Nick
I woke up
to pounding. Not my heart against my ribs
this time, but a fist on the door. “Open
up, Carter!” bellowed a voice that I quickly recognized as AJ’s.
Shit, I thought, scrambling out of bed.
“Crap, we
overslept, didn’t we?” I heard Cary say.
I looked back, and she was sitting up on her side of the bed, squinting
at the clock. Checkout time was eleven,
and it was five minutes past. “We should
have set an alarm…”
“Yeah, it’s
not like we had anything else to think about last night,” I replied
sarcastically, grabbing a t-shirt from the heap of clothes overflowing out of
my open suitcase. I pulled it on over my
head and looked down to make sure my port was hidden.
AJ was
still banging on the door. “Yo, Nick!”
he shouted again. I bet half the hotel
could hear him. If he wasn’t careful,
there’d be a horde of fans knocking on my door, too.
“Coming!” I
called on my way to get the door. I
undid the lock and opened it to find not only AJ, but Brian and Howie standing
there, too. Uh oh. Somehow, I already knew
this wasn’t just about missing checkout time.
“Morning… sorry… overslept,” I apologized quickly, before they could say
anything.
AJ shoved
his palm into my chest and pushed me backward as he barreled into the
room. He didn’t push me hard, but I winced;
my chest was still sore from getting zapped.
“What the
fuck, dude?” I complained, glaring at him.
I was hurt and confused. In the
old days, when Kevin was in the group, I might have gotten crap for being five
minutes late, but not now. And definitely
not from AJ. Things were a lot more
chill without Kevin around, which was how I knew there was something else going
on. What’d
I do now? I wondered. There was no
way they could know about what had happened last night… could they?
“Where were
you last night?” AJ demanded. He was
glaring back at me. Brian and Howie
stood on either side of him, not quite glaring, but still looking pretty
serious.
I swallowed
hard. Well, shit, I thought. Maybe they do know. But then, maybe they didn’t. How could they? They probably just knew Cary and I had been
out really late, and I was going to get a lecture about too much partying. Well, okay.
I could take that. “Me and Cary
hit a couple of clubs,” I said, as casually as I could. “We were out pretty late. Why?”
AJ’s eyes
narrowed. Brian and Howie looked at each
other, but apparently they’d elected AJ to do the talking. “Clubs?” he repeated. “Not a hospital?”
Fuck! my mind screamed. Fuck, fuckity fuck-fuck-fuck! How did he know?? I just stared at him, like a deer caught in
headlights, without a clue as to what I was going to say.
Brian spoke
up. “Some fans saw you guys leave the
hotel last night. They got into a cab
and followed you… to the emergency room.
There are pictures online; fans have been chirping at me and Leighanne
like crazy, asking what the emergency was.”
“The rumor
is it was an overdose,” AJ added flatly.
His dark eyes fixed me with a stare so hard, I finally had to look
away. “Look at me, Nick,” he snapped, as
soon as I did. “Look me straight in the
eye and tell me the truth. Are you using
again?”
God, he
sounded a hell of a lot like Kevin. He
must have picked up some tips from when Kevin was the one accusing him of this
same shit. And Kevin had been right, of
course. Kevin was always right. But AJ was dead wrong about me. So I looked him right in the eye and
answered, “No. I’m not.”
“Then what
happened last night, Nick?” Howie jumped in.
“Why were you at the hospital?”
Unlike the others, he actually sounded concerned about me, not just about what the fans were
saying. I was grateful for that, but I
still didn’t know what to say.
“He did
overdose,” Cary’s voice drifted over from the bed. My head whipped around to stare at her. What the fuck was she doing, throwing me
under the bus? “Not on drugs, though,”
she added, pulling the covers up higher around herself. “Just caffeine.”
My heart
was thumping hard in my chest, but not like last night; it had already started
to slow down again on its own, as I realized what she was doing. She was being honest… in my own half-truth
kind of way… and in doing so, she was also guaranteeing I’d have to go along
with her little deal. If the guys knew
how bad all that caffeine had messed me up, they’d make sure I wasn’t pounding
down Red Bulls before the show anymore, too.
She was pretty clever, that Cary.
“Caffeine?”
I turned
back to the guys; they were all looking at the two of us in disbelief, their
eyebrows raised. I felt my face
flush. “Yeah… for real. It’s stupid, but I kinda drank too much Red
Bull before the show last night, to get rid of my hangover, and it fucked me
up. My heart was, like, racing and
wouldn’t stop, and it kinda freaked me out, so Cary took me to get checked
out.”
I left it
off there, not wanting to get into all the gory details. It was bad enough having to go through it
once; I didn’t want to relive it right then, and I also didn’t want to shock
the guys. (Get it? Shock?)
Brian was already frowning, while Howie’s eyes had gotten wide. AJ was still staring at me like he couldn’t
decide whether to believe me or not. He
said, “Jesus, how much caffeine do you need to drink to fuckin’ OD on it?”
Brian
asked, “Never mind that. Are you okay,
Nick?”
“Yeah,” I
said quickly, “I’m good.” I knew my
cardiomyopathy diagnosis bothered Brian.
It made me feel guilty because, while he’d been born with his heart
condition, I had caused mine. He had
lived with a defective heart for twenty-two years before getting it fixed, and
in just a fraction of that time, I’d taken my perfectly healthy heart and
fucked it up. Whether he knew it or not,
Brian had been a big motivation for me to get myself back into shape; I didn’t
want to let him down again. I wanted everything to be “good.” I just wished it actually was.
“They gave
him some fluids and medication to slow his heart down,” Cary explained. “He was dehydrated, too, and that made it
worse. I told him he needs to start
drinking more water and lay off the caffeine.”
She gave me a stern look.
“Jeez,
Nicky,” said Howie. “That’s just common
sense. You need to start taking better
care of yourself.”
Now he
sounded like Kevin, too, but that was typical.
They were the two fitness freaks in the group. And Howie had done his best to fill Kevin’s
shoes as our unspoken leader the last few years, so I wasn’t surprised to be
getting a lecture from him. He was still
a lot more laidback about it than Kevin, so it wasn’t that bad. I knew I deserved it, anyway.
“Yeah, I
know,” I muttered. “I’m gonna.”
AJ was still eyeing me, like he didn’t quite
believe me. It was weird that, out of
the three of them, he was the one who was onto me. Okay, so Howie can be pretty clueless, but
Brian could always read me like a book.
Then again, Brian was an honest guy and expected honesty in return. AJ, on the other hand, had enough experience
in deception to recognize a liar when he saw one. He had been there, on the other side of it,
lying his way through his addiction, trying to cover up how bad it really was. As a result, he knew when he was being lied
to.
“You know
what else makes your heart race?” he asked slowly.
No one said
anything. He was staring at me, but his
tone made it sound more like a rhetorical question. Sure enough, he answered it himself.
“Cocaine.”
Brian and
Howie both looked at him, then at me.
Howie’s eyes were wide again; Brian’s were narrow. Quickly, I shook my head in response to their
silent questioning. “I’m not… I told
you, I’m not doing drugs again.”
“No? Then why have you been acting so weird
lately? Moody… secretive… never wanting
to do anything with the three of us…”
“That’s not
true,” I argued, but I knew it was. How
many times had I blown them off, turned down a club or even a movie because I
was doing chemo or feeling like shit because of it? It was a lot, maybe more than I
realized. I liked it better when they
thought it was Cary’s fault, for being some kind of gold-digging sex goddess.
“And have you
looked at yourself in the mirror lately?” AJ ranted on, ignoring me. “You look like shit, dude. You’re starting to look fuckin’ manorexic.”
“Fuck you,”
I spat, really annoyed now. “I thought
you guys were proud of me for losing all that weight. Now you’re gonna turn it against me?”
“If you’re
doing blow again to keep the weight off, then damn straight we are,” AJ shot
back. Brian and Howie kept quiet; they
weren’t accusing me out loud, but they weren’t trying to stop AJ from attacking
me, either.
“I’m not
doing blow!” I shouted, my heart beating like a bass drum in my chest. “And you, of all people, AJ, have no right to
give me shit about that. We all know
you’ve been off the wagon all year, yet no one’s accusing you of doing drugs.”
I expected
that one to burn, but AJ didn’t even seem fazed. He was staring at me. “If you’re not snorting coke, then why’s your
nose bleeding?”
“Huh?” I reached up to my nostrils and felt moisture
there. My fingertips came away
bloody. I looked down just in time to
see a drop of bright red splat onto the carpet at my feet. “Shit,” I said, turning away from the
guys. I left them standing just inside
the door and hurried into the bathroom.
I turned on the lights; there were still towels and clothes all over the
place from my little incident that night before. I grabbed a wad of toilet paper, then went
out to the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. My nose was bleeding pretty good; in no time,
the toilet paper was soaked. Where did that come from? I wondered. I never got nosebleeds.
“I’ll take
care of him,” I heard Cary tell the guys.
“We’ll be down in a few minutes.
Sorry for being late.”
She said it
so sweetly, not even AJ was going to keep arguing with her, and in a matter of
seconds, I heard the door open and close again.
I admired her for the subtle way she’d gotten rid of the guys for
me. “Thanks,” I said, when she appeared
behind me in the mirror.
“Let me
see,” was all she said back, turning me towards her.
“I dunno
what started this…” My voice was muffled
by the wad of toilet paper I was holding up to my nose.
“Low
platelets,” she replied, without missing a beat. “That’s the stuff that makes your blood
clot. I knew you should have had that
transfusion last night…”
“Oh.” Nick
fucks up again, I thought, annoyed.
She grabbed
a clean washcloth from the shelf above the sink and said, “Come here.” She led me back out into the main room and
sat me down in one of the armchairs.
“Lean forward,” she advised.
“Don’t tip your head back, or the blood will just run down your
throat.” Then she handed me the
washcloth and said, “Pinch the bridge of your nose. You need to keep pressure on it for at least
ten minutes. If the bleeding doesn’t
stop, then we might have to go back to the hospital.”
I groaned,
and more blood squirted out of my nose, into the washcloth. I sat there for over fifteen minutes,
squeezing my nose and feeling like a loser, while Cary picked up the room and
repacked my suitcase. “You can always
blame it on dry air,” she said, folding the button-down shirt she’d dressed me
in the night before, “you know, from the air conditioning. Unless you want to just tell them the truth,
so they don’t think you’re snorting cocaine.”
She gave me an incredulous look, like she couldn’t believe I would be
okay with them thinking that.
But I
wasn’t okay with it. I hated that AJ
thought I was into drugs again, after I’d worked so hard to get clean. I had slipped up a few times, but not
recently, and definitely not since my cancer diagnosis. It hurt that he didn’t believe me – and from
the looks on their faces, neither did Brian or Howie, even though they wanted
to. But what else were they supposed to
think? Even if I didn’t want to admit
it, I could see why they’d jumped to the conclusion of coke.
“You should
have told them, Nick,” Cary went on, adding the folded shirt to the neat stack
she’d made in my suitcase. “That was the
perfect opportunity.”
All I could
do was nod and say, “I know.”
***