Between Here and Forever - Elizabeth Scott [7]
And it would be fine if I was still twelve, but barely filling out an A cup at seventeen is pathetic. As is the fact that I can buy—and wear—boys’ pants because I’m barely five foot two. And also have no hips to speak of.
But now I know the guy I saw yesterday is Eli, and that he can be found in the gift shop. He must be fairly new to the hospital—I know everyone who works here—and I can work with that. I know what I saw yesterday.
I know what—who—Tess needs in order to wake up.
seven
I tell Tess his name as soon as I see her. She doesn’t respond, but that’s okay. I bet she needs to hear his voice again. When she does, she’ll do what she did yesterday. She has to.
If Tess doesn’t wake up, then she isn’t—then she won’t be here. Not truly here, you know? And she’s always been the bright star my family revolves around. She’s been the person who people in Ferrisville talk about with reverence in their voices. Tess is pretty, young, kind—all the things people want each other to be. All the things people so often aren’t.
The only problem is, I don’t know how to get the guy up here. I think about it as I tell Tess about my day, mostly lingering on the candy bar I bought before last period because Tess is a sucker for candy. She even ended up living with Beth because of it.
When I went to visit them last fall, she told me she knew she had to swap roommates and move in with Beth the very first day she came to campus.
“I walk into my room,” she said, “and there’s this girl sitting on the floor eating a Nibby Bar. You know, the one with the cocoa nibs in it?”
I’d nodded and made a face because Tess’s love for bitter chocolate, up to and including chocolate with pieces of twiglike chocolate in it, made no sense to me.
“And I think, wow, this is going to be amazing, because I love Nibby Bars too,” Tess had said. “But it turned out Beth lives across the hall, and just stopped by to say hi. I knew things would work out, though. And they did!” She’d turned and grinned at Beth, who shook her head at Tess, but still smiled.
“How about some candy?” I ask Tess now. “A nice bar of chocolate, maybe? I’ll get you one, I swear. You just have to open your eyes.”
Tess doesn’t move.
“Fine,” I say, and my voice comes out more angry than I mean it to. I swallow hard and look at the floor.
“Someone wanted a copy of, um, Sassy You?” a voice says out in the nursing area.
The voice. It’s that guy. Eli. I hear someone else murmur something, but I don’t listen.
I don’t listen because behind Tess’s closed eyes, I see something move. I see her body hearing something. I see it responding.
I know what I have to do, and so I go out and say, “It’s mine. I mean, I want the magazine.”
The guy—Eli—looks at me. If I thought he was really looking at me, and not seeing someone who wanted a copy of the world’s stupidest magazine (and if I looked like someone he’d want to see), I swear my knees would melt. (That’s right, melt. Screw going weak. Eli is beyond that mortal power.)
“Um, excuse me, but I asked for that magazine,” one of the nurses says. “Mrs. Johnson loves it.”
Mrs. Johnson is in worse shape than Tess. She can’t even breathe on her own, and no one ever comes to visit her. I guess all her family is dead, or something. She just lies there in her room, all alone, day after day, air pumped in and out of her lungs, keeping her breath flowing, her heart beating. The nurses don’t pay much attention to her, and the first week Tess was here, I had nightmares about Mrs. Johnson every night.
I started sneaking into her room once in a while and saying hello to her, and the nightmares stopped. I still do it, and although I’ve never spoken to her, I’m sure Mrs. Johnson wouldn’t want a copy of Sassy You, with its stupid articles about how to get guys to want you “all the time!” and profiles of celebrities whose greatest achievements are tossing their hair around, smiling, and swearing that their latest trip