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Luke laughed, tugging at my other arm. “Hey, you can’t pull on my fiancée like that.”
“It doesn’t count. You tricked her.”
“Guys?” I whispered, grinning.
Luke let go of my arm. “She’s gotten a bunch already.”
“That makes you as bad as Rocky and that other idiot,” Gabriel said, pulling me onto the bed with him. I crawled up until I was sitting on the edge. Gabriel stuffed the blanket around his shoulders as he sat next to me. He rubbed a palm at his sleepy eyes. “Which reminds me, we need to figure out how we’re going to stop this stupid obsession. If this catches on, it’ll turn into guys bullying her instead.”
The house creaked. I froze, trying to fix on the sound. Was it a normal house settling creak or something else?
Gabriel was oblivious. “And Rocky’s on the football team. We don’t need the whole team doing that to her.”
I leaned over, hovering above him, as I extended a finger out to his lips, pushing a fingertip to his mouth to get his attention. His eyes widened and his lips closed. My cheeks teased with heat. It was like he was kissing my finger.
A distinctive creak of the pushpin being pulled from the wall sent me falling to the floor in a panic. I meant to get out of the way for Gabriel to get past me to get inside the attic. Instead, he shoved the cover over his head.
Luke seized me by the waist, dragging me into the attic with him. I spilled out onto my back. My shirt got shoved up, exposing my stomach and my back scratched against the wood. My bad ankle locked into an odd position, and I bit at my tongue to try to ease the pain. Luke hovered on all fours over me, closing the door behind us.
The door to my bedroom crashed open against the wall.
“What are you doing in bed?” Marie’s voice filtered through to us. I heaved a sigh. While it wouldn’t be good for Marie to catch Gabriel here, it wasn’t as bad as my mother.
Through the attic door, Gabriel groaned, girly, muffled.
“Sick?” Marie asked. “Why’d you move your stuff around?”
More mumbling.
Dry air clamped down on my throat. I started coughing. Luke shifted above me, drawing himself down against my body and covering me with his frame. His hand found the back of my head and he stuffed my face into his chest. I tried to swallow and breathe but it felt like the more I breathed in, the more I needed to cough.
Outside in the bedroom, Gabriel started coughing, too, masking my noise.
“You’re not going to puke, are you?” Marie asked. “I came to check in. I’m going back. She’s asleep again.”
Tears threatened my eyes. My body shuttered against Luke’s as I tried to swallow back a cough. His lips found my ear.
“Hang on, sugar,” he whispered. “One more minute.”
I pressed my face to his chest and smashed my mouth against his shirt.
“You should get some water,” Marie said.
Silence lasted for a few minutes. I swallowed over and over again to hold back a cough.
The attic door burst open. Gabriel lunged inside and Luke pushed me out. Coughing spasms took over. I scrambled for the bed.
The door was still wide open but Marie was gone. I gasped for air, got up from the bed and crept to the door.
Marie was in her bedroom, digging through clothes on her floor. I crossed the hallway to the bathroom, tucking my head under the sink to drink water from the tap.
Marie entered and nudged my body while I was upside down and I ended up with some water up my nose. I pulled back, pushing a palm to my face as I coughed and sneezed out water. Beautiful.
Marie yanked open a drawer and dug through the back for some make up. She shoved some into her book bag. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” she said. She walked down the hallway and down the back stairs.
Did she really check in with mom? She didn’t even notice the IV. She also didn’t notice the bandages on my wrists and around my ankles. How often did my family walk by each other and never really see? The guys noticed bandages, bruises, my hair pulled back in my clip, the way I moved... How blind was I to their movements and the small things? I vowed to myself to start noticing everything. It mattered to me. I wanted to notice those things because it touched me when they noticed them about me.
I found a wash cloth and cleaned my face. I selected a bottle of over the counter pain medications. I was tired of my ankle throbbing and my tailbone aching.
When I got back to my room, the boys were still behind the attic door. Did they not hear her leaving? I closed and locked the door again, moving to the attic door and pulling it open.
It was dark and I didn’t see them at first. “Luke?” I whispered.
His head popped out from the back. He crawled forward. “How did you hear her coming?”
I shrugged. “I’m used to it.”
“Yeah, but Gabriel was talking,” he said. He knelt on all fours just inside the door as if hesitating.
“Oy,” Gabriel called from behind him. “Get out.”
“We should stay in here,” Luke said. “That was close enough.”
“We won’t go far,” Gabriel said. “We’ll stay behind the bookshelf. It’s too hot in here.”
I backed away as the two of them slinked out onto the mauve carpet behind the bookshelf. Luke did look relieved.
Gabriel sprawled out on his stomach, breathing in the air. “Oh god,” he said. “I was flipping out. I thought she was going to look under the blanket for sure when I started coughing.”
“How’s your throat?” Luke asked me.
I smiled. “It’s fine now. Are you guys okay?”
“Yeah,” Gabriel said. “Where did she go?”
“She went back to Danielle’s.”
He smirked. “Those two deserve each other. She didn’t even care you were sick.”
I twisted my lips. “There wasn’t much she could do if I was.”
“Sure she could,” he said, getting up on his knees. “She could have offered to get you medicine or at least checked your temperature. Something. Anything.”
I rattled the bottle of medicine in my hands. “I’m not five,” I said, grinning. “I can take my temperature.”
“That’s not the point,” Gabriel said. “You’re family and everything.”
My eyes drifted and I noticed I was looking at the wall, the carpet, the open attic door, Gabriel’s black sneaker. I forced my eyes to look at his crystal blue ones. “Is that what your family does?” I didn’t want to challenge him. I was curious. I’d read different things in books and watched how people responded to family in movies.
Was it real that a mother would make a kid chicken soup and tuck him into bed? If I was sick, my mother told me what to do for myself. Maybe when I was really young, around six or so and before my mother got sick, I could remember her hovering over me. It was distant, a hazy memory that didn’t seem to match who she was now.
Was it even real or was I just hoping that once upon a time, my parents might have been normal?
Gabriel’s lips pursed and he shrugged. “All families should do it.”
He didn’t directly answer the question. It had me curious but Luke leaned forward, reaching around me for the laptop that was still on the floor. It distracted me and the question was lost.
Gabriel’s eyes latched onto the bottle of medicine again. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
What wasn’t wrong? I was sore, my tailbone hurt and my throat was itching. “My ankle,” I said, reaching for the easiest thing. “I don’t think sitting on that stool helped the bruised bones.”
Gabriel shook his head. “Trouble, you should say something when you’re hurt.” He snatched the bottle from me. Chucking it across the room, he pulled a prescription bottle without a label from his back pocket. He twisted the top and spilled the contents into his palm. It was full of a variation of different pills.
“What are those?” I whispered.
He ignored me, finding two red, slim capsules. “Here. Take these,”
he said, placing them in my open palm.
I flipped the pills over, looking for markings. “What are they?”
Gabriel rolled his eyes. “Will you just listen to the doctor? Take them.”
“You’re a doctor?”
Luke laughed, shaking his head. “It’s fine, Sang.”
I hesitated, but grabbed one of the water bottles still sitting around and swigged down the pills.
