What was he talking about? I had no idea.
‘Ha ha,’ I said, smiling back at him. I reached over to touch one of the rose’s silky crimson petals.
Which is when I noticed my hand…
… wasn’t my hand.
I mean, it was, obviously. It was attached to my arm. But it looked… different. Instead of my chewed-up, raggedy fingernails (I’m a hardcore nail-biter), I saw that I had what appeared to be a grown out, though perfect-except-where-the-cuticles-needed-to-be-pushed-back, French manicure… pink on the bottom, with white tips.
Weird. Also, did my fingers look… thinner than before? Could you lose weight in your hand? I suppose so, if you were unconscious long enough.
But still. How long had I been sleeping, anyway?
Then I realized: long enough for Frida to glue on those Lee Press On Nails she was always threatening to make me wear.
Then I realized Gabriel was talking to me. He was saying, ‘You look well. They’re saying — well, all sorts of things about you. I didn’t know what to expect. No one would tell me anything about you. They aren’t allowing visitors… I had to sneak on to this floor —’
He snuck on to my floor to visit me? That was so sweet…
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked, actually sounding concerned.
‘Fine,’ I replied. ‘A little sleepy… ’
‘Then you rest,’ Gabriel said, looking slightly alarmed. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you.’
‘No, it’s OK,’ I said, fearful he was preparing to leave. My hot-guy hallucination! It couldn’t end so soon!
But the truth was, I was having a hard time keeping my eyelids up. They kept kind of falling closed, no matter how hard I tried to keep them open, just like in Mr Greer’s class.
‘Don’t go,’ I said to him. It was just an inch or two from the rose petal I was stroking to where he was resting his hand. And before I could stop myself, I had lain my fingers over his. What was I doing? I mean, me, touch a boy’s hand? Especially the hand of a boy as cute as Gabriel Luna. Not that any boy as cute as he was had ever come close enough to me before in order for me to reach his hand… I mean, obviously there was Christopher, who I considered cute…
… but I knew the rest of the world — or at least Frida and the rest of the Walking Dead — didn’t technically agree with me. At least, not unless he got a haircut.
Then again, Christopher had never brought me ROSES before. Christopher hadn’t come to visit me in the hospital (don’t think I hadn’t noticed). Christopher had never stroked the back of my hand with his thumb, as Gabriel had just done. The few times I’d ever touched Christopher’s hand with mine, he’d moved his out of the way with lightning fast speed, thinking it was an accident (it so wasn’t).
But the thing was, none of this was really happening anyway, since it was all a hallucination… so what did it matter? This was the perfect opportunity to practise holding a boy’s hand so that, when the opportunity with Christopher actually arose — and it was going to have to some day, right? Right? — I’d know what to do.
The minute my fingers touched his, Gabriel stopped looking like he was getting ready to get up and leave. Instead, his face kind of softened a little, and he even turned his hand over to hold mine, and, doing that amazing thumb-stroking thing, said, in that deep soothing voice of his, ‘I’ll stay until you go to sleep.’
Wow. That sounded nice. Super nice.
And exactly what a hallucination should say. I could only hope Christopher, when the time came, would be as nice.
But there was still something vaguely wrong. Something was missing from my perfect-boy-hallucination scenario.
Then I realized what it was.
‘Will you sing me that song?’ I asked, my eyelids so heavy I was looking out of mere slits. ‘The one you sang… ’ Where? I didn’t even know what I was talking about. All I knew was that I’d heard him sing a song… somewhere. I was pretty sure.
He smiled. ‘I didn’t know you even heard that song,’ he said. ‘I thought you didn’t show up until after my performance was over. But I’ll gladly sing it for you.’
What was he talking about?
But then he started singing, super softly, and it didn’t matter.
And the sweet notes of the song he was singing soon lulled me all the way to sleep… but not before I heard, way off in the furthest reaches of my mind, a voice that sounded a lot like that of the lady with the bun in her hair going, ‘Hey, you there! What are you doing in here?’
And the singing stopped.
But by that time I was asleep anyway, and so I didn’t care.
A hot guy named Gabriel Luna had sung me to sleep.
A hot guy named Gabriel Luna had brought me roses.
A hot guy named Gabriel Luna had held my hand.
It had to all be a dream. The most perfect dream I had ever had. Or would have been, if it had been a different boy, and not Gabriel Luna.
I never wanted to wake up.
Except that of course I did. Wake up, I mean.
The next time I opened my eyes, it was daylight again.
And sitting in the chair beside me was a girl who kept shaking my arm and going, ‘Nikki! Nikki, wake up. Wake UP!’
Then, when she saw that my eyes were open, she went, ‘Oh, thank God. What are they pumping into you anyway, to make you sleep so hard? I thought you were in a coma or something.’
I just blinked at her. She looked familiar somehow, but I couldn’t quite figure out how. Was she someone I knew from school? And if so, why was she talking to me? Because she was totally gorgeous — perfectly smooth cafe-au-lait coloured skin, a funky bleached-blonde pageboy, collarbones so sharp they looked like they could cut through tin cans, like those knives on TV.
And the gorgeous girls at Tribeca Alternative do not speak to me. Except to ask me to get out of their way.
‘You have no idea how long I’ve been trying to track you down. Do you know they’ve got rent a cops at all the elevators, to keep people from getting up here to see you? Getting in to see you is harder than getting a table at Pastis for Sunday brunch,’ the girl prattled on. ‘I had to sneak up the stairwell, then hide in the ladies’ room until the coast was clear. Thank God I had a copy of the newest issue of Us Weekly to throw on to the head nurse’s desk in order to distract them long enough for me to sneak by. It’s a good thing Britney’s on the cover again, or it never would have worked.’
Slowly, I realized how I knew this girl. Not because I’d been asked by her to move out of the way in the hallways of my school, but because she’d been on the covers of some of Frida’s magazines.
She was Lulu Collins, daughter of Tim Collins, the famous film director whose cinematic adaptation of Journeyquest had made so much money… and almost ruined the whole game for me forever after.
Why in God’s name was Lulu Collins sitting beside my hospital bed?
‘Anyway’ she went on, ‘Since no one would tell me anything about what was going on with you, I just took matters into my own hands. I had to. I know Kelly’s going to be mad, but whatever, I’m your best friend — and she’s not going to keep from me what’s going on with my best friend. Also, to tell you the truth, I couldn’t take the whining any more. You wouldn’t believe how much she’s missed you. So I brought her to see you. I know it’s against the rules, but whatever, some rules are just stupid.’
And without another a word, Lulu Collins reached into her colossal tote bag, and pulled out…
… Nikki Howard’s fluffy white dog.
Which she promptly deposited on my chest.
And can I just say, that dog went mental for me? I have never really considered myself much of a dog person. I mean, I like them well enough, but my parents never thought it was a great idea for us to have pets, given their wacky living situation (Dad in New Haven, Mom in New York City).
But this dog. Holy moley, this dog loved me. It was jumping all over me, licking my face, dislodging wires –