The Bubble Boy Read Free Page B

park and a cemetery with white headstones that stretch out for miles.
Henry told me it’s called Clark Park – children play football and baseball there.
    The cemetery is called Woodlands. Henry thinks people go there straight from the hospital morgue. The camera starts to shake.
    ‘Henry, are you okay?’
    ‘Yeah, I’m good. Just walking to the other window.’ He turns the camera. I see his blond hair and smiley face again. He’s always so happy to show me around. He gets out
of the way and I see more red buildings, cars and buses going down straight roads, stopping at the lights and in the distance I see a ferry crossing a river. It’s the Schuylkill River that
splits the city in half. Then he sits down on his bed.
    It’s only taken us ten minutes to do our window tours. He tells me he thinks London looks great today. I tell him his streets look more interesting than mine. He laughs and tells me
it’s boring, that I only like America because it looks so exciting in films.
    I hear a door click open. Henry looks up over the top of his screen.
    ‘Hey, Brett’s here.’ He turns his screen. Brett is Henry’s favourite nurse. He’s tall and skinny and he’s got spiky hair like Bart Simpson. He bends down and
waves at me.
    ‘Hey, dude,’ he says. ‘How you doing?’
    ‘I’m okay,’ I say. ‘How are you?’
    ‘Yeah, I’m good. Sorry, but I’ve got to check on this guy and give him his meds.’
    ‘It’s okay. I’m going to go, Henry. Catch you later.’
    I close down my laptop. I like chatting to Brett, but I hate seeing the needles. Greg says it’s psychological, that I’m hyper-empathetic. It’s just a complicated way of saying
that whenever they stick a needle in Henry, it feels like it’s going into me. I don’t know when it started to happen, only that it did.
    Henry is my best friend. He’s American and lives in a hospital in Philadelphia where his doctors think he has the same condition as me. Or maybe I have the same condition as him, because
he’s three years older than me so has been trapped in his bubble three years longer than I’ve been trapped in mine. But Henry might be going outside. Not for ever, just for an hour or
so. A scientist from NASA has made him a spacesuit with special lightweight oxygen tanks. So far he’s only worn it in his room, but yesterday they let him walk to the end of the corridor. It
sounds like they’ve still got some technical problems but I think Henry will be going outside soon. I wish I was too. I wish I could go outside and walk with the people down the street. They
might just be going to work but I’d love to walk with them in the sun or in the rain and I’d talk to them without worrying that I might die every time I take a breath. I’d like to
go a park and kick a ball and throw a Frisbee for a dog. I’ve never been to a park and the only time I’ve ever seen a dog is on TV. Henry hasn’t seen one either. He saw a cat
outside his window once, but I think he must have been dreaming because his window is two hundred feet up in the air.
    When I was nine, I dreamt the doctors were going to fly me over to visit him. I told Henry, and we planned what we would do if we could hang out. He would bring Madden NFL 13 and I would get
FIFA 13, then we would watch old films. Henry wanted to watch
Terminator
– he would bring all four of them, and we’d stay up all night and drink our glucose drinks and play
music. But the director of his hospital wouldn’t let us do it in real life. He said it wasn’t practical or safe for either of us to travel ten miles in a car, let alone three thousand
on a plane. So we just use Skype instead.
    I close down my laptop and think of him in his room. His doctors are trying something new, too. They’re injecting him with something called Amphotericin B to fight off fungal infections.
If it works for him then maybe it’ll work me too. Last year they gave him extra vitamin D because he was sweating lots