behind them. Startled, Reese let the doctor swing her legs up and tuck the thin blanket over her.

“Let me take a look at you,” Dr. Brand said, pulling out a stethoscope. Her eyes were such a light brown that they were almost gray.

“Where’s David?” Reese asked again as Dr. Brand pressed the stethoscope against her chest. “He was in the car with me. Is he all right?”