Everything I Thought I Knew Read online

  Broken

  Strange Days

  Heads and Hearts

  The Tunnel

  Questions

  The Ride

  Weird Things

  Nobody Cares If I’m Late

  The 360

  How Are You?

  Ink

  After

  We Match

  Ice

  Hello, Heart

  Digging

  Waves

  You Don’t Belong Here

  Good News / Bad News

  Exorcism

  Moving On

  Tides

  Perigee

  The Worst Place on Earth

  Looking

  Finding

  Dead Is Dead

  Falling

  A Multitude of Universes

  What If?

  Goodbye

  Again

  Here’s one of the many things I thought I knew that turns out to be wrong: you need to fall in love to end up with a broken heart.

  That’s not how it was for me. At least not at first.

  Sometimes things — glass, eggs, hearts — just break, and there’s no way to put them back to their exact, original form. You can’t stir the cream out of your coffee. A broken plate, even if you glue it, will always have cracks. This is just basic physics, or, more specifically, the second law of thermodynamics. Not to nerd out on you too much.

  But I’m already getting ahead of myself, which I tend to do, because my brain never seems to want to slow down and just be still. There’s too much going on in there, especially now. So let’s rewind a bit and begin with the moment the universe decided to start messing with all my assumptions and well-laid plans, big-time.

  October 14 at 3:45 p.m.

  It’s the fall of my senior year.

  I’m running.

  “Damn, it’s hot,” I say to Emma as we round the curve at the far side of our high school’s track. The lane lines vibrate ahead of me in the heat. Halloween is a few weeks away, and it must be more than eighty degrees, at least.

  Emma, her auburn ponytail smooth and perfect, looks like she’s barely broken a sweat. “Is it?” she asks. “Feels pretty good to me.” A warm spell, typical for the San Francisco Bay Area in the fall, has brought us beach weather in the middle of a month packed with college application submissions, after-school practices, and, as always, piles of homework. The result: we won’t, in fact, be hanging at the beach. Cross-country is basically the only time I get to breathe outdoor air.

  We’re doing intervals today, and Emma’s pace seems faster than usual. As soon as we are side by side, she pulls ahead. I have to push myself to catch her. I push, she pulls. She pulls, I push. This is starting to annoy me, even though it’s what Emma and I always do when we practice together — we compete.

  She pulls ahead again. I try to focus on increasing my pace.

  Focus, Chloe, focus.

  But all I can think about is water.

  I didn’t drink enough before practice.

  I didn’t drink any water, actually. I got held up leaving seventh period because I needed to talk to Ms. Breece about my paper proposal for AP Physics and had barely enough time to pull on my running shoes. My proposal is going to be late, which Ms. Breece made sure to note is “unlike you, Chloe,” which is true, I guess, but it got me thinking about what really, honestly is “like me,” because sometimes, or maybe even all the time, I’m stumped on that one. Which got me stressing again about my college application essays and whether they are mind-numbingly boring, and, by extension, if I am mind-numbingly boring. Which resulted in me forgetting to fill up my water bottle. This is starting to seem like kind of a big mistake, now that my mouth has gone dry and I’m dizzy and feeling like I might be about to throw up all over my shoes.

  I turn to Emma. Her mouth is moving, but I only hear her last few words.

  “. . . don’t you think?” she asks. “Chloe?” Cross-country is when we catch up on anything we didn’t get to talk about at lunch. The pop quiz we weren’t expecting in Calc. Weekend plans. Emma’s ongoing analysis of her five-minute conversation with Liam Morales about Catch-22 — Was it an excuse to talk to her? Or did he just need some quick info from someone who actually read the book? — a topic that, for my own reasons, I really don’t want to analyze anyway. But I must have zoned out for a few seconds, or minutes, because I have no idea what she just said.

  “Think about what?” I barely have enough breath to get out the words, so I slow to a light jog as Emma pulls ahead of me for the third — or is it fourth? — time. Instead of pushing, I just stop. My heart is thumping hard.

  Thump thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump. It’s all I can hear. Thumpthumpthumpthumpthump.

  Emma turns around. “Chloe?”

  The lane lines ahead of me look wrong. They’re not just vibrating, they’re rippling. Like those wave graphs in my physics textbook. The whole field around us is rippling. Are we having an earthquake? I look toward Emma, also rippling, who has now stopped running too and is staring at me, eyes wide.

  “Chloe, are you okay?”

  My chest feels like it’s being crushed. My ears are on fire. Sweat is running down my face and my back, soaking my shirt.

  Not okay, I think.

  Definitely not okay. But I can’t say the words.

  And then the world that’s spinning, spinning, spinning like a top gets tipped over, me with it. The last thing I see is the brilliant blue of the October sky overhead.

  When I open my eyes, my mom is there, and I can tell immediately that she’s been crying. Her face is puffy and red. Next to her, my dad is pale, like someone drained the blood out of him.

  “Mom?”

  “Hi, sweetie.” She grabs my hand.

  Machines whir all around me. A tube is fitted under my nose. Oxygen, I’m assuming. Electrodes are attached to my chest under a thin fabric gown and there’s an IV in my right arm. I’m in a hospital, obviously. But not dead. So that’s encouraging, at least.

  “Mom, what happened?” I whisper. My chest hurts. I still feel like I don’t have enough air in my lungs, and it’s hard for me to talk. She and my dad look at each other in that way they do sometimes when I ask a question they don’t really want to answer. Like when I was five and asked them if they were going to die someday too after we held a backyard funeral for my recently departed hamster, Nugget.

  I can tell my mom is holding back tears as she struggles to keep a neutral face. She clutches my hand with both of hers.

  “It’s your heart, Chloe. There’s something wrong with your heart.”

  My heart?

  How can there be something wrong with my heart? Heart problems are for big-bellied old men. For people who eat greasy cheeseburgers and fries all the time and never exercise. For people who smoke. Not for just-turned-seventeen-year-old girls. Not for vegetarians who run five miles almost every day after school. Not for people like me.

  I turn from my mom to my dad. Dad’s the science teacher of the family; maybe he’s the one who should cover this. But he’s still as silent as the grave, which is highly unusual for him. And alarming to me.

  “Dr. Ahmadi says it’s a defect,” my mom explains. “One that we didn’t know about until now. He will be here shortly to go over everything with us.”

  “Who’s Dr. Ahmadi?” I ask.

  Nothing that’s happening right now is making any sense. Why didn’t they call Dr. Curtis? I wonder. She knows me. I know her. She’s been my doctor since I was a baby.

  “Dr. Ahmadi is a cardiac surgeon,” my mom says. “He’s a specialist.”

  The word surgeon gets my attention.

  Surgery seems serious. Heart surgery, extremely ser
ious. But it can’t be anything that bad. I was fine when I left the house this morning. Wasn’t I? Plus, I don’t have time for any surgery. Not now. Not in the next-to-last semester of my senior year. Not with midterms coming up in a few weeks and college applications due. I try to take a deep breath to calm myself down, but I just end up inhaling a horrible plastic-y smell from the oxygen tube and it freaks me out even more. Why are they giving me oxygen?

  “Do I need surgery?” I ask, my chest already tightening up in anticipation of the answer.

  My mom and dad look at each other again, and I really want to shake them this time, because I know they know I hate it when they treat me like a baby who can’t handle uncomfortable information. If there’s something important going on, I want to know what it is. I like to have answers.

  But before I can ask another question, there’s a knock at the door.

  “Hello?”

  A man wearing green surgical scrubs appears in the doorway and my mom and dad stand up.

  “Please come in,” my mom says. “She’s awake.”

  A smile spreads across his face as he walks toward me.

  “Nice to meet you, Chloe. I’m Dr. Ahmadi.”

  According to Dr. Ahmadi, here’s what (not who) is responsible for breaking my heart:

  Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Dysplasia. ARVD for short.

  It’s a rare form of cardiomyopathy — a cellular defect — and it’s been slowly killing the muscle tissue of my right ventricle, probably for years. Maybe since I was born. The resulting scars are now making it hard for my heart to do what it’s supposed to do. Like beat hard enough to oxygenate my blood. Which is not exactly something a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and an ugly cry is going to fix.

  ARVD is why I collapsed on my high school’s track. Why I have been feeling so tired and out of breath recently.

  Why I’m going to need a new heart.

  And it’s why, if I don’t get one soon, I’m going to die.

  I’m going to die before I turn eighteen. I’m going to die before I graduate high school. Before I get to go to college, visit Tokyo, climb the Eiffel Tower, fall in love, own a dog, and become the first scientist to confirm the existence of life on another planet. Oh my god, I think. What else? I don’t even know all the things that I want to do, to see, to taste, hear, and touch, because I assumed I had plenty of time to figure it out. A lifetime of it.

  Dr. Ahmadi tells us that, based on my condition and my age, the chances are good that I’ll be given a priority position on the transplant waiting list.

  And then we will be in the very awkward, awful situation of hoping that someone who is not me might die instead.

  So I can live.

  Somewhere — close by? far away? — I hear an alarm. Is it a hospital monitor, alerting nurses to come running? Or is it the phone on my nightstand, in my bedroom, at home? I’m stuck again in that weird in-between place that bridges asleep and awake, where I’m not sure if I can trust my senses.

  Is what’s happening right now really happening, or is it a dream?

  Where am I?

  What am I supposed to be doing today?

  I never got stuck like this before. Before everything that happened with my heart, I always woke up with a plan, hardly remembering my dreams. My brain would already be busy preparing for the day ahead: the French quiz scheduled for first period, the English paper that I needed to revise during study hall, the cross-country meet after school.

  But now, I sometimes struggle to ground myself. Am I in my room, or someplace else? Sometimes I forget when it is, forget that it’s morning and not night, that it’s almost summer and not fall, that more than eight months have passed and I’m not still running side by side with Emma in the second week of October during our senior year. Sometimes . . . sometimes I open my eyes and wonder, for many more seconds than is comfortable, if I’m living or if I’m dead.

  Spoiler alert: I’m still alive. My heart? Not so much.

  Now I have a new one, and a lot of things are different. Not just different — strange.

  The most obvious is the scar. It runs from the top of my collarbone to my abdomen and makes me feel like the Bride of Frankenstein, who, as you may know, was also brought back to life using borrowed parts. This is why, technically speaking, I guess I shouldn’t even call it a “new” heart.

  If I want to be 100 percent accurate, it’s recycled.

  Repurposed.

  Reanimated.

  One that previously belonged to someone else.

  Until a fog-shrouded night this past December — one week before Christmas — when it was extracted from my donor’s still-warm body and transplanted into mine.

  We both had run into some serious bad luck.

  My luck, as we know, turned south that day I collapsed during cross-country practice. And two months later, a trauma of some sort rendered my donor’s head pretty much kaput.

  Healthy heart. Dead brain. An ideal match for a patient on the list.

  A patient like me.

  True story: The national transplant waiting list is the only list I’ve ever made it to the top of for failing rather than succeeding. My heart was getting a big fat F in keeping me alive, and that’s one consideration that moves you to the front of the line. Minors also generally get priority over older people, who have less of their lives ahead of them, I suppose. How much you have in common with your donor determines the rest. Blood types need to be compatible. Proximity is also important, since hearts, in particular, have a limited shelf life. My donor had O positive blood, just like me. We also lived within thirty miles of each other, which is how, on the night I got the call, I was able to be in surgery, buzz saw poised over my sternum, within minutes of my partner-in-bad-luck’s official pronouncement of death.

  And now we’re not partners in anything anymore. It’s just me left standing, trying to wrap my head around everything that’s different, and strange, and not like how I’d thought.

  So what else? In addition to the scar, there are a lot of pills. Pills to take in the morning. Pills to take at night. Pills that I can’t forget or else I’ll break this heart too, and then I’ll be back on that horrible list, waiting again for someone who is not me to die. Or not waiting, if it’s me who does the dying. This is why my mom makes me carry around one of those plastic dispensers with a tiny compartment for each day of the week, just like my grandma.

  I also used to run all the time, but now I don’t. I used to be a vegetarian, but now I’m not. I used to have every minute of my life scheduled, but now I have hours, sometimes whole days, where I do nothing but watch back-to-back episodes of Parks and Recreation and The Walking Dead and leaf through the stack of comics I bought at the used bookstore downtown.

  I used to never have nightmares.

  But the most different thing of all, especially for everyone who knew me before, is that I’m now a high school dropout. Well, sort of. I missed more than half of my senior year, so I’m making it up in summer school, which is full of actual dropouts, like Jane Kessler, who tells me she flunked trig; and Brian Felder, who didn’t graduate because he had to go to one of those rehab camps for World of Warcraft addicts. So instead of doing a research-lab summer internship like I’d planned, I’ve been spending my weekdays in the nearly empty school library, staring blankly at an open Google doc and pretending to make headway on the essay I need to turn in about The Grapes of Wrath. Normally, this is something I could probably wrap up with one hand tied behind my back, but the “Symbolism of the Turtle in Chapter Three” is eluding me. Does anyone really care why John Steinbeck wrote about a turtle crossing the road? I know I sure don’t. Not at the moment, anyway, which is not . . . like me.

  I hear my mom in the hallway and prepare the smile I will put on when she pops her head into my room to make sure I’m up. She’s weirdly cheerful and helicopter-like and overenthusiastic these days, which is yet another thing that’s different. I don’t have the heart (no pun intended) to tell her I’m not
all that excited to get out of bed. That I don’t want to take another handful of pills, or write my AP English essay about symbolic turtles, or start dealing with the college acceptances stacked on my desk, which, due to my “special circumstances,” can be deferred a semester while I complete the credits I need to graduate. That I feel like a stranger in my own skin.

  In fact, though I haven’t mentioned this to her or my dad or anybody else, I’m not all that excited about anything these days — except for one thing: at three o’clock, I surf.

  A slimy piece of seaweed tangles around my ankle and I shake it off, simultaneously shaking some feeling back into my numb toes. Even with the wetsuit on, the coldness of the water is always a shock at first — the ocean spray like tiny needles pelting my face. Paddling my board over the swells, I keep my eyes on Kai’s head bobbing up and down about ten yards ahead of me and try to forget the fact that most of my weight is resting on a breastbone that not so long ago was sawed in half. It almost feels like the scar is tingling beneath my suit.

  My parents would freak if they knew I was out here, putting my recently restored life into the hands of this guy I barely know. I SPECIALIZE IN BEGINNERS read the ad I found pinned to a bulletin board in a nearby surf shop a few weeks ago — a shop I had finally ventured into after spending more than a few afternoons surveying all the action from the beach.

  Initially, I’d been hanging out there to escape Senior Week. To avoid everyone trying to convince me to come to the senior picnic and the senior-faculty dodgeball game and the night where all the seniors spray-paint their names on the Wall — a cement barrier that holds up the hill behind campus. I was invited to everything, of course, even though I wasn’t officially graduating. But feigning excitement about my classmates’ upcoming parties and travel plans and college start dates when I was days away from reporting to summer school? Hard pass. So instead, I got in my car, which lately is one of the few things that makes my brain stop buzzing, and I drove until I reached the coast. Watching the waves, alone, with my feet buried in the cool sand, was so much better than attending Senior Pajama Day. And once I started studying the surfers paddling out and gliding like water gods over the waves, I couldn’t stop. Had I really never noticed how mesmerizing they are before? I guess not, because if you had told “before Chloe” that she’d be attempting to surf, she would have said you were dreaming. She’d have warned you that the waves here are too powerful. The water is too cold. That there are sharks lurking nearby that might mistake you for a seal.