I lifted a half-smile and said, “You’re right, I won’t, but the soaking doesn’t seem to be helping me anyway.” I reached up and pulled the rag but Chance was gone. And so was the nice oversized tub. A monstrous crick in my spine reminded me I was still cramped in the awkward bowl of a tub in my dorm, and I painfully maneuvered my way out of it.
At least one thing came from that painful nap. I learned something that could clarify if I had an overactive imagination, or if some random coma boy had found an impossible way to slip into my dreams every night.
17
I woke up early the next morning feeling refreshed and luckily, free of that horrible neck pain. For the first time ever, Chance didn’t come to spend the night with me. Guess he picked up my ‘get lost’ hint from my nap after all. I slipped out of the room before Sophie awoke and headed down for an early breakfast. Robert would still be swimming, like he did every morning, so I didn’t have to worry about running into him in the cafeteria.
On Mondays, I would usually catch Sophie in the hall between second and third and again for lunch, but I took an alternate route and went to the library for lunch. She was only gonna drool over what happened with me and Robert and the almost sex-capade, and I just didn’t want to think about anything Robert-related right now. And I couldn’t tell her why.
After school, I hopped straight on the bus that would take me to the hospital and breathed a deep sigh of relief. I had made it through the entire day without running into anyone. And no one would expect me to go to the hospital today cause it wasn’t a normal volunteer day for me.
As I departed the bus and entered the hospital’s lobby, I snatched an abandoned paper off a bench and headed down the familiar hall that would lead me to my old ward. I didn’t see Margaret at the nurses’ station but I did see Michelle, another nurse that took care of me last fall. Her eyes popped with curiosity when I neared.
“Jenna, we weren’t expecting you today,” she said cheerfully.
“Yeah, I know. Is Margaret around?”
“She doesn’t come on till four.”
That left me about an hour until she came. “Alright. I’ll just go hang out at 34B until then.”
Michelle shook her head and said, “Bless her heart. She’s always trying to get one of us to go talk to that poor kid. Glad you’re willing to do it. It’ll get her off asking us today.”
“You’re welcome, then. Will you let her know I’m here when she comes in?”
“Sure thing.”
I found myself taking several deep breaths as I crossed the room to Chance’s, er, Evan’s, bed. He looked the same as he did yesterday; still pale, but serene.
“Hey,” I said, stroking his cheek and running my fingers through his hair. “Still haven’t come around, huh? You know you’d be doing me a huge favor if you would. Then if you were still in my dreams afterwards, I’d know for sure I was just imagining this nightmare.”
I whipped open the newspaper and flipped until I found the sports section. “So who do you like? I know you like soccer, but how do you feel about basketball?” I casually read him stories from the paper, trying not to utterly bore us both. About an hour and a half later, I heard footsteps traveling towards us and folded down the newspaper to confirm it was Margaret. I smiled warmly at her as she pulled the curtain aside.
“See, it’s refreshing to just talk to someone and not have them talk back, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” I jested. “Boys in general seem to keep their mouths shut conversation-wise, so this is kinda like talking with my boyfriend.” She hooted and hollered over that as she began recording his vitals in the binder she was holding. “I just hope he can hear me, cause otherwise I’m reading these boring sports stories for nothing.”
“If anything, I’d think he’d find it comforting to have someone sitting beside him.”
“Yeah.” I inhaled a deep breath through my nose, summoning the courage I was about to need. “So what’s his birthday? I wanna read him his horoscope. Personally, I think he’s a Libra.”
“Oh, yeah? Why’s that?”
“He just looks like a flirt. I mean, look at me. Two days and he’s already got me eating out of his hands reading this crap.”
Margaret chuckled and flipped through her binder. I think my heart quit beating – too afraid the loud thump would cover up her voice as she answered. “Uh…March twentieth.”
I gasped silently, my chest heaving and expanding to maximum capacity, and my eyes bugged out. Thank God she didn’t look up right away to see that. My heart sped up triple-speed and I felt red and flustered.
“What’s that make him?”
I gratefully buried my head behind the wall of newspaper sheets. It was difficult to calm the shaking in my body and smooth out my voice. “Pisces. Compassionate, romantic and imaginative.”
“Oh, well that’s much better than flirt. I’ll catch up with you later.”
“Okay,” I mumbled, and listened as she walked away from his bedside and left to continue her rounds elsewhere. I dropped the paper on the bed and just sat there.
Immobile.
Dumbfounded.
Scared.
I was ready to hear something completely different. I hadn’t let myself believe or really fixate on this yet, cause there was only a one in three hundred and sixty-five chance he would have the same birthday.
I thought no way.
I thought I was making this all up in my head, and that the physical description of the man that kept me safe and warm each night was just spot-on accurate to the physical body that lay before me. I mean, we’ve all got twins out there somewhere, right?
I sluggishly picked up the phone on the bedside table and numbly dialed one of the only two numbers I’d ever bothered to memorize. Sophie picked up on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Soph?”
“Jenna! Where are you? You’ve been AWOL all day. I even checked to see if you landed in the nurse’s office.”
“Sorry. I’m up at the hospital. Do you think you could come meet me in my old ward? In 34B?”
“OH-MY-GOD!” she burst. “Are you back in the hospital?!”
“What? No! I’m just volunteering.”
I heard her mumble a curse on the other end. “Jesus, Jenna! Don’t do that.” She breathed a sigh of relief and I’m sure she was shaking her head in annoyance.
“So can you come?”
“Yeah, sure. I’ll be right there.”
“And Soph?”
“Yeah?”
“Just you, okay?” I definitely didn’t need Robert convincing her to let him pick me up.
“Yeah, alright.”
I hung up the phone, pulled my feet into the chair with me and just rocked my body back and forth for a bit. So what did I know so far? I grabbed a pen and notepad from the table’s drawer and made a list.
1. Chance and I died on the same day at the exact same time
2. Chance appeared in my dreams the day after my meds ran out (I just remembered this. He appeared to me the night before my first date with Robert)
3. Chance and Evan are identical in physical appearance
4. Chance and Evan share the same last name
5. Chance and Evan share the same birthday
I obsessed over these points for half an hour, trying to come up with an alternative to the crazy idea that Chance and Evan were one in the same. When Sophie arrived, I felt even more scared. To admit this was social suicide – paddy wagon-worthy. She lifted her eyes with interest when she scanned Evan’s unconscious body.
“Cute. Who’s he?”
I resumed rocking my body in the chair. “Chance. This is the guy I’ve been dreaming about every night.”
Her eyes narrowed and she scanned him again. I was surprised when all she said was, “Well, he’s cute and all, but still not as hot as that Supernatural guy.”
I groaned and rubbed my brow bones hard with the heels of my hands. “Sophie, no. This is the guy that’s been in my dreams every night. A guy that apparently died and came back to life the same time I did, and has come to see me every night since.”
There it was. The scrunched-up, what-the-fuck face I knew was coming my way. I threw the notepad from my lap at her and she reluctantly took her eyes off me long enough to read it.
“So what do you think?” I asked, nervous cause her face wasn’t changing from that horribly critical expression.
She huffed. “I think it’s time to get a head scan.”
My face soured and I dishearteningly replied, “I had a follow-up scan after Christmas. Nothing.”
“Yeah, well, maybe they’ll see something now.”
Annoyed, I said, “Soph, forget the head scan. I may be guilty of an overactive imagination but there’s nothing physically wrong with my head.”
“Soooo, let me see if I’ve got this right. You think that this guy here,” she waved her hand over Evan’s body, “can somehow travel to your head every night just to please you six ways from Sunday? Seriously?”
I buried my head in my lap and tried to muffle my scream of annoyance.
“Jenna, we’ve had this conversation before. The dreams aren’t real. You’re probably just feeling guilty cause you’re ready to give yourself sexually to Robert and you feel bad cause you’ve been screwing some random guy in your head every night.”
“Not random,” I muttered, and rested my chin over my knees.
“Yeah, I know,” she mocked rudely. “Evan here. I mean, their names don’t even match. That’s your first clue right there that this is all in your head.”
“They’re identical, Sophie!” I snapped.
“So you saw the guy before! You were both in the same ward at the same time! You were probably rolled past him in the hall while you were going in and out of consciousness!”
“I questioned it too. So last night I asked him what his birthday was. They match, Sophie!”
“Well, kudos for you,” she scoffed. “You’ve got a little ESP in you. It’s not enough, okay? Trust me, the two of you are not sharing some type of brain frequency.”
I huffed and buried my head in my knees again, on the verge of crying. I heard her rip the page off the notepad and crumple it up.
“Do not self-destruct on me Jenna. You’ve got a good thing going with Robert and I won’t let you flip out and ruin it.” She whacked me in the back of the head with the notepad, and when I looked up at her, she was pointing at me. “You’re gonna go to bed tonight and you’re gonna kick that Chance out of your head already. And if that doesn’t work, I’m gonna order your old meds off the internet, cause those seemed effective at keeping him out.” She rounded the bed, tossed the paper in the trash and motioned for me to follow her.
“No, they just kept me from dreaming.”
“Perfect! A little less dreamin’ will do you some good. Now come on. Step away from the coma boy cause my Beetle is now pulling out of Looneyville station.”
We didn’t speak the entire way home. When we got back to school I buried myself under my bed covers, completely numb, and drowned out the world using Sophie’s mp3 player. I’m not sure how long I lay there, but eventually someone rubbed my arm and brought me back to life. It was Sophie, and I pulled the headphones from my ears.
“Robert’s at the door. I told him you’ve been sick and sleeping all your spare time away and that’s why he hasn’t seen you. But you need to tell him this yourself so he doesn’t get all pissed off at you. Luckily you look like death at the moment so this whole sick thing might actually fly.”
I slowly dragged myself out of bed, wrapped the blanket around me and opened the door. His eyes widened when he took in what I was sure was the most disgusting version of me he’d ever seen.
“Jeesh, Jenna.” When he reached out to caress my face and I saw the concern and warmth in his brown eyes, I felt ashamed all over again. “Do you need anything?”
I shook my head no and said, “Just give me a few days to let it pass, okay?”
“Yeah, alright.” He leaned in and gently kissed my forehead. His lips lingered, and breathing in the familiar scent of citrus and lavender cologne, my guilt burst through the layer of numbness I’d created and rose to the surface once more.
I pulled away and gave him a weak smile as I waved goodbye, then softly shut the door between us. I glanced in the mirror on my way back to bed and couldn’t even laugh at how horrible I looked. My skin was pasty and sallow and my eyes were red from some unavoidable crying, and my eye cavities almost looked sunken from the shadowed bags that now resided beneath them. My hair was a complete knotted nightmare and somewhat resembled Johnny Depp’s do in Edward Scissorhands. Yep…saw that one with Chance just last week. I fought hard to stop thinking, from wondering if that’d be the last movie I’d see with him. I plugged the headphones back in my ears and buried myself under the covers once more.
18
I awoke in the middle of the night when I rolled over and suddenly found myself atop Chance’s chest. The motion brought his tranquil body to life too, and he reached out and wrapped his arm around me.
“How long have you been here?”
He shrugged and stroked my cheek softly. “Few hours maybe. You seemed so tired and I wasn’t sure if you were still in a bad mood, so I just wanted you to rest. Like last night.”
My heart melted a little. No! No, my heart cannot melt from him anymore! I rolled my body out of his grasp and back to my side of the bed.