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Thirty minutes later, I was standing outside the hospital that’d been my home for the last few weeks. Shivering. Not feeling so good anymore. Not sure I could take any more steps into the world than I already had.
The air was cold and fresh. It wasn’t snowing—not even one tiny flake.
“Go!” I heard Amy shouting behind me. “Go.”
I hunched my shoulders. The coat smelled like someone had sprayed it with disinfectant since I wore it last.
“Fine,” I muttered through gritted teeth.
I made it out to the sidewalk by keeping my head down.Just walk, I said to myself.Just put one dumb foot in front of the other. One, two, three, four, five… When I got to the corner, a city buspulled up beside me. I turned and gave the hospital one last look, and then I got on.
Inside it was warm and steamy, and there were a bunch of free seats. I felt self-conscious in my borrowed clothes. I hadn’t remembered to brush my hair or wipe the yogurt stain off my pants. I knew that if anyone looked closely at me, they’d be able to guess where I’d come from. But no one looked at me at all. They just stared at their phones.
The doors shut, and the bus lurched into traffic.
I didn’t have a plan for where I was going to go or what I was going to do. I told myself that all I had to do was keep it together until it was time to go back to my little white room.
I stared out the window as we drove west, watching people walking their dogs, or waiting to cross the street, or going into or coming out of stores. It was like having a front-row seat to the world’s most boring movie.
After we crossed the bridge to Manhattan, I transferred to a bus going uptown. I got another window seat. By now I had a pretty good idea of where I was headed, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself.
It was too weird.
Too crazy.
Jordan always told me not to use that word, but he wasn’t around to stop me.
When I got to 116th Street, I slipped out the back of the bus and found myself outside the gates of Columbia University. I took a deep breath and passed right through them.
CHAPTER 89
I wasn’t trying to stalk him—I was just trying to even the score. Jordan Hassan knew where I slept, how I spent my hours, what ratings I got on my daily mental status exams. I lived my life under a magnifying glass, and he could look through it any time he wanted.
Meanwhile I could list everything I knew about him in about fifteen seconds. He told bad jokes, had a bizarre affection for puzzles, and claimed to read theNew Yorkeron the subway (I didn’t believe him). His grandfather was born in Egypt, he grew up in New Jersey, and in another couple years he was going to med school. Where? “Wherever I get in,” he’d said.
These were tidbits—fragments—puzzle pieces. Not nearly enough. I wanted to know so much more about him. Not just to keep things fair, either.
It was because when I looked into his agate eyes, I felt seen in a way I had never felt before. He cared about me, I was sure of it. And he didn’t think I was broken or bad or defective.
Or maybe he did. But it didn’t make him run. It made him want to help.
Someone jostled me from behind, and I realized I was just standing in the middle of the walkway, staring into space, whilestudents in puffer coats and backpacks streamed around me. So I started walking again, and in a few hundred yards it seemed like I’d come to the middle of the campus. To my right were steps leading down to fields gone brown and muddy in winter. To my left, a series of white stone steps led up to a huge, columned building. I would’ve liked to go inside to get warm, but I didn’t have a student ID.
I knew I didn’t belong here. I didn’t need some bored security guard telling me that to my face.
I sat down on that first set of steps and hugged my knees to my chest.
What’s it like, Jordan? Do you take classes in that building there? Have you played soccer on that field? Did you ever sprawl across these steps on a sunny spring day?
I knew that even if I could learn how to stay in the present, I’d never be able to be part of a place like this. I’d always be on the other side of an invisible and impossibly high wall.
I sat there watching students walking between classes as the chill from the steps seeped into my bones. If there was one thing I was good at, it was letting time wash over me. Why mark its passage, when one day was so exactly like any other? The Schedule took time out of our hands entirely. It wrapped us, suffocated us, in relentless, numbing monotony.
I hummed a little. Shivered. The minutes turned into an hour. Two hours. How much longer did I have to stay away from Belman?
I started picturing Jordan coming out of a classroom, in his big dumb puffer coat. And then I imagined myself coming out of a different classroom, right across the quad. A look of surprised happiness would appear on his face. I’d hitch up my backpack andstart toward him at the same time he’d be hurrying to get to me. We’d meet in the middle of the walkway, and before I could say a word, he’d reach out and pull me close. I’d be pressed against his chest as his long fingers worked their way under all my layers of clothes. I’d feel them against the skin of my stomach, cold and hot at the same time ….
Enough stupid fantasies. I had to get out of there.
