The Bubble Wrap Boy (12 page)

F
or the first time in my teenage life, I was pleased my ridiculous squeaky curse of a voice had never broken. After two minutes of impersonating Mom, though, my throat was starting to hurt like I'd swallowed a rosebush with thorns. But there was no way I could give up, there was still stuff I had to learn.

The conversation so far had gone something like this.

I fought to think who on earth she was talking about.

I was on the verge of giving up the pretense and hanging up, but my hand refused to obey my brain. “Can she come to the phone?”

(Maybe if I heard her voice it might make more sense.)

My heart stopped, but my brain whizzed a hundred miles an hour. So whoever Dora was, she couldn't speak? What was going on? Was it some kind of bad joke from one of the kids at the park? I mean…

I wasn't lying either. Though “shock” didn't quite cover it.

I put the phone down gently, then staggered, zombie-like, into the bedroom. Where on earth did I start with this one?

For once Sinus was silent. No sarcasm or put-downs, just the sound of the room filling up with my far-fetched story.

“Whoa,” he finally said. “That is trippy.”

“Do you think it's a joke? Someone from the skate park?”

“Dude, bubble wrap is one thing, but this is something else. No one could make up stuff like this!”

He was right, but I couldn't believe it was true either.

I mean, Mom having a sister? She was an only child. I thought back as far as I could for the sketchiest of memories of an aunt, someone more laid-back and normal than Mom. Someone who stuck up for me. But there weren't any. I hadn't even met my grandparents. They'd died before I was born; there had only ever been Mom.

“If this is all true, then why wouldn't she tell me?” I asked Sinus. “Why keep a secret like that?”

“Beats me.”

“And what about Dad?” I was starting to get angry now, confusion boiling my blood. “I mean, he must know about it. She can't have kept it a secret from him too, can she?”

Sinus shrugged, looking for a second like he wanted to get out of this madhouse.

“I'm going to ask him!” I shouted, jumping to my feet. “Have it out with him.”

Sinus grabbed me and pulled me back to the carpet.

“Don't do that. Not yet. Imagine if he doesn't know. Imagine if she has kept it from him. He'll go crazy. No, we need to check this out first. Do some digging around.” He grabbed my laptop and opened it up. “What did you say the name of the place was again?”

My mind went blank. The name had a tree in it, but I was damned if I could remember which one. I sat there looking like an idiot.

“Come on!” Sinus looked aghast. “You can't have forgotten that already.”

“Some complete stranger has just told me that I've got an aunt that I never knew about. Apparently my mom and possibly my dad are the biggest liars walking the planet. And apparently I'm as naive as they are devious. So forgive me if I can't remember that the name of the hospital was Oakview….It's Oakview. Oakview.”

I put my hand to my mouth in relief as Sinus typed the name into Google.

“Oakview,” he read. “It's a nursing home. Long-term patients…blah blah blah…twenty-four-hour care…specializes in head injuries.”

“Where is it?” I asked, mind racing.

He scanned the screen. “Near the ocean. By the fishing museum.”

“Right.” I was back on my feet again. “Let's go.”

“Where?” he asked dimly.

“Where do you think, dummy? Oakview.”

“But your mom'll be back soon, won't she?”

I looked at the time. Mom always filled her shopping cart to the ceiling, so I thought if we moved fast we still might be safe.

“We'll have to find transportation,” I thought out loud.

“It's two buses to get there.”

That would never work. We had one option. It wasn't a good one, and Sinus was going to hate it. But it was all we had.

I
pedaled like the wind. Well, like a gust…or maybe just a gentle breeze.

Okay, I pedaled as hard as I could without hurting myself.

Getting the rhino to move was difficult at the best of times, but with Sinus wedged into the basket on the front, it was ridiculous.

He made an almighty fuss when I showed him the trike, but he was so nosy that the thought of being left behind was worse than the idea of embarrassing himself. With a final grumble, he clambered into the basket, legs dangling over the handlebars. I might have been smaller than him, but there was no way he could get the wheels turning.

If I hadn't been so mega-stressed, I would've laughed at him. He looked ridiculous. All he needed was a blanket wrapped around him and he would've been a dead ringer for E.T.

We could've done with some otherworldly powers: someone to lift the bike into the air and propel us there at jet speed. All I could do was grit my teeth and power us on as best I could.

We arrived after about twenty-five minutes, both of us ready to collapse: me with exhaustion and Sinus with a cramp. He rolled around on the ground like a hooked fish. I was tempted to kick him while he was down there, but resisted the urge—I'd undoubtedly need his help. Instead, I pulled him to his feet and told him to man up.

Oakview was a big place, must have been a hundred years old, all pillars and plaques. The building sat in the middle of a huge garden, with ancient trees and stone benches scattered about. Even though the oaks were enormous, they couldn't block the sight of the ocean about a mile away.

“Nice place,” said Sinus.

“Huge,” I added. “Think we'll find her?”

He shrugged. “We can try. Reception's that way.”

I paced toward the house, suddenly realizing I had no idea what I was going to do when I got there. I mean, how do you ask for directions to your long-lost aunt's room? And what was I going to say to her when I met her? Would she even know who I was? That I even existed?

Suddenly it all felt like too much. All I wanted to do was climb on the rhino, creak my way home, and climb into bed. But something stopped me.

The thought of Mom's face the last four weeks, the creases and emotions scratched deep into it. All the worry that I thought had been about some stupid massage course, when it had actually been about Dora—whoever she was.

I thought about all the years she'd kept up the act, the courses she'd invented to keep reality from me, all the skills she'd made up just to be here. I couldn't begin to count the number of journeys she must have made.

I had a hundred questions burning up in my head and had to believe that the answers lay inside that building. Even though the possibilities running through my mind scared me, I had to listen. There was no alternative.

So, still without a clue about what to say, we pushed through the double doors and into the reception area.

It was cavernous, the size of our apartment. More like a stately home than a hospital. The only reminder was the smell—that artificial and antiseptic odor that makes you tense as soon as you step inside.

It seemed calm, with gentle music piping in through speakers that I couldn't see. It was like being sung a lullaby.

The only thing that wasn't calm was the nurse behind the front desk. She was trying to do three things at once and failing at all of them.

She was on the phone, the cord wrapped twice around her body as she struggled to feed paper into a printer. She babbled into the receiver in a language neither I nor Sinus understood.

It was either medical talk or swearwords so sophisticated we hadn't encountered them yet. After the verbal abuse I'd suffered the past month, I had to believe it was the former.

Even though she was failing at what she was already attempting, she insisted on trying to drink a cup of juice that sat by the printer. A long curly straw poked from the glass, and each time she dipped her head to it, she managed to poke herself in the eye. Comedy gold, but I wasn't in the mood to laugh.

She didn't notice us for a couple of minutes, eyes rolling in frustration when she finally did. The last thing she needed was a couple of kids to deal with. She finished the conversation in her own time, then tried to untangle herself from the phone cord, knocking over her drink in the process.

More highly medical terms spewed from her pursed lips.

I pulled a wad of tissues from the box on the desk and dabbed at the spill, mopping the liquid closer to her printer.

“Yes, yes, thank you,” she snipped, grabbing the tissues from my hand. “I
can
manage.”

Sinus shot her a look that said,
Are you sure?

If I really did have an aunt living here, I hoped this wasn't her nurse.

She pushed the liquid around the desk for another minute or so, huffing and puffing, until, with a final flourish, she threw the soaked tissues into the garbage, took a deep breath, pasted on a really flimsy smile, and sighed. “Now, boys. What can I do for you?”

No sooner had the words passed her lips than a siren rang out. The kind you hear in World War Two movies when the Nazis are about to blitz London. She looked so panicky that I thought I should dive under the nearest desk.

Grabbing a microphone that sat on a small stand, she hollered two words that ripped through both the speakers and our eardrums—“CRASH TEAM!”—before vaulting over the desk and toward a door to the right, knocking her glass over again.

“I'll be back, boys. Wait right here!” she hollered over her shoulder.

At that point I was obediently looking for a chair, but not Sinus. He raced after her, catching the door she'd dashed through, just before it locked behind her.

“What are you doing?” I whispered.

“We've got forty minutes until you have to be home. I'm trying to find this aunt of yours before your mom locks you up for life.”

He was a genius. A snotty, irritating, big-nosed genius.

What would I do without him?

Without a second thought we pushed through the door and ran up the stairs in front of us. Dora was in here somewhere.

All we had to do was find her. And quick.