Smoke and Mirrors Read Free Page B

don’t want to sound melodramatic, but it was like the first time in my life I felt truly appreciated. I felt loved. And I did not want to have to return to my old, ordinary self.
    But I eventually returned anyway — to a blinding headache and a hospital room with a TV.
The Simpsons
was on, and Homer was trying to save the nuclear power plant from a meltdown.
    And I remember my mother crying one time when she came into my room and thought I was asleep. I recall feeling her tears soak through my hospital gown. She said that she loved me very much and if I would only get well, she would promise to be a better mother. When I did start to get better, though, she didn’t show the same kind of affection. But both of my parents seemed relieved that I was back.
    I recall one doctor, too; I think he was still in medical school, and he had kind of long blond hair and a really relaxed way of talking to me. He was a
Star Trek
fan too and used to quiz me about Klingons and Star Fleet regulations. I remember that. He played chess as well, but poorly. No sense of strategy at all, and he was easy to beat.
    All the time I was in that hospital room, I never felt alone. I had my own room — my father saw to that, big spender that he was in those days. Doctors came and went. Orderlies, nurses. But there was something else as well, like a presence of some sort, like someone was watching over me, making sure I was okay, even when no one was in the room.
    By the time I left the hospital, I had regained most of my memory, but it had holes in it. I couldn’t remember if I liked Coke or Pepsi better. I couldn’t rememberwhich channel
Star Trek
was on. Or which drawer in the kitchen had the knives, forks, and spoons.
    They said I suffered some short-term memory loss, which came in handy as an excuse for doing so poorly on a math test and French vocabulary quiz (both of which I had never studied for). My parents gave me only a short, incomprehensible lecture about how foolish I had been. They bought me things to make me feel better, but my father threw away my skateboard, which the ambulance driver had kindly returned to my house after the accident.
    The doctor explained my lethargy as part of post-traumatic stress. “His accident,” he said, “has had as much of an emotional impact on him as if he had been in a war.” I did continue to have that image of the bus floating towards me the split second before I was knocked out. But that wasn’t what was bugging me. I really wanted to get back to that beach and those people on it. My old babysitters and the surf dude who handed me the tiny ball bearing planets.
    Regular life just wasn’t going to work for me anymore.

C HAPTER F OUR
    I accidentally started to pay attention to Mrs. Dalway, who was telling us she had once seen Mel Gibson acting in a live version of
Macbeth
, and I was wondering why he would want to do a thing like that. I had liked Mel Gibson in the movie
Braveheart,
and when I was thirteen, he had me thinking of taking up sword fighting as a lifelong career until it clicked in my still slightly bruised brain that there probably wasn’t much of a calling for sword fighting anymore.
    Then Mrs. Dalway read a few more lines from the bard:
    Who can impress the forest, bid the tree
Unfix his earthbound root? Sweet bodements! Good!

    Such was my distraction that I had not been keeping an eye on Andrea, and when I looked over towards the computers she was gone.
    What I did next was considered to be quite unusual in a high school English classroom. I began to cry. I really did.
    I know. A sixteen-year-old boy crying in the middle of Shakespeare is a little weird — well, a lot weird. I mean, almost anyone at Stockton High could tell you I was not normal. Normal and me just didn’t go hand in hand. It wasn’t the first time I’d cried. I’d done it before. And it’s not just a sudden downpour of tears. It’s not like