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“What?” I’ve got a death grip on his shoulders.
“Do it,” he urges.
I press my chest to his back and do it. I let go and hold my arms out.
It’s a whole different level of flying.
56
KNOX
There’s no news. No updates beyond her going to surgery.
She’s breaking my heart with this story because I know what’s coming.
But I keep reading.
57
MANUSCRIPT
CHAPTER 8
My sixteenth year started with a stay in the hospital. Seems only right I should send it off the same way.
The last day of my sixteenth year, one day before my seventeenth birthday, my parents call an ambulance for me. It’s bad enough that they don’t try to drive me on their own, I guess. I only remember the sirens, the lights in my eyes. The groggy way I keep trying to resurface, but something is holding me under the water.
Everything fades out after that.
It’s kind of scary to think about. Like being here one minute and gone the next. And it’s not like snapping my fingers and waking up hours or days later—Ifeltgone. Drifting, unable to catch something to pull me back up.
It didn’t hurt, though.
Maybe I should be grateful for that. For the lack of pain.
When I wake up in the intensive care unit, the pain I was so glad to have escaped waits for me. I’m almost blinded by it, and doctors respond to my crying by upping the pain medication.Flooding my body with morphine, until my muscles unclench and I’m able to breathe again.
Time moves funnily after that. From awake, upright, understanding… to not. To being unable to string together a sentence. My parents blame the medication, the agony in my chest that the doctors are trying to control.
I catch vague words.
Infection.
Sepsis.
I turn seventeen.
“I’m here,” a deep, dark voice whispers. “I’m right here, sunshine.”
Eventually, I wake up for real.
There’s a weight on my shoulder, and it takes me a long moment to look down. Knox’s head rests there, his mouth open slightly. Sound asleep. His body is curled alongside mine, our fingers laced together. My other hand has an IV taped to the back of it.
Tears prick at my eyes.
In the cot beside my bed is my dad, also asleep. A peaceful feeling settles over me at them both being here. It washes away some of the immediate fear, the need to know exactly what happened. I watch them both and try not to move.
Sometime later, a nurse enters the room.
