Once they had determined I was stable, they moved me to a more permanent room, where I dozed for a while. When I woke, the first thing I saw was Michelle’s face.
“Michelle,” I said, my voice groggy. I reached out my hand, which she took and squeezed.
“How are you feeling?” she said.
“Stupid.”
She laughed. “Yeah, well, I’m not going to argue there. This is a little too familiar, me visiting you in the hospital.” Last year, I’d landed in the hospital four times. “I called your dad, by the way.”
“Oh, good.” Although I was sort of dreading facing my father. How would I explain this to him?
“I also brought you a bag of your stuff, just some clothes and toiletries.”
“Thank you, Michelle,” I said. I sat up in bed, feeling disoriented and weak. “What time is it?”
“Nine,” she said.
“At night?”
“No, in the morning.”
“How long was I out there?”
“Well, as far as I can tell, you went for a run yesterday afternoon, and we found you a little before eight this morning, so . . . you were out there all night.”
“God, it felt like longer.”
She stared at me with a protective, maternal expression I’d never seen before. “How did you end up in that cave, Emma?”
“Remember last year?” I said. “The coma dreams about
Jane Eyre
?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Well, it was kind of like that. Only with
The Scarlet Letter
.”
She made a twisted face like she was dealing with someone deranged. “But you weren’t asleep. You were running, right?”
“Yeah, but I fell into some kind of trance. It’s hard to describe.”
“Try,” she said.
I did my best to explain what had been happening to me. She listened attentively, her brow growing more furrowed as I continued my story.
“This is serious, Emma,” she said. “You could have died out there.”
“I know,” I said. “But I didn’t. You saved me.”
“Not exactly,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not going to believe this,” she said. “You know how you asked how I knew where to find you?”
“Yeah.”
“It was Gray. He called me.”
“Gray called you?”
“Well, he called you. Last night when you weren’t back by dinnertime, I got a little worried. But I figured you might have gone to see Owen. Or maybe you got a bite to eat in town. When you hadn’t come back by nine o’clock, I started to get really concerned. I was going to call you, but you’d left your phone in our room. So I called everyone else—Owen, Jess, even Flynn. No one knew where you were.
“Eventually, I got into bed, hoping you’d be back soon. I didn’t want to overreact and call the police. I must have dozed off because I remember waking to the phone ringing. Your phone. Even though it didn’t make sense, I thought it might be you. I looked at the display and saw Gray’s name. I didn’t answer the first time. But he kept calling.
“Finally, I picked up, and he thought I was you. When I told him you were missing, he got all freaked out and said that’s why he had called. He said he’d gotten this strange vision of you trapped in some dark place, and that’s when I thought of the witch caves. I called campus security and explained that you were missing. They thought I was being paranoid, said you’d probably just stayed the night in a friend’s room. But I had this weird feeling Gray’s vision might be real. So I called 911. They connected me to the fire department, and I told them you were an amateur spelunker.”
I laughed at that one until my ribs ached.
“It was the only way I could think to get them to believe you might be stuck in a cave. It was a long shot, but the fire department thought it was worth checking out. Secretly I think they just wanted to give those snowmobiles a whirl.”
I tried to calm down enough to speak. “Michelle, I don’t know what to say. Thank you.”
“It’s not me you should be thanking,” she said. “You and Gray have some freaky mind meld thing going. Like Luke and Leia in Star Wars. God, I hope you’re not brother and sister.”
“Stop making me laugh,” I said. “It hurts.”
We hung out a little longer until the doctor came in to do some more tests. As soon as Michelle left, I fished through the bag she’d brought and found my cell phone. Jess and Owen had texted me, and Gray had left about a dozen text messages and one voice mail. I listened to his voice message first.
“Emma, it’s Gray. I don’t know why I’m calling, except that I got this strange feeling and I’m worried about you. I know you probably don’t want to talk to me right now, but please call me anyway and let me know you’re all right.”
There was a pause during which I could hear him breathing softly, then a hang-up. After listening to his message three times, I had it memorized.
Impulsively, I called him back. When I got his voice mail, I didn’t know what I could say that would possibly acknowledge the enormity of what had taken place last night. So I hung up. I texted him a message instead:
Am okay. Thanks for calling.
The words looked so cold and inadequate. So I typed in the words
I miss you
and stared at the tiny sentence, my thumb poised over the Send button. Then I watched the letters disappear one by one as I deleted them, leaving only the message that I was okay.
C
HAPTER
19
M
y dad arrived at the hospital just as I was nodding off to sleep.
“Emma, thank God you’re okay.”
“I’m fine, Dad. Just a little shaken up.”
“What happened?”
Sparing him the ridiculous truth, I stuck to the story Michelle had told the police and said I’d been out looking for the witch caves. While exploring one of them, the storm had intensified and I’d gotten snowed in.
“What possessed you to go looking for a cave in the middle of a snowstorm?”
Legitimate question. “We studied them in history class, and I was curious. But it was a dumb thing to do, Dad. I’m sorry I worried you.”
“Honey, my job is to worry about you. That’s what I do, whether you like it or not. When you’re thirty-five and a best-selling poet on the Riviera, I’m still going to worry.”
“A best-selling poet, Dad?”
He laughed. “No such thing?”
“Exactly. And I’d prefer Paris to the Riviera.”
“Don’t start on Paris,” he said, laughing.
Even though I tried to convince him to go home, he insisted on staying overnight. The doctor wanted to keep me there so he could reassess me in the morning. But I felt fine. At least physically. But all this deception was starting to weigh on me. I hadn’t told my dad about the dreams because I was worried he would assume the worst—that I was becoming sick like my mom. And maybe I was.
Last year, a legion of doctors had not been able to explain how I’d survived a lightning strike with no permanent cognitive damage. But what if they’d gotten it wrong? What if I was brain-damaged, and that explained the hallucinations I was having?
There was this possible medical explanation, and there was Darlene’s mystical one, and the truth probably lay somewhere in between. I didn’t know what I believed anymore.
When I got back to school on Monday, I really wanted to talk to Owen, but I knew he’d be in class. I took the day off to rest, but ironically, I couldn’t seem to sleep when I wanted to.
I waited until the afternoon and called Owen’s cell, relieved that he actually picked up. “Emma, are you okay?” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“God, you gave everyone a scare. Michelle told me you were out
spelunking?
”
I laughed. “You’re not buying that one?”
“I figure it probably had more to do with your narcolepsy. Or whatever you want to call it.”
“Yeah. Look, Owen, I know I need to get this under control, but I didn’t call to talk about the cave,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you about the other night. Can I come over?”
There was a long pause, and then he said, “Okay. When?”
“Are you free now? I could walk there.”
“Walk?” he said. “In four feet of snow? After last night? I don’t think so. I’ll come and pick you up. We can get coffee in town.”
For a moment, he sounded like the old Owen—conciliatory, sweet, always ready to make me feel better. But as soon as I got in his car, I felt this terrible tension that made my insides coil and tighten. Things between Owen and me had always been so simple and effortless. But I wondered if maybe they’d only seemed simple and effortless to me. Maybe Owen had been struggling with our friendship for a long time.
“How are you?” I asked as we drove into Waverly, wondering how we were going to sustain a conversation over coffee when we could barely fill the space of a ten-minute car ride.
“I’ve been better.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m so sorry about the other night,” I said. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I wasn’t thinking.”
He seemed to swallow whatever he was about to say. Then he muttered through gritted teeth, “You don’t need to explain.” Every word took so much effort, and his body language seemed cold and distant.
Once we got into Waverly, we went to the coffee shop and sat at a table by the window. Owen bought me a latte and scone even though I insisted on paying, and we sat across from each other, fumbling with our place settings. Owen tapped on his mug, and I played with my spoon.
After the silence grew unbearable, I decided to take the direct approach. “How are things with you and Flynn?”
His eyes widened, like he was surprised I’d broached the topic. “We’re cool, I guess,” he said. “He was really drunk that night. And he’s Flynn, you know?”
So he’d forgiven Flynn almost immediately because Flynn was drunk and basically an idiot anyway? But me, he blamed because he’d expected more. It wasn’t fair, but it also wasn’t far from the truth.
“Are you guys still going to Europe together?”
“Of course,” he said. “We fly to London in July.”
“And then Paris in the fall?” He nodded. I remembered our deal to go to our first opera together. I doubted that would ever happen now.
Owen glanced down at his coffee, and more time ticked away. This was torture. I had to say something to crack through his defenses. “So, you’re still so mad at me you can’t even look at me?”
His eyes flickered up at mine. “Just the opposite,” he said. “I still feel something I know I shouldn’t. That’s why I can’t look at you. But that’s my problem, not yours.”
He dropped his gaze again, and I struggled to say something. “Owen, do you think we’ll ever be able to be friends again?”
“I’ve never stopped being your friend, Emma. But watching you kiss Flynn that night? I’ve never felt more like a fool. Not even with Michelle. With her, at least I saw it coming. You blindsided me.”
“Owen, I can only say I’m sorry again.”
“It’s okay. You can’t make yourself love someone. Especially when you still have feelings for someone else.”
“Owen—”
“No, let me finish. After that night when you kissed me at the cast party, I knew you were rebounding, but I let myself believe that maybe someday, you could love me, too. But seeing you kiss Flynn, I realized neither kiss meant anything to you. Because you’re still in love with Gray.”
His eyes fluttered closed. When I didn’t say anything to deny it, Owen tipped back the last of his coffee and pulled his chair back.
We drove back to school in silence, and when we pulled up to Easty Hall, I put my hand on his arm.
“What can I do to make this right?” I said.
He didn’t answer right away. “Nothing,” he said. “I’m going to need some time.”
“Okay,” I said. “I can do that.”
I smiled softly, but he kept staring straight ahead at the steering wheel. When I got out of the car, I bent down and peered in at him. “Owen?” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for seeing me,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”
He looked up and smiled a little sadly. “What are friends for?”
Over the next few weeks, life got a little better. And worse. Michelle and I were talking again, which was wonderful. Jess had moved in with Elise, and they had reconciled, too. But everyone had found out about my excursion to the witch caves, so now people were talking about me in not-so-hushed voices, saying I was “a witch,” “a drama queen,” “a mental case.” And Amber and Chelsea continued to torture Jess.
In Bio, Ms. Brewster started her unit on plant sexuality. Girls were snickering before she even started her lecture.
“Up until the nineteenth century,” she said, “many people refused to believe plants had sexuality because according to the Bible, plants were created on the third day, and it wasn’t until the sixth day that the Bible made any mention of gender. Yet scientists know now that plants have a far more complex sexual cycle than animals.”
I had to admit, it was kind of funny to hear Brewster talking about stamens and pistils and sepals and hermaphrodite plants. Even the diagrams she put up on the Smart Board looked kind of dirty.
“In dioecious species,” she went on, “each plant has reproductive units that are either male or female. The androe-cious plants produce male flowers only and the gynoecious plants produce female flowers only. In some populations, all plants are gynoecious, thus they must rely on nonsexual reproduction to create the next generation.”
Amber leaned over to Chelsea and said, “What do you know, lesbo plants.”
Chelsea threw her head back laughing, and the giggles spread like a contagion. But not everyone was laughing. Elise glared at Amber and told her to grow up, and Michelle looked at me like she was going to lose it.
Ms. Brewster slammed her book down on her desk and shouted, “I don’t know who is speaking, but the next person who says anything inappropriate will be spending all Saturday in the dissection closet.”
Everyone settled down quickly after that, but I heard Amber whisper, “We all know who’s been spending time in the closet this year.”
“That’s it,” Brewster said. “Ms. Fairchild, I’ve warned you for the last time.”
Elise looked up from her notebook. “That wasn’t me,” she said. “I’m just taking notes and doing my reading.”