After I Wake (9 page)

I laugh until my sides hurt, and then I laugh some more, before I manage to glance at my mom, who's been watching me with an expression somewhere between concern and bemusement. “You said that you wanted to remember the exact moment when I got my purpose back, right?” I choke out. “But I'm pretty sure you got the date wrong.”

My mom rushes to the page-a-day calendar, and sure enough, I'm right. She blushes and joins me in fresh peals of laughter. I manage to cease it shortly after it occurs to me that we might wake up some neighbors. I suspect the neighbors think I'm crazy, but I don't really care, because I'm not trying to impress them.

When I sit up from the position on the floor that I slumped to when I started laughing, my mom is staring at the poem, hovering near it with her hand poised in the air, preparing to scribble on it. The first writing utensil she grabbed was a pen. “Just add a plus one to the date,” I cackle, and when my mom looks at me, I can see that she was already doing it. We start to snicker again, now at the fact that we apparently share a brain. I wonder how that happens, sharing a brain. Probably prolonged exposure to another person.

I yawn suddenly, and my mom does too. The memories of my nightmare flood back, and I feel wide-awake again. I stiffen a little, and my mom notices right away. She gently prods me until I tell her, and then I go write about it in the red journal. She asks me if I've ever had nightmares or flashbacks like those before, and I tell her the honest truth, that the nightmare was the first. I'm suddenly terrified to go back to sleep, but my body disagrees, and I stumble back upstairs, my mother's supportive hand on my shoulder.

As I try to get comfortable, my mom sits next to me and gently brushes my hair, which has gotten shaggy in the past weeks, away from my forehead before kissing it. I whine at her a little, and she only replies that she is glad to have me back again before she goes to the door and closes it, sealing me in a box of utter darkness. Before I can panic, I fall asleep, exhausted. Thankfully, the next sleep is a dreamless one.

 

 

T
HREE
DAYS
after I returned home from the hospital for the first time, with my hand still freshly gone from my life for the rest of my life, I took a shower. It was awful.

Showers for me had always been peaceful. I'd take my sweet time, washing my hair first. It was long; I'd spent years growing it out. It ended down near where my spine meets my tailbone, and I was immensely proud of it. It was mostly straight, only the tiniest bit curly, not frizzy at all, and easy to manage. It's the most beautiful red, and I had my hair dyed blonde at the end so it looked like my hair was on fire. It was all a girl could ask for in a head of hair.

Within minutes it was tangled and matted, awkwardly shampooed, and plastered to my neck and face and I felt like I was suffocating under it and I couldn't manage to shower with one hand and I was freaking out. I had to have my mom help me clean it off while holding my emotions in as I felt her fingers pulling the knots apart.

The hair was the second change to my appearance in a short while. I made the appointment minutes after the shower debacle, speaking quietly into the receiver and telling them I needed a haircut.

My mom dropped me off, and I walked in alone. Ashley, the hairdresser I saw on occasion to trim off dead ends, greeted me and tried not to stare at my hand. Of course she knew, everyone knew. It was a slow news week and gossip flies in a hair salon. In return, I tried not to stare at her orange skin because she was spray tanning to make up for the pathetic sun exposure in a Connecticut winter.

She led me into the styling area and sat me down to wash out my hair, engaging in casual conversation and hedging around the subject of anything hand-related. I didn't speak much other than to try and have the conversation fade out naturally, but Ashley was persistent, jumping from subject to subject to keep me talking.

When we got to the chair, she combed through my hair and told me how healthy it was and that she didn't need to trim anything, but I cut her off.

“Cut it off. All of it. I want my hair short and manageable. I can't manage one-handed. I need a pixie cut or something.” Her eyes widened, her mouth dropped open into a small O, and I closed my eyes. She asked me if that was what I really wanted to do, and I nodded once, keeping my eyes closed. I opened them slowly as I heard snipping noises and quickly shut them again when I saw large chunks of my hair flying off my head. I opened them again after a moment, choosing to watch hesitantly.

Ashley continually chatted to me while she cut off my hair,
telling me how I had the perfect facial structure for a pixie cut and how popular they were and that there was some stranger she had seen while shopping the other day and how that person had had such a pathetic pixie cut and she wanted to fix it as a hairstylist but she couldn't really go up to some stranger in the middle of a store while she was looking at ground beef and diss her haircut, could she?

It would seem wrong, or so Ashley exclaimed while thrusting her scissors into the air above my head for emphasis before going back to trimming, to approach a total stranger and beg to fix her hair. It would just be so, so wrong and so Ashley had done what she knew was the right thing and carried on her merry way to get some vegetables, although at the time, it had felt even more right to approach the stranger, but she had not and it was for the best.

It took a painfully long amount of time for my hair to disappear, and when I stepped down from the stylist's chair, I felt lighter, airy. I wasn't weighed down by my hair like I had been, though I didn't know I had been in the first place, and I felt like I was about to fly away, wanted to fly away, but it wasn't an option at the moment.

But I felt less
me
too. There was a part of me that was gone, years of experience and memories were being swept up and thrown away by Ashley, who had gone and murdered my hair. I was assured that it looked nice, and I was very cute and/or stylish, but I didn't accept it. My mom came back to pick me up, and she agreed that it looked very nice. I stood by while she paid the bill, straining to see the last of my hair going away forever. I could grow it back, but it would take time and several months of an awkward mullet to make any progress in growing my hair out, and it didn't seem worth it.

In a snap decision to make my life easier I was split between rational and irrational thought. Rationally, I knew that getting rid of my hair would be good for me in the long run because it was easier to maintain and take care of. But I felt like a different person. I wasn't the same human I had been a little while before. I didn't even know how long before. It was in the first stay at the hospital that I had stopped counting time.

 

 

T
HE
NEXT
day, I get to drink coffee with my mom after she brews it. I feel very official as I sip it, full of sugar to make the bitter taste less intense. We're both bleary-eyed from a few hours ago when we were celebrating my poetry breakthrough. But we have an important e-mail to compose, although my mother doesn't know it yet.

“Mom, I kind of want to do the National Accolades thing. I'd like to go to the city again, and maybe do the photo shoot thing too.”

“Only kind of? I don't know if I believe that, Car.”

“Alright, I kind of really want to do it. I've wanted to since we got the letter…. But it didn't feel alright until now.” I am enveloped in an espresso-scented hug.

“Let's do this.” My mom grins. We go upstairs, nursing our coffees.

The e-mail takes a while to compose, though it comes together nicely in the end. To make a long e-mail short, we started out by thanking Alexander Brown for the invitation and accepting it, while also agreeing to partake in the photo shoot. I then proceeded to apologize for taking almost two full months to reply, because I had been unable to produce any poetry and thusly felt uncomfortable talking about poems in front of a bunch of people. However my feelings changed and my opinion accompanied it, and I graciously thanked the man for such a fine display of patience and for the opportunity. There was some other technical stuff, but that was the gist.

I ask my mom if I could invite Emmett, since the invitation let me bring two guests, which I assumed meant two parents or legal guardians, but having only one, I want to have Emmett come with me. She says yes. Despite his occasionally snarky attitude, Emmett is genuinely a good person, and he does care about me, unlike the majority of my peers. He wants to see me happy. The city might bring that out. That, and my mom also loves him.

My mom kicks me out of her office so she can do her work, and I start to text him.

Me:
Want to go to New York City?

Emmett:
Well, that piqued my interest quickly.

Me:
Well, do you? It's for the National Poetry Accolades thing.

Emmett:
I'd love to. A moment.

Emmett:
My mom wants to know about adult supervision.

Me:
My mom will be coming too. Like she'd miss this.

Emmett:
An excellent point, my dear Carter. Another moment.

Emmett:
When?

Me:
The weekend of the fourteenth.

It went on like that for a little while, us sending these little back-and-forths with Emmett needing information and me giving it. In the end he gets permission, and our trip for two becomes the expected trip for three.

 

 

W
HEN
A
LEXANDER
Brown e-mails me back, two days after the initial e-mail we sent, I get a pleasant surprise. The magazine cover and apparently almost all of the rest of the magazine is already arranged, with the exception of my face. The team is ready for me to show up whenever, including the day before the event. We arrange to have the pictures taken on September 14th, with the daylight hours after the shoot and before the event devoted to exploring the city and the next day to get ready for the awards. The excitement shared by my mother and Emmett is palpable.

The trouble with a formal black-tie dinner party is that I am grossly underprepared. I have no dresses or shoes or jewelry. I am a firm wearer of denim. Unfortunately, that means that I need to go shopping. Emmett tags along under the pretense of needing a perfect bow tie, but it is my, most likely correct, opinion that he enjoys seeing me grumble about trying on uncomfortable clothing. The frowns he keeps giving his phone may suggest he has an ulterior motive. I hope we don't go into the mall and encounter a guy with perfect cheekbones and a ratty band shirt.

We load into the car and set off for the mall to explore the prom dress stores. I need a long dress, and a nice one, whether I like it or not. Luckily, I convince my mom to check in a few thrift shops on the way there.

We are unlucky and continue on the path to the mall. I have a strong feeling that if we were in the peak of prom season, there would be an abundance of dresses for me to choose from.

We get to the mall, which is thankfully devoid of impressively cheekboned men in possession of ratty shirts, and walk about, my mom striding purposefully to the wedding dress and other fancy attire store while Emmett and I hang back, looking at the passersby.

“So, Carter, tell me about your poem.” Emmett chooses to plunge straight into conversation, before I can initiate my own. My mom told him in the car, but I changed the subject because I'm already over the new poem glory a little bit. I will forever love the poem, but I think it could have gone better.

“It rhymes,” I growl, before speeding up a little to try and catch my mother, who is slowly disappearing into the crazy throngs of bored teenagers with sunglasses perched on their heads. I refuse to say anything else about it, due to the fact that I already hate it for said rhymes.

Ten minutes later, I'm rifling through dresses in an uncomfortable rainbow of colors. I go to try on a blue dress with lacey flowery details, because it makes me look like a fashionable woman from the 1920s, and I love that sort of thing. Also, it has pockets. Putting pockets on a dress makes it 10,000 percent better. Instantly. I may have to get it just because it has pockets.

It fits perfectly, and I adore it, though I struggle with getting it for a major reason: the dress's sleeves end at the elbows, leaving my scars and missing hand clearly visible for the whole world to see, and leaving me feeling incredibly uncomfortable. But it's a really cute dress, and I kind of want it badly.

“You don't have to get it. We can get something else,” my mom says, eyeing my arms.

“But I'm in love with it,” I mutter. “And it's cheap.”

“I can't argue with that,” she replies. “But if you're not comfortable, it's not worth the price.”

At that precise moment—so perfect it was like clockwork meant purely to inconvenience me—Darcy walks by the window, stopping to peek in with a wistful expression smothering her features.

Seconds later, she has rushed in, leaped onto the elevated platform on which I am modeling the dress for my mom and Emmett, and enveloped me in a breathtaking hug that I choose not to return. I freak out a little at the smothering feeling and emit a small squeak. She pulls back and I look at her, and her eyes find mine, full of tears.

“I am so, so sorry, Carter. It's all my fault. Everything is. All of it.” By way of greeting, Darcy chooses to apologize profusely for I don't know what.

“What do you mean?” The angry mutter escapes my lips before I can think of something remotely reassuring to say to her. I just watch her incredulously.