My Soul To Take

CHAPTER 7

For several minutes, I stood still in my room, so angry, and scared, and confused, I didn’t know whether to scream, or cry, or hit something. I tried to read the novel on my nightstand to distract myself from the disaster my life had become, and when that didn’t work, I turned on the TV. But nothing on television held my attention and all the songs on my iPod only seemed to magnify my anger and frustration.

My mind was so full of chaos, my thoughts coming much too fast for me to grasp, that no matter what I did or where I stood, I couldn’t escape the miserable roar of half-formed thoughts my head spun with. I was starting to seriously recon sider that sedative—desperate to just be nowhere for a little while—when my phone buzzed in my pocket.

Another text message from Nash. U OK?

Fine. I lied. U? I almost told him he’d been right. That I shouldn’t have told my aunt. But that was a lot of information to fit into a text.

Yeah. With Carter, he replied. Call U soon.

I thought about texting Emma, but she was still grounded. And knowing her mother, she stood no chance of a commuted sentence, even after practically seeing a classmate drop dead.

Frustrated and mentally exhausted, I finally fell asleep in the middle of the movie I wasn’t really watching in the first place. Less than an hour later, according to my alarm clock, I woke up and turned the TV off. And that’s when I realized I’d almost slept through something important.

Or at least something interesting.

In the sudden silence, I heard my aunt and uncle arguing fiercely, but too softly to understand from my room at the back of the house. I eased my bedroom door open several inches, holding my breath until I was sure the hinges wouldn’t squeal. Then I stuck my head through the gap and peered down the hall.

They were in the kitchen; my aunt’s slim shadow paced back and forth across the only visible wall. Then I heard her whisper my name—even lower in pitch than the rest of the argument—and I swallowed thickly. She was probably trying to convince Uncle Brendon to take me back to the hospital.

That was not going to happen.

Angry now, I eased the door open farther and slipped into the hall. If my uncle gave in, I’d simply step up and tell them I wasn’t going. Or maybe I’d just jump in my car and leave until they came to their senses. I could go to Emma’s. No, wait. She was grounded. So I’d go to Nash’s.

Where I wound up didn’t matter, so long as it wasn’t the mental-health ward.

I inched down the hall, grateful for my silent socks and the tile floor, which didn’t creak. But I froze several feet from the kitchen doorway when my uncle spoke, his words still low but now perfectly audible.

“You’re overreacting, Valerie. She got through it last time, and she’ll get through it this time. I see no reason to bother him while he’s working.”

While I appreciated my uncle standing up for me, even if he didn’t believe in my premonitions either, I seriously doubted Dr. Nelson would consider himself “bothered” by a phone call about a patient. Not considering what he was probably getting paid.

“I don’t know what else to do.” Aunt Val sighed, and a chair scraped the floor as my uncle’s shadow stood. “She’s really upset, and I think I made it worse. She knows something’s going on. I tried to get her to take a sedative, but she busted the bottle on the refrigerator.”

Uncle Brendon chuckled, from across the kitchen now. “She knows she doesn’t need those damn pills.”

Yeah! I was starting to wonder if my uncle wore chain mail beneath his clothes, because he sounded eager to slay the dragon Skepticism. And I was ready to ride into battle with him….

“Of course she doesn’t,” Aunt Val conceded wearily, and her shadow folded its arms across its chest. “The pills are a temporary solution, like sticking your finger in a crack in a dam. What she really needs is your brother, and if you’re not going to call him, I will.”

My father? Aunt Val wanted him to call my dad? Not Dr. Nelson?

My uncle sighed. “I hate to start all this now if we could possibly put it off a while longer.” The refrigerator door squealed open, and a soda can popped, then hissed. “It was just coincidence that this happened twice in one week. It may not happen for another year, or even longer.”

Aunt Val huffed in exasperation. “Brendon, you didn’t see her. Didn’t hear her. She thinks she’s losing her mind. She’s already living on borrowed time, and she should not have to spend whatever she has left of it thinking she’s crazy.”

Borrowed time?

A jolt of shock shot through me, settling finally into my heart, which seemed reluctant to beat again for a moment. What did that mean? I was sick? Dying? How could they not have told me? And how could I be dying if I felt fine? Except for knowing when other people are going to die…

And if that were true, wouldn’t I know if I were going to die?

Uncle Brendon sighed, and a chair scraped across the floor again, then groaned as he sank into it. “Fine. Call him if you want to. You’re probably right. I just really hoped we’d have another year or two. At least until she’s out of high school.”

“That was never a certainty.” Aunt Val’s silhouette shrank as it came closer, and I scuttled toward my room, my spine still pressed against the cold wall. But then she stopped, and her shadow turned around. “Where’s the number?”

“Here, use my phone. He’s second in the contacts list.”

My aunt’s shadow elongated as she moved farther away, presumably taking the phone from my uncle. “You sure you don’t want to do it?”

“Positive.”

Another chair scraped the tiles as my aunt sat, and her shadow became an amorphous blob on the wall. A series of high-pitched beeps told me she was already pressing buttons. A moment later she spoke, and I held my breath, desperate to hear every single word of whatever they’d been keeping from me.

“Aiden? It’s Valerie.” She paused, but I couldn’t hear my father’s response. “We’re fine. Brendon’s right here. Listen, though, I’m calling about Kaylee.” Another pause, and this time I heard a low-pitched, indistinct rumble, barely recognizable as my father’s voice.

Aunt Val sighed again, and her shadow shifted as she slumped in her chair. “I know, but it’s happening again.” Pause. “Of course I’m sure. Twice in the last three days. She didn’t tell us the first time, or I would have called sooner. I’m not sure how she’s kept quiet about it, as it is.”

My father said something else I couldn’t make out.

“I did, but she won’t take them, and I’m not going to force her. I think we’ve moved beyond the pills, Aiden. It’s time to tell her the truth. You owe her that much.”

He owed me? Of course he owed me the truth—whatever that was. They all owed me.

“Yes, but I really think it should come from her father.” She sounded angry now.

My father spoke again, and this time it sounded like he was arguing. But I could have told him how futile it was to argue with Aunt Val. Once she’d made up her mind, nothing could change it.

“Aiden Cavanaugh, you put your butt on a plane today, or I’ll send your daughter to you. She deserves the truth, and you’re going to give it to her, one way or another.”

I snuck back to my room, shocked, confused, and more than a little proud of my aunt. Whatever this mysterious truth was, she wanted me to have it. And she didn’t think I was losing my mind. Neither of them did.

Though they apparently thought I was dying.

I think I’d rather be crazy.

I’d never really contemplated my own death before, but I would have thought the very idea would leave me too frightened to function. Especially having very nearly witnessed someone else’s death only hours earlier. Instead, however, I found myself more numb than terrified.

There was a substantial fear building inside me, tightening my throat and making my heart pound almost audibly inside my chest. But it was a very distant fear, as if I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around the concept of my own demise. Of simply not existing one day.

Maybe the news just hadn’t sunk in yet. Or maybe I couldn’t quite believe it. Either way, I desperately needed to talk it through with someone who wasn’t busy keeping vital secrets from me. So I texted Emma, in case her mother had lifted the cell phone ban.

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?”

“Well, they obviously have something important to tell you, but I seriously doubt you have a brain tumor. Shouldn’t you have some symptoms, or something, if you’re sick?”

I dropped into my desk chair again and ran my finger over the mouse pad to wake up the monitor. “I looked it up, and—”

“You researched brain tumors? This afternoon?” Nash hesitated, and the footsteps paused. “Kaylee, is this because of Meredith?”

“No!” I shoved off against the desk so hard my wheeled chair hit the side of the bed. “I’m not a hypochondriac! I’m just trying to figure out why this is happening to me, and nothing else makes sense.” Frustrated, I scrubbed one hand over my face and made myself take another deep breath. “They don’t think I’m crazy, so it’s not psychological.” And my relief at knowing that was big enough to swallow the Pacific Ocean. “So it has to be physical.”

“And you think it’s brain cancer….”

“I don’t know what else to think. There’s one kind of brain cancer that sometimes doesn’t have any symptoms. Maybe I have that kind.”

“Wait…” He paused as a gust of wind whistled over the line. “You think you have a tumor because you have no symptoms?”

Okay, I still wasn’t making any sense. I closed my eyes and let my head fall against the back of the chair. “Or maybe the premonitions are my symptom. Some kind of hallucination.”

Nash laughed. “You’re not hallucinating, Kaylee. Not unless Emma and I have tumors too. We both saw you predict two deaths, and we saw one of them actually happen. You weren’t imagining that.”

I sat up in my chair, and this time my long, soft exhalation was in relief. “I was seriously hoping you’d say that.” It helped—albeit a tiny little bit—to know that if I was dying, at least I was going out with my mind intact.

“Glad I could help.” I could hear the smile in his voice, which drew one from me in response.

I swiveled in my chair and propped my feet up on my nightstand. “Okay, so maybe I’m having premonitions because of the tumor. Like, it’s activating some part of my brain most people can’t access. Like John Travolta in that old movie.”

“Saturday Night Fever?”

“Not that old.” My smile grew a little, in spite of what should have been a very somber conversation. I loved how easily Nash calmed me, even over the phone. His voice was hypnotic, like some kind of auditory tranquilizer. One I could easily get hooked on. “The one where he can move stuff with his mind, and learn whole languages by reading one book. And it all turns out to be because he has brain cancer and he’s dying.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen that one.”

“He gets all kinds of freaky abilities, then he dies. It’s tragic. I don’t want to be tragic, Nash. I want to be alive.” And suddenly the tears were back. I couldn’t help it. I’d had more than enough of death in the past few days, without adding my own to the list.

“Okay, you’re going to have to trust me on this, Kaylee.” The footsteps were back, and then a door closed, cutting off the bluster of wind on his end of the call. Then his voice got softer. “Your premonitions don’t come from brain cancer. Whatever your aunt and uncle were talking about, that’s not it.”

“How do you know?” I blinked the moisture from my eyes, irritated with how emotional I was becoming. Wasn’t that another symptom of brain cancer?

Nash sighed, but he sounded more worried than exasperated. “I have to tell you something. I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”