Alive Read Online Free Page B

My voice is a whisper. I stare at the blood. “Ohmygod.” I repeat faster. “What
happened
?” my voice shrieks.
    I turn on the faucet and pull my shirt underneath it, where I scrub furiously at a handprint. It stays put. Blood crusted on fabric. Smelling like spare change. Blood in the shape of hands.
Grabbing at me. Gore. Plasma. Bodily fluid.
Get off me. Get off me.
    Beginning to panic, I flee from the bathroom, walking fast the rest of the way outside to the lunch area.
    It’s only when I’m surrounded by other people in the quadrangle that I let my stride slow. My pulse throbs in the two glands at the top of my throat and my hands tremble even though
they’re clenched into fists at my sides. I glance down at the gory blots, ready to find someone to tell, but when I do my breath hitches in my chest.
    They’re gone.
    As in, they’re not there.
    I thumb the fabric, looking for even one of the stains, but the only thing remaining is a giant wet spot where I’d doused myself with water from the faucet. Even my fingernails are clean.
It doesn’t make sense.
    I press my knuckles into the side of my head and take a deep breath. I’m tired. I must be tired. I rub the heel of my hand into my eye socket and try to shake off whatever it is I thought
I saw.
    I was wrong. Confused. Meanwhile, the teeth in my chest gnaw at the new heart in response.

“How was your first day back at school?” Mom shouts as soon as my foot crosses the threshold into the entryway. She has the uncanny ability of a golden retriever to
know exactly when any member of the family will be getting home. For my dad, that hasn’t been often since the surgery.
    “Exhausting,” I call back, plopping my backpack next to the large South African man-sculpture my parents bought on their honeymoon. I’ve always loved our house because it
isn’t all Pottery Barned out—except for our coffee table, which Mom got on sale and which she insists looks like an authentic frontier piece. My parents used to travel a lot before I
was born and sometimes after, too, right up until the time when I’d gotten sick. They had a one-week trip to Santorini planned, but had to cancel on account of the fact that my heart started
giving out.
    Who knows? Maybe they’ll go now.
    I drift into the living room, where Elsie’s busy knocking blocks together on the floor and Mom’s supervising from the kitchen, looking at one of those fifteen-minute-meal cookbooks
filled with recipes that will inevitably take her, like, forty-five.
    “Stel-lah!” Elsie shouts at me. Lately, she only has one volume, and she punctuates it by slobbering all over her chin. “Lah! Lah! Lah!”
    “Hi, Elsie.” I plug my ears until she stops repeating the last syllable of my name. Remind me what’s cute about baby talk again?
    “Shhh, Else,” Mom says. She’s been reverse-aging
Benjamin Button
–style since I woke up from surgery. She looks at least ten years younger without all the worry.
Makeup’s part of her daily routine again, and she uses the curling iron to tame that patch of frizz around her temples.
    For me, the memory of a briefcase and high heels cling to my mother like the Ghost of Christmas Past. But Elsie will never see that. It’s a piece of my mother that was carved away, yanked
out the same way my heart was yanked out of me. It’s simply no longer part of her, like swimming is no longer part of me. Another victim of the aftermath of my surgery.
    “Come sit down and let me make you a cup of tea.” The familiar worried look flashes over her face, wrinkling her forehead. I must look tired. But she doesn’t say anything, and
I sit in one of the whitewashed kitchen chairs and try to look more spirited. She turns down one full-color page and gets up to start rattling around the kitchen.
    “When’s Dad coming home?” I ask, trying not to sound resentful.
    Mom levels her chin and peers over the top of her glasses. “He’ll get home when he gets home.”
    I