Author: Adele Griffin
Category: Suspense
Go to read content：https://readnovelfree.com/p/424_15
2. Paranoia/terror. I appreciate your bravery in coming forward with this. I’m sure it is a disturbing sensation, to feel that you’re being discussed or that secrets are being kept from you. I agree that you are grappling with a lot of stresses as a result of returning home and resuming your life. Nevertheless, if this persists or worsens, I can contact a clinical mentor at Long Island City Psychiatric Hospital. Let me know if you would like me to pursue this.
3. Missing memories. We have discussed this a bit, yes? And don’t forget the good news: in over 70% of cases such as yours, a head-trauma patient will get partial-to-full memory restored. Given what you have told me about the preceding weeks (a breakup with your boyfriend and a fight with your best friend), your amnesiac brain merely might want to bury unpleasantness. It is a bit as if Brain is telling you, “Ember, why do you need to hold on to that disturbing file? Let us delete it! We certainly have got enough on our plate right now!”
4. Tingling/sensations of cold & heat. Your last EMG (8 Sept.) was consistent with the radial nerve damage that was a direct result of spinal trauma. Your best treatment: plenty of sleep, a balanced diet, and scheduled, rigorous physical therapy. Your body wants to regulate and reestablish normalcy. When you come in next month for your cortisone shots, let’s do another EMG.
Finally, just to restate what you already know, please keep up your work with Jenn. She was a visiting practitioner here, and she is extremely competent. A mature commitment to therapy will bridge the difference, in terms of restoring your body’s flexibility and easing residual pain, as you return to a full schedule of physical activities.
Best regards,
The Devil's Son - ParanormalCheck out the best interactive novels on Whispers: Interactive stories.
“Dr. P”
Vassilis Pipini, MD
Department of Neurosurgery
Weill Cornell Medical Center
9
Twenty Bucks Says
Just before I’d left, I’d given Kai my number. So he had mine, and I had his. But I figured he’d be the one to call me. Not the next day or even the next. But he’d be in touch. No doubt he would. So when I hadn’t heard from him by the middle of the following week, I started to check my messages compulsively—a few times even phoning my cell phone from the landline. Just to make sure the ringer was on and working.
Full-on doubts began to replace my anticipation. I’d just assumed we’d made a connection. Had my battered brain missed some basic social cue? Maybe Kai hadn’t felt the same entrancement, the same intrigue to know more about me.
He sure hadn’t felt the same urgency.
Or, or—maybe he’d been playing me. Maybe I’d been the victim of one of those cruel best-friend bets. Maybe there’d been some second guy in the shadows across the street, egging him on: “Kai, twenty bucks says you can walk over and hook up with that lonely girl hanging out on the fire escape.”
And then Kai took the dare and strolled across the street and stepped into the building while his pal—maybe that guy Hatch, his T-shirt business friend—stood smirking from across the street.
I could just imagine Hatch, the wingman. That semi-Neanderthal guy’s guy with the greasy skin who looks like he’d barely know his own address.
Before we’d parted, Kai had torn the first page from his precious notebook, ripping a scrap for me to scribble my number, then printing his own above the quick sketch he’d drawn of me. The lines were loose but the likeness was spot-on. He’d even given me more hair, not that I’d asked for it. But it was as if he’d guessed how I felt about the raggedy chop I’d gotten in the hospital, and wanted to help me out.
Forget him, I decided, when it seemed the call was not happening. But I couldn’t. Kai was stuck in the grooves of my thoughts. It scared me to think that I’d bungled the situation. Like I was too damaged and “miscalibrated,” imagining there’d been an electric connection between us when there hadn’t been anything.
I felt duped, and in other moments I felt like an idiot.
On Wednesday evening, almost a week later and still no call, I decided to do it. Just one brave, quick “Hi, how are you?” and then I’d know exactly where I was with him. I wouldn’t even ask Rachel’s advice—if it went badly, I’d bury it, and force myself never to think about Kai again. But somehow I’d misplaced the scrap of paper. Which just didn’t make sense. I tore through my room like a CIA agent, searching everywhere—pockets, drawers—before I sat down and attempted Kai’s number from memory.
When I punched the numbers in, I was pretty sure I had it right. But the voice mail message was impersonal, a droidbot informing me that if I wanted to leave a message, please wait for the tone.
I didn’t. I clicked off, my cheeks hot. Maybe Kai had given me a wrong number? Or I’d memorized it wrong. How could I have lost the paper?
I sank to the edge of my bed.
Okay, think, Ember. I wouldn’t have thrown it out. And now I was going to turn my room upside down to find it. Again, I ransacked my backpack, my desk drawers, my closet, my bureau, searching, flinging items, cursing—where the hell, what the—aha!
There it was. Inside my jewelry box. Folded into a tight square, in the corner. Next to my teeth.
My heart beat hard as I smoothed the stiff creases and stared at the sketch of perfected, prettier Ember. The sequence of digits above, in Kai’s elegant, artist’s lettering. And yes, it was the same phone number that I’d memorized. How could I have forgotten that I’d placed it here? My temples were beginning to throb with the threat of one of my headaches—a pain I’d never suffered until the accident, but which now frequently plagued me.
I called the number again. Again, voice mail. My voice was the worst kind of girl-speak, too high, quavering.
“Hey. It’s me. Ember. Just wanted to see what you’re up to. We talked about maybe getting together, sometime? Chocolate silk pie or pizza pie, or whatever. So if you want, or, you know, maybe…” And then I recited my own phone number. Hurried, nervous, not casual enough.
My whole body was thudding with my head as I ended the call.
It was a total desperation move. I should have waited for him to call me. Eager, vulnerable, pathetic me.
If Kai didn’t call me back by the end of the week, I’d chalk it up to a Small, Humiliating Failure, with a touch of Learning Experience. The problem with a guy like Kai was that he was too “fringy”—a term Smarty used for city kids we couldn’t cross-check through other friends or schools or anyone. He was too many degrees of separation, and I had no character references; nobody I knew would know this kid Kai, not in Lafayette or the neighborhood. Nothing.