Alive (28 page)

When I look down, what I see is a bloody mess, clothes coated in crimson, but nobody else seems to notice. People pass me by without a second glance.

I trail Lydia until we reach the nurse’s. She wants to stay, but I tell her I’m fine. The nurse will send me home with a note anyway, which she does.

Only, when I get home, I realize I’m not alone. A black Tahoe idles a short distance down the street and an icy ripple of fear follows me like a ghost into the house.

I bang through the front door.

“Stella?” Mom calls from the kitchen.

“I’m home,” I shout. I palm my forehead and try to take deep, normal breaths. What’s happening to me?

Mom appears in yoga pants and an apron. “Quiet, Elsie’s down for her nap.” Of course. I’m on the verge of losing my mind, but let’s all make sure I do it quietly,
because my little sister’s very busy napping. “What are you doing here?” Her eyes grow wider as if she’s only now registering the fact that it’s the middle of the day
and I’m home. “Stella, what’s wrong? Do I need to start the car? I’ll call your father.”

“No.” I pinch my forehead. In normal life, I’d have any number of perfectly non-alarming excuses. I have a cold. I have the flu. I have food poisoning. But if I say any of
these, it’ll be an instant red flag. The symptoms are a match for basically every sign of transplant rejection. Doesn’t high school come with enough rejection that I shouldn’t
need to worry about my immune system rejecting my organs, too? “It’s nothing. Just…cramps,” I say, pulling out the oldest trick in the book. “I was feeling exhausted,
so I figured I should come home anyway.”

Mom relaxes. “Smart, Stella,” she says, becoming once again businesslike. “You’re finally learning to take care of your body first.” Tess’s murder had really
freaked out the Duwamish parents. Mine were no exception. I felt the heightened worry. The need to check in, text every hour. For my parents, any change in the status quo was an excuse to go into
military-operation helicopter parenting.

“That’s me. A model patient.” I wander over to the dining room and separate the slats on the blind over the front window.

“Still raining out there?” she asks.

The street outside is slick, damp in a way you can smell just by looking at it. It’s still out there—the black Tahoe, its windshield wipers shuddering menacingly across the glass.
Fumes snort up from its mouthy muffler and swirl between the drops of rain, where they blend and disappear.

I drop the blind with a snap. “Yeah, it’s a real nightmare.”

I can’t get to my room quickly enough. Mom, usually eagle-eyed when it comes to my symptoms, completely misses the amped-up, paranoid energy that makes my hands shake and leads me to crack
all my knuckles to the point that it sounds like rapid machine-gun fire.

I close the door behind me and lock it. Retrieving my computer, I start it up and nervously chew the inside of my lip until there’s a painful sore bitten into the gum. Who, I wonder, is
Levi Zin? I should have a better answer for this. Immediate. Apparent. None comes.

I had known that he wasn’t on any social media, and at the time, it felt like an edgy choice—avant-garde, even. Akin to liking a band before it was popular. But now, this single fact
has taken on a more onerous hue. Who is this person that I’ve been spending all my time with? The fact that I don’t know is unsettling. I think of the way his fingers crushed into my
wrist, threatening to snap it.

Sure, my parents’ generation loves to poke fun about our reliance on all sorts of Internet outlets, but in some respects these collections of profiles serve as an anchor, a way to keep
personalities from becoming too slippery.

While my browser loads I try to summon a list of people who have no virtual footprint, but the only ones I can think of are members of the Mob and of the CIA, both groups that seem far too
“establishment” for my Levi.

My heart contracts.
My
Levi? He’s not
my
anything anymore.

When the search window pops up, my fingers—brittle as hollow bones—tap furiously at the keys. First, I check all the major social media outlets for good measure. I find one locked
account, but without a picture or any other information, it’s impossible to tell if this is the same Levi Zin.

Next, I cast a wider net, punching his name into the search engines for the Internet at large. This turns up a flood of useless information. I scroll through it, skimming the underlined headers,
hoping for a stray word to catch my eye.

It’d help to have an inkling of what I’m looking for. A title in all caps:
YOUR EX-BOYFRIEND
,
LEVI
,
IS A
CREEP
? Not likely.

When I’m starting to realize the task has taken on a distinctly needle-in-a-haystack feel, I narrow the search words to “Levi Zin” “Seattle.” In the moment it takes
for the computer to process, I have a moment of clarity—that may not even be his real name—but in the next…

Bull’s-eye.

“‘Boating excursion turns tragic for local teen,’” I read aloud. Breathless, I double-click the link. The header leads me to the Web site for the
Seattle Times
.
This alone feels almost too official for my wild-goose chase. The article’s dated only a few months back. I bite the corner of my thumb as my eyes scan the page.

My mouth goes dry. It takes me three full read-throughs to digest the contents of the article and even then I feel full paragraphs—letters and punctuation—stewing half-chewed in the
pit of my stomach.

This, I remind myself, could be any Levi Zin. Not one in particular. But even as I practice self-soothing by repeating these thoughts, I know that they have a ring of
falseness. It’s not as if Levi Zin is a particularly common name. The probability shrinks more when narrowed to the number of Levi Zins in Seattle. Not impossible, but the chances are minimal
that there’s no connection at all.

I pull out a tattered notebook from my school bag and jot down the names Daniel James and Stefan Ashbury. These feel important, like a trail of bread crumbs. No photograph
accompanies the article. I also copy the name of the hospital, Harborview Medical Center. Because of my transplant, I’m familiar with most of the surgical facilities around Seattle, and this
one I recognize as the hospital where Henry’s father works.

My work takes on a more purposeful air, but I’m still not able to ignore the consistent throbbing in my chest. One thing’s clear: the boy who entered Duwamish High isn’t the
one who died. The boy at my high school must have assumed the identity of the deceased Levi, but why would anyone do that?

As I see it, there are two options: witness protection—or worse. And since the witness-protection program provides people with new identities—not old, stolen ones—this leaves
me with only one real possibility.

And it’s much, much worse.

When I wake, my room is dark with shadows tinted sepia by a yellowing moon. It’s the middle of the night, hours before my alarm clock will go off. Everything is still but
for the pounding of my heart. Right away, I’m as alert as if I’d had two cups of coffee.

My sixth sense buzzes in my ears. I lie stock-still. Afraid to move. The sensation of another human presence nearby settles over me and I remember being very small and too scared to check inside
my closet at night.

I slide the covers off my chin and peer down my nose at the window on the other side of the room. But no one’s there. My pulse skips. Slowly, I push myself up, back to the pillows, and
draw my knees to my chest. The space outside is empty, but the acrid scent of fresh cigarette smoke seeps through the cracks in the sill.

Without looking away, I fumble for my phone on the nightstand and slide it into my lap.

Henry,
I type into the keypad,
I need to come over tomorrow
.

There’s no response until morning, and all I can do is sleep with one eye open.

“Hi, Dr. Jones,” I say, stepping over the threshold into Henry’s home. Henry’s father, dressed in baby-blue hospital scrubs, is a grown-up replica of
Henry. His boyish, curly hair gives him a vaguely hyperactive appearance, and it’s occurred to me more than once that I rarely see adult men with curls you could loop your finger through. His
demeanor is unfailingly earnest and sincere. He has a way of making me feel as if he cares deeply about the answers I give to any offhand question.

“How are you?” he asks, ushering me in with a hand placed gently between my shoulder blades.

“I’m…” I contemplate this for a moment, since answering Dr. Jones always seems to warrant a bit of reflection. “I’m okay.”

He raises his eyebrows. “‘Okay’?”

“Well…” I push nervously at the spot over my heart where it aches.

“Have you had any complications?” When I’d first been diagnosed, I’d wanted Dr. Jones to perform my surgery. Especially after I’d met cold, hard Dr. Belkin. I
didn’t know at the time that not just any surgeon could perform a transplant. Dr. Jones covers more general emergency-room trauma.

But he’d taken pains to talk my parents through the selection of a doctor and a surgery center. It was he who’d gotten me in with Dr. Belkin, who, despite his chilling bedside
manner, is still one of the best doctors in the country.

“Not exactly,” I say. Though my life has gotten complicated, that’s for sure. “It’s just a transition.” This is my canned response, the one I give to any
adult who asks. A
transition
. A transition to what? Into insanity?

He nods, shifting his feet out to shoulder-width. “That’s what I tell all my patients. People think you can have a major surgery and—poof!—they’ll be shooting
baskets the next day. But that’s not realistic. The body has its own timeline and its own matters to attend to. You just need time to heal.” I don’t argue with him on that front.
My heart certainly does seem to have a mind of its own.

“Is Henry here?” I ask after an awkward pause.

“Ah, right. Sorry to keep you. It’s just such a pleasant surprise.” I blush. “Henry’s downstairs in the basement. You know the way.”

I usher myself down the carpeted hallway. Henry’s mother has never met a scented candle she doesn’t enjoy, and the house usually smells fragrant with spiced pumpkin or apple cider.
Today I detect something candied and appetizing.

The door to the basement is closed and I knock lightly before opening it. At the bottom of the stairs, I find Henry sprawled out on the couch. He straightens, pushing a pillow back into place,
when he sees me.

“Don’t look so alarmed,” I say, plopping down next to him. A flood of memories rushes to meet me. I’ve spent hours on this couch devouring grainy episodes of
The Twilight Zone
or tuning the AM radio dial to just the right frequency to catch
Lunatic Outpost
. But it’s been months and the basement’s been cleared of all of our
strewn-about books and posters and empty popcorn containers.

“I’m not. I just thought under cover of darkness in the middle of the night was more your style.”