AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Lulu,” he says. I’m a mess right now, a disaster. In a few minutes I’ll be cold, maybe a little embarrassed, probably very worried that we’ll be found out and booted from the program, but right now the sound of his voice is enough that if he said “let’s run that again,” I’d let him do it.
I hum my response instead of risking opening my mouth and letting fly whatever words decide to come out.
He takes a deep breath, filling his chest and belly. The top of his scar peeks out from beneath his boxer shorts, his pants pulled down far enough to see the start of a shiny white line. “You,” he says. “Are a very good friend.”
I know it would get us kicked out, but when I inevitably write in my study journal about today, I wish I could include this in my notes.
Chapter Eleven
Jesse
The heaviest weight in this waiting room is Lulu’s gaze on the back of my neck. The first time I turn around, she quickly drops her gaze. The second time I turn around, she stares back at me, her cheeks pink, her neck pink, her lips pink. For reasons that will remain forever unknown to me, I cross my eyes and poke out my tongue. That makes her smile.
We go in one by one for our blood pressure and stress tests and reflexes or whatever. My nurse, a petite white woman who reminds me so much of Grandma I’m worried she’ll have me admitted if she listens to my heartbeat, frowns at the data from my biometric monitor.
I never used to be the type of person who worried that much about my health. I work out. I’m young. I don’t smoke or drink to excess. I don’t have a lot of risk factors, but I’ve learned through experience that sometimes you can do everything right and things can still go wrong.
“Everything alright?” I ask.
She glances up at me. “Looks like your sleep hasn’t been great.”
I shrug. “I do shiftwork.”
She nods. She can probably relate.
“You exercise regularly,” she says more to herself.
“How can you tell?” I ask.
She flips the report over to show me a collection of line graphs but turns it back before I can make heads or tails of it. “These monitors are basically glorified fitness trackers. I can see the spike in your heart rate around the same time every day. Looks like a routine.” She smiles at me. “That’s good for your heart and mental health.” She pauses as her eyes track the bottom of the page. “Go for a late-night run?” she asks.
I don’t like to run. Didn’t even before my accident. “No.”
It takes until I’m sitting in the waiting room again before I realize what that late-night spike in my heart rate might have been. Even though there’s no way she—or any of the doctors and nurses in the study—could know what, orwho, caused that spike, the back of my neck gets hot. It feels like a sign that says, in flashing neon, “I saw Lulu Banks’s nipples last weekend.”
Someone calls my name, and my voice is a rough gasp when I say, “Yeah.” But it’s just George, assigning me to a new group for the “therapy sessions” that feel more like one prolonged icebreaker. People talk, about what they’ve done to make friends these past two weeks, about how they feel about those things. I try to make myself smaller, quieter, to be unnoticeable. Not only because I don’t want to share. I’m not sure how I can talk about anything I’ve done this past week without talking about Lulu too much to arouse suspicion.
Back in the waiting room again, Lulu sits beside me. Her eyes stare straight ahead, her back is stiff, and her hands grip the armrest like she’ll float away without it.
“Hi,” I say after an interminably long silence.
“How are you?” she whispers. Her nails are a chipped pink bubble gum color.
“Fine,” I say. “How are you?”
“I was wondering,” she says, ignoring my question. The light flickers overhead and she jumps.
“Breathe, Lulu,” I say, my voice low.
“Sorry.” She smiles across the room at another participant. Rather, she bares her teeth. I press my hand into my thigh to keep from reaching for hers. “I just feel like...everyone can tell,” she says, exhaling softly.
I close my eyes to avoid smiling like a lunatic, relieved that I’m not the only one. “I’m pretty sure everyone just thinks you’ve had too many coffees this morning.”
The thing about Lulu’s smile is that it’s limitless. Every time I think it can’t get any bigger, it does. It gets so big I could fall inside it. Big enough I want to throw myself over the edge and plummet until I’m swallowed whole. Since I want to keep this look on her face, this bashful, big smile, I keep nodding as she speaks, even as it takes too long for her words to register.
“I think maybe I’m not cut out for this.”
My brain is a record scratch. “This?”
