We Were Never Here Read Online Free Page B

idea terrifies me. I cannot possibly move around. Perhaps ever again.
    My mother clears her throat as she looks away from me, and I believe her, but I can tell my question has upset her. That’s when another doctor comes in. This one crosses his arms, and without looking at me, he says that we need to put in a central line.
    â€œA who?” my mother asks. “What?”
    He nods. “It’s a tube that is connected to a vein, so blood can be taken and we can get medications in more easily without jiggering the IVs and infecting the sites.”
    I shiver. It’s not just an expression; I really do it.
    As if he’s read my mind, the doctor turns toward me. He has pens in his breast pockets. Both of them. “It’s a small surgery,” he says. “Tiny, really. It will deliver all the medicines and saline and liquid food, and it will let us take blood for testing. So we can figure out the problem.”
    I wonder, if I could see inside myself, what would it look like? I imagine a map, roads of sick blood leading nowhere. Blue blood. So blue inside. What I would do now to just feel my old weird self in there.
    â€œNow, Mrs. Stoller, can you please wait outside while we put in the line?”
    â€œI would like to stay,” she says.
    He shakes his head. “Please,” he says. “It won’t take long.”
    She gets up slowly, and as she walks out, I doubt I have ever been so sad to watch my mother leave the room. She leaves thedoor slightly ajar, but I can’t see her.
    â€œI’ve got one too,” Thelma says over the curtain. “There are worse things. Believe me.”
    A nurse comes in with a kit of some kind that she opens, peeling back the seal, and then she is scrubbing my chest with this brown antiseptic.
    â€œI’m Alexis.” She tilts her head to the side as she spreads out large pieces of gauze over my heart.
    â€œOh,” I say. “Hi.”
    This is when I think of the frogs.
    Okay, the frogs. Let me back up to the science lab at school. Middle school, dissecting frogs. There was a lot of human drama about the frogs. Most of the guys were super excited about the prospect of cutting into frogs; a little too excited, if you asked me. And most of the girls pretended to be squeamish, groaning when Mr. Hallibrand told us about it. But we weren’t squeamish, most of us. It’s just what we thought we should be.
    A few days before we were set for the dissection, Zoe had told me that when she and her lab partners cut their frog open, it moved. “It totally came to life!” she said before kicking me out of her room for the night so she could call Tim. “I’m not kidding.”
    I knew she was just trying to freak me out, but it did make me even more worried, not so much that the frog would become a zombie, but that it wasn’t really dead and that it had a soul and that soul was being tortured.
    Of the four in our group, I was the one with the scalpel. I remember pinning the frog to the waxed tray. And slicing into the skin and then pulling it back from the fat tissue and muscleand bone. The anatomy of an innocent frog, exposed. My hands shook. I remember the scissors cutting, the small bones breaking when I hit something wrong. And I remember the heart. Actually, my sister wasn’t lying: when we touched it with our gloved fingers, that heart jumped back, still beating. All four of us screamed.
    Now the surgeon’s head is turned at my chest. The nurse rubs on some anesthesia—“local,” she calls it, as if she means it’s like, made in America—and then he’s performing his incision. I can hear it but I can’t feel it.
    Outside I hear my mother squeal. “Look at you!” she says. “How sweet you brought your dog.”
    â€œHe’s a therapy dog,” the boy, that boy, says. “I bring him to cheer up the patients. There aren’t so many teenagers on this ward, so