Out of Nowhere
Authors: Rebecca Phillips
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Genre Fiction, #Coming of Age, #Teen & Young Adult, #Romance, #Contemporary
Out of Nowhere
Rebecca Phillips
Out of Nowhere
By Rebecca Phillips
Copyright 2013 Rebecca Phillips
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages for review purposes.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarities to real people, living or dead, are coincidental and not intended by the author.
Cover Image: Copyright 2013 photopixel
Used under license from shutterstock.com
Cover Design by Jason Phillips
For Jason, the sweetest long-haired guy I’ve ever known.
Praise for Out of Nowhere, 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Finalist
“Riley's story is thoughtful and grounded, showing the impact of a traumatic event years after the event occurred...Even supporting characters are well-rounded, and the relationships ring true.”
–
Publishers Weekly
*
“Riley's story is one that garners empathy, and readers will smile as she overcomes the psychological stumbling blocks on her path." –
Andrea Cremer, NYT Bestselling Author of the Nightshade Series
“...an easy, readable style; many appealing characters; and genuinely touching moments...An extremely enjoyable read.” –
Regina Hayes, Editor-at-Large for Viking Children’s Books
*review based on unpublished manuscript
Table of Contents
Chapter One
I wasn’t sure what would kill me first—the nagging pain in my head or Dr. Kapur. My money was on the pain, but only because ethics and an exceptional bedside manner prevented Dr. Kapur from acting on any homicidal urges he may have had toward me. The headache, on the other hand, wasn’t quite so restrained.
“Maybe I need another CT-scan,” I said, and then opened wide for the tongue depressor. “Ahhh.”
“Tilt your head back, please,” Dr. Kapur said, tossing the tongue depressor in the trash can. He shined his little light up my nose and I watched his warm brown eyes scrunch up at the corners, the way they did when he was concentrating. “You had a CT-scan six months ago, Riley, and it was perfectly normal.” His fingers probed my neck. “Any tenderness here?”
I shook my head, which set off little spasms of pain through my eye sockets. Dr. K moved back to his desk, where he sat down and plucked a pen from the front pocket of his white coat. The plucking of the pen meant one of two things: a prescription, or more scribbled writing in my thick chart. Sometimes both. I’d been going to Dr. K for almost a year now, long enough to grow accustomed to his habits. Fortunately, he’d grown accustomed to mine too. He wasn’t as transparent as most of the other doctors I’d seen, but I could tell I tested his patience sometimes.
“Did I mention the fever?” I said. “I had a temperature of one hundred point one last night.”
He slid his prescription pad in front of him and started scratching away on it. “Low-grade fever, congestion, headache, nasal discharge, post nasal-drip….” he recited as he wrote. “Sounds like a classic sinus infection to me.”
“Sinus infection?” As I repeated this I noticed—as I often did—how much better words sounded when
he
said them. With his accent, he could even make
sinus infection
sound exotic. “Is this a secondary infection from the cold I had last week?”
He glanced up at me, smiling, his teeth bright against his russet skin. “Likely. Now I’m going to give you a script for an antibiotic, and I also want you to take a decongestant and an anti-inflammatory pain reliever.” He handed me the small slips of paper. “Lots of liquids, lots of rest, medication as directed. You know the drill.”
I stood up, stuffing the scripts in the front pocket of my backpack. “And if the antibiotic
doesn’t
make me better?”
Dr. Kapur closed my chart and came over to stand in front of me. “Then you call Paula and make another appointment to see me,” he said gently. “Sound good?”
I nodded, and he smiled at me one last time before leaving the room.
Oh Dr. Kapur
, I thought as I left the office and crossed the waiting room.
You have no idea how much better you make me feel, simply by being tolerant with me.
My regular pharmacy was located a few blocks away from the doctor’s office, close enough to walk to. I dropped off my prescription at the counter and spent the next twenty minutes wandering around the drug store, checking out the magazines and shampoo displays while I waited for my meds. By the time I made it back outside, the dark clouds that had been hovering all day finally decided to open up. Fat drops of rain splattered against the pavement. I jogged the few feet to the bus stop and took shelter under the awning of a nearby bookstore.
Music would only aggravate my headache, but I dug out my iPod anyway and popped in my ear buds. Losing myself in a song was better than standing here and watching the homeless guy beg for change on the corner. As a born-and-raised city kid, I was used to street noise and grime and walking or taking the bus everywhere I went, but I’d never gotten the hang of pretending homeless people were invisible, a routine piece of the city’s backdrop along with overflowing garbage cans and graffiti. My mother liked to remind me that I couldn’t rescue everyone. “Some people don’t want to be saved,” she’d say. In response, I’d always bring up Lucy and Alice, the shelter cats I’d rescued from certain death.
They
were grateful.
The bus pulled up and I took a seat near the front, trying to picture Mom’s reaction to my bringing a homeless man home to live with us. It wouldn’t be pretty. Cats were one thing…a human being was something else altogether.
The bus merged into rush-hour traffic, passing office buildings and restaurants and upscale clothing stores as we lumbered down Centennial Drive. I pressed my shoulder against the window and tried not to breathe in the damp reek of the person behind me, who obviously had something against deodorant. Even with my clogged nose, I could smell it. Trapped in an enclosed space like this, surrounded by bodies and recycled air, was enough to trigger an anxiety attack even when I wasn’t holding my breath against the assault of BO. I buried my face in my jacket and inhaled just enough oxygen to get me through the next few minutes.
My stop was next. Before the bus had even finished braking, I jolted out of my seat as if I’d been tasered and dove for the door. On the sidewalk, I sucked in a lungful of fresh air and began to walk the short distance to my house.
I’d lived at 3370 Gardner Street since I was four years old. Before that we’d lived at my grandparents’ house across town. The only thing I remembered about living there was the time I broke my wrist while sliding down the banister. Halfway down I’d lost my grip and tilted sideways, landing with a resounding crack on the hardwood floor below. I remembered the clean sound of my bone breaking, like a twig snapping underfoot, and then the white, panicked face of my father as he rushed over to scoop me up. There must have been pain, but my memories of the incident ended there, in the safety of his arms.
Maybe part of the reason my parents chose the Gardner Street house was because it lacked an irresistibly smooth banister. Affordability didn’t hurt either; back then, my father was just starting out as a paramedic and my mother was in school full-time, getting her business degree. But they’d wanted their own place, even if that place happened to be a sixty-year-old bungalow with a postage-stamp-sized yard and ugly kitchen flooring that hadn’t been replaced since the invention of television.
We still had that same old floor—dark brown and beige linoleum, stained and peeling at the corners. Five years ago I was sure my mother would have it torn up, finally, to rid herself (and me) of the most glaring reminder of what had taken place on that surface. But she didn’t, and every time I swept or mopped or simply walked into the kitchen, my mind flashed on the image of my father’s form, white and still, sprawled across that revolting linoleum.
* * *
I unlocked the front door, straining my ears for Tristan’s welcoming squeal. But only the familiar sound of Dr. Phil’s theme music trickled into the entryway. I held my breath for the second time in the past half hour. Not to block out a bad smell, like on the bus earlier, but because I never knew what kind of mess I’d find after my mother spent an entire day stuck in the house with a sick baby.
“Good evening,” she said when I found her on the couch in the living room, still in her bathrobe. “I was just starting to wonder if you’d been kidnapped.”
I crouched down to pick up a plastic fire truck, depositing it in the large bin in the corner. It looked like a Toys “R” Us had exploded in here. “I went to the doctor after school.”
“Of course.” She dragged herself off the couch to help me with the mess. “What was Dr. Lard’s diagnosis this time?”
“Dr.
Laird
,” I said, gathering a herd of plastic farm animals into an orderly pile. “And I stopped going to her last year. I see Dr. Kapur now, remember?”
“Oh yes, the charming gentleman from India.” She cocked an eyebrow at me. “So you’ve had the same doctor for the past year? That’s odd. Usually they drop you like a hot tomato once they realize you’re a hypochondriac.”
“A hot
potato
. And for your information, I have a very real sinus infection.” I cleared the last of the toys from the floor and reached for my backpack. “Where’s Tristan?”
“Still napping, can you believe it?”
“Mom! It’s after five. He’ll be up all night.”
She headed for the kitchen, presumably to start dinner. “He was up last night with that cold. He needs to sleep.”
Sighing, I unearthed the bag o’ meds from my backpack. Antibiotics and decongestants for me, bottle of Baby Tylenol—grape flavor—for Tristan. I’d done everything short of wearing a mask to avoid passing on this cold to my baby brother, but the germs had prevailed. For the past two nights he’d been awake at three in the morning, fussy with fever and a stuffy nose. Waking up in the middle of the night, unable to breathe, had to be scary for a fourteen-month-old.
I popped my first pill and then went down the hallway to Tristan’s room. My brother was wiggling in his crib, fixed in the land between awake and asleep. I crept over and looked down at him, marveling as always at how cute he looked, even with matted hair and ten pounds of snot dripping from his nose.
“Hey, bud,” I whispered. Tristan opened his eyes and immediately extended his arms toward me. I lifted him up, pressing my lips against his clammy forehead. “How about some juice?” I asked, and he rubbed his eyes and grunted. He couldn’t talk yet, aside from some gibberish that reminded me of a show I once watched about people speaking in tongues, but I knew what most of his sounds meant.
I changed his diaper and carried him out to the kitchen, where our mother was dicing an onion at the counter. From the back, she didn’t look much older than me. Or much different, for that matter. We were both tall and slender, with long, straight black hair and eyes the color of dark chocolate. People often mistook us for sisters, which wasn’t too much of a stretch since Mom had given birth to me when she was barely eighteen.
“I have to go to the store for a few hours this evening,” Mom told me as I secured Tristan into his highchair. “Payroll catastrophe. Can you watch Tristan, or did you have plans?”