Class - Cecily Von Ziegesar [95]
The door to the room was open. Adam and two people who must have been his parents stood at the head of the bed where Adam’s sister lay with a blistered face and bandaged hands. An IV drip was taped to her arm.
“You guys here for the ass transplant?” Tragedy joked hoarsely when she saw them. “You got the right room.”
The guy who’d arrived with Shipley blinked his icy blue eyes. He reminded Adam of someone, but he couldn’t quite think of who.
Patrick wasn’t expecting an audience. And now that he knew the girl was alive, he wasn’t even sure he wanted to see her. “I can come back later,” he said, squeezing the kitten inside his pocket. Amazingly, the kitten had slept, curled deep inside his parka, the entire time he’d been in jail.
The color had returned to Ellen’s cheeks. “You must be the famous Pink Patrick!” she crowed. “Our hero!” She raised her eyebrows at Shipley. “And who are you?”
Adam cleared his throat. “Mom, this is Shipley. The girl I was telling you about.”
Ellen pursed her lips together, making it clear that she wasn’t too keen on whatever she’d heard. “Let’s leave Pinkie and Trag alone for a bit,” she said, herding the rest of them out of the room. “That boy saved her life.”
Shipley followed them out into the hall and closed the door behind her, still trying to reconcile the fact that Patrick was a hero.
“You wouldn’t believe the morning I’ve had,” she told Adam.
“A hunter shot her,” Adam said. “She went for a walk last night in Mom’s fur coat and got lost in the snow. And then a hunter shot her.”
“And if she’d died, I would have had to kill you too,” Eli declared. “The both of you.”
“The weather was so bad, the guy probably didn’t even know he’d hit something,” Adam went on, ignoring his father. “Anyway, it was an accident.”
“But she’s okay,” Shipley insisted, glancing at Adam for assistance. His parents weren’t exactly friendly.
Adam frowned. “That depends on your definition of okay.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Just so you know, Adam is grounded,” Ellen interjected. “Until he’s about forty-five. Although I don’t suppose it makes any difference.”
Shipley laughed. Then she stopped laughing. No one else was laughing.
Adam wanted to touch her, to kiss her, to tell her it was all right, but he’d already resolved something in his mind that had nothing to do with touching her or kissing her or talking to her ever again.
Ellen and Eli went over to the coffee station and poured themselves two Styrofoam cups of coffee and creamer.
Shipley leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. She needed a nap.
“My brother was always such a fuckup,” she said to no one in particular.
Patrick had developed a hatred of hospitals when he was just a boy. He’d suffered from chronic ear infections and post-nasal drip, and when he turned six, the pediatrician ordained that his tonsils and adenoids needed to be removed.
His parents had lied to him. “You’ll be asleep for the whole thing, and when you wake up you’ll get ice cream,” they said. But when he woke up, his head felt like an octopus whose eight legs had been eaten off by a shark. He didn’t want any ice cream, and he refused to speak to his parents. It was about that time that he stopped taking off his jacket.
Shipley was only a baby then, sunny and silly. She sat on the floor, making puddles with his ice cream, while he watched back-to-back episodes of The Twilight Zone. He’d thought meeting up with her today would be a turning point of some kind, that he’d become something more than just the sketchy subject of a short poem. But he could see now that that would have been too easy. Turning points were hard to come by.
The room was full of beeping machinery. There were flowers on the nightstand and a TV was bolted to the wall. It wasn’t anything like jail, although it sort of smelled the same.
“I brought you something.” Patrick removed the kitten from his pocket and put it down on the bed. The kitten crawled