Ms. Marshall replied a few minutes later, telling me that Emma was still grounded, but she’d see me the next day for Meredith’s memorial, if I was planning to go.
I wrote back to tell her I’d be there, then dropped my phone on my bed in disgust. What good is technology if your friends are always grounded from it? Or hanging out with teammates?
For lack of anything better to do, I turned the TV on again, but I couldn’t concentrate because what I’d just overheard kept playing through my mind. I analyzed every word, trying to figure out what I’d missed. What they’d been keeping from me.
I was sick; that much was clear. What else could “living on borrowed time” mean? So what did I have? What kind of twisted illness had “premonitions of death” as the primary symptom, and death itself as the eventual result?
Nothing, unless we were still considering adolescent dementia. Which we were not, based on the fact that they didn’t think I needed the zombie pills.
So what kind of illness could make me think I was crazy?
Ignoring the television now, I slid into my desk chair and fired up the Gateway notebook my father had sent me for my last birthday. Each second it took to load sent fresh waves of agitation through me, fortifying my unease until that fear I’d expected earlier finally began to take root in earnest.
I’m going to die.
Just thinking the words sent terror skittering through me. I couldn’t sit still, even for the few minutes it took Windows to load. When my leg began to jiggle with nerves, I stood in front of my dresser to peer in the mirror. Surely if I were ready to kick the proverbial bucket, I would know the minute I saw myself. That’s how it seemed to work when someone else was going to die.
But I felt nothing when I looked at my reflection, except the usual fleeting annoyance that, unlike my cousin, my skin was pale, my features completely unremarkable.
Maybe it didn’t work with reflections. I’d never seen Heidi in the mirror, nor Meredith. Holding my breath, and barely resisting the absurd urge to cross my fingers, I glanced down at myself, unsure whether I was more afraid of feeling the urge to scream, or of not feeling it.
Again, I felt nothing.
Did that mean I wasn’t dying, after all? Or that my gruesome gift didn’t work on myself? Or merely that my death wasn’t yet imminent? Aaagggghhh! This was pointless!
My computer chimed to tell me it was up and running, and I dropped into my desk chair. I pulled up my Internet browser and typed “leading cause of death among teenagers” into the search engine, my chest tight and aching with morbid anticipation.
The first hit contained a list of the top ten causes of death in individuals fifteen through nineteen years of age. Unintentional injury, homicide, and suicide were the top three entries. But I had no plans to end my own life, and accidents couldn’t be predicted. Neither could murder, unless my aunt and uncle were planning to take me out themselves.
Lower on the list were several equally scary entries, like heart disease, respiratory infection, and diabetes, among others. However, those all included symptoms I couldn’t possibly have overlooked.
That left only the fourth leading cause of death for people my age: malignant neoplasms.
I had to look that one up.
The description from a separate, respected medical site was dense and nearly impossible to comprehend. But the layman’s definition under that was too clear for comfort. “Malignant neoplasm” was doctor-talk for cancer.
Cancer.
And suddenly every hope I’d ever harbored, every dream I’d ever entertained, seemed too fragile a possibility to survive.
I had a tumor. What else could it be? And it had to be brain cancer to affect the things I felt and knew, didn’t it? Or the things I thought I knew.
Did that mean the premonitions weren’t real? Were brain tumors giving me delusions? Some sort of sensory hallucinations? Had I imagined predicting Heidi’s and Meredith’s deaths, after the fact?
No. It couldn’t be. I refused to believe that any mere illness—short of Alzheimer’s—could rewrite my memories.
Hovering on the sharp, hot edge of panic now, I returned to the search engine and typed “symptoms of brain cancer.” The first hit was an oncology Web site that listed seven kinds of brain cancer along with the leading symptoms of each. But I had none of them. No nausea, seizures, or hearing loss. I had no impaired speech or motor function, and no spatial disorders. I wasn’t dizzy, had no headaches, and no muscle weakness. I wasn’t incontinent—thank goodness—nor did I have any unexplained bleeding or swelling, nor any impaired judgment.
Okay, some might say sneaking into a nightclub was a sign of impaired judgment, but I was pretty sure my decision-making skills were right on target for someone my age, and miles above the judgment of others. Such as certain spoiled, vomit-prone cousins, who shall remain nameless.
I was tempted to rule out brain cancer based on the symptoms alone, until I noticed the section on tumors in the temporal lobe. According to the Web site, while temporal-lobe “neoplasms” sometimes impaired speech and caused seizures, they were just as often asymptomatic.
As was I.
That was it. I had a tumor in my temporal lobe. But if so, how did Aunt Val and Uncle Brendon know? More important, how long had they known? And how long did I have?
My fingers shook on the keys, and a nonsense word appeared in the address bar. I pushed my chair away from the desk and closed my laptop without bothering to shut it down. I had to talk to someone. Now.
I shoved my chair aside and crawled onto my bed on my hands and knees, snatching my phone from the comforter on the way to my headboard. At the top of the bed, I leaned back and pulled my knees up to my chest. My eyes watered as I scrolled through my contacts for Nash’s number. I was wiping tears from my face with my sleeves by the time he answered.
“Hello?” He sounded distracted, and in the background, I heard canned fight sounds, then several guys groaned in unison.
“Hey, it’s me.” I sniffed to keep my nose from running.
“Kaylee?” Couch springs creaked as he sat up—I had his attention now. “What’s wrong?” He switched to an urgent whisper. “Did it happen again?”
“No, um…Are you still at Scott’s?”
“Yeah. Hang on.” Something brushed against the phone, and dimly I heard Nash say, “Here, man, take over for me.” Then footsteps clomped, and the background noise gradually softened until a door creaked closed, and the racket stopped altogether. “What’s up?”
I hesitated, rolling onto my stomach on my bed. He hadn’t signed on for this kind of drama. But he hadn’t run from the death predictions, and I had to talk to someone, and it was either Nash or Emma’s mother. “Okay, this is going to sound stupid, but I don’t know what else to think. I heard my aunt and uncle arguing, then my aunt called my dad” I swallowed back a sob and wiped more moisture from my face. “Nash…I think I’m dying.”
There was silence over the line, then engine noise as a car drove past him. He must have been in Scott’s front yard. “Wait, I don’t get it. Why do you think you’re dying?”
I folded my lumpy feather pillow in half and lay with one cheek on it, treasuring the coolness against my tear-flushed face. “My uncle said he thought I’d have more time, then my aunt told my dad that he needed to tell me the truth, so I wouldn’t think I was crazy. I think it’s a brain tumor.”
“Kaylee, you’re adding two and two and coming up with seven. You must have missed something.” He paused and footsteps clomped on concrete, like he was on the sidewalk. “What did they say, exactly?”
I sat up and made myself inhale slowly, trying to calm down. The words weren’t coming out right. No wonder he had no idea what I was talking about. “Um…Aunt Val said I was living on borrowed time, and that I shouldn’t have to spend any of it thinking I was crazy. She told my dad it was time to tell me the truth.” I stood and found myself pacing nervously back and forth across my fuzzy purple throw rug. “That means I’m dying, right? And she wants him to tell me?”