Noggin (4 page)

“No,” I said, laughing. “You’re right.”

“Let me ask you something. If you don’t mind.”

“Go ahead.”

“When you woke up and people, I dunno, maybe your mom and dad or whoever, they started saying how much they missed you. Did that make you feel weird? It made me feel so weird.”

“Yes,” I said, maybe a little too loudly. “So weird. I mean, I love them, but I
just
saw them.”

“Right? I wake up and I see my wife standing there, and my first thought was,
Damn, how’d she find time to get her hair cut in this hospital?
And then I realize that the kids standing beside her are
my
kids. They’re my kids with five years added to each of them, and I’m pretty sure I passed out from the shock. Then I come to again and she’s telling me all about missing me so much, and all I can think about is how different they all look.”

“I feel kind of guilty about it,” I said. “I see the way my folks look at me, and I feel like I’m supposed to be acting some special way around them, like I’m supposed to be proving how grateful I am to be back when I don’t even really feel like I left in the first place. And of course I’m grateful. I’m not sick anymore. I wake up and suddenly I can stand up on my own again; no one has to help me to
the bathroom or feed me. I think everyone forgets that the last thing I remember is months and months of dying.”

“Travis, not to freak you out or anything, but I’m probably going to cry when I get off this phone. I’ve waited a long time to have this conversation with someone.”

“Me too, Mr. Ramsey,” I said.

“No. Now, you call me Lawrence. My dad was Mr. Ramsey and he was a dickhead.”

“Fair enough.” I laughed.

“Well, listen, Travis. I should probably run, but I just wanted to let you know that I’m here. Any time you need to talk, just call me, okay? And maybe we’ll eventually figure all this weird shit out together. And don’t be fooled by that guy in the truck commercials, okay? I don’t have a damn clue what I’m doing back here, but I figure I might as well make a buck or two off my fifteen minutes of fame while I can.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Thanks, Lawrence. Talk soon.”

“You bet, Travis.”

We didn’t talk long enough to discuss what it was like to be attached to a new body, but I knew we’d get to that eventually. He’d been so easy to talk to, and I could tell he felt the same way about me. Relief, I guess. I think we were both so relieved on the phone that it was hard to decide which of our million questions to ask first. Like, I wanted to know how long it took for his friends to treat him normally again. And I wanted to know if things with his wife were the same as they’d been before he left.
He’d obviously had to make this whole new persona up for the media, so maybe I’d need a
Travis, the Head Kid
character to get through this too. I couldn’t hide from reporters my whole life, after all. There’d be a day when I’d have to know what to say to them.

But first I had to go back to school. And I had to do it without Kyle or Cate. I wouldn’t know a single person there except the teachers and the principal. I’d be stuck in high school while all my friends were off living their lives and working their jobs and going to their college classes and partying. This was all so ridiculous, and when things got this way before, the only two people I could talk to were Cate and Kyle. But now they were part of the problem. They weren’t there. They weren’t there when I woke up, and they wouldn’t be there when I went back to school. Some people say dying alone is a fate worse than death itself. Well, they should try being alone during the living part sometimes. There’s no quicker way to make you wonder why the hell you ever thought you’d want to return.

The day before I went back to school, I found out that there is an urn containing my ashes hidden in the closet of the guest bedroom. I discovered this when I was in there looking for an extra blanket for my new cold-natured body.

Oh,
I thought to myself.
This sure is an odd place to keep a heavy vase
.

So I brought it out to the living room and asked my parents, who were both staring at their cell phones, what was in it.

“Shit.” My mom was no longer looking at her phone.

“Why would you keep a vase full of shit in the closet?”

“Travis, watch your mouth,” Dad said.

“Have a seat, honey.”

There is no delicate way to tell a person that he is holding a container full of the incinerated remains of his own body. Had there been a better way, I might not have
accidentally dropped the urn right onto the hardwood floor, which made my mom scream and my dad immediately jump down on all fours and start sweeping the ashes into a pile with his bare hands, almost as if he were trying to save each and every molecule of my former self.

“Go get the vacuum!” Mom shouted.

“We can’t use a vacuum on Travis’s ashes!” he yelled back.

This is about the time I walked outside and sat down on the front steps. It was October, so it was pretty cool in Kansas City, too cool to be wearing just a T-shirt and gym shorts borrowed from my dad. I still didn’t have any clothes, or much else for that matter, so my parents had planned to take me shopping later that day. I was guessing that dropping my leftovers all over the living room floor had slowed things down a bit.

Ashes. I don’t know why I was so surprised. I mean, they had to do something with what was left of me after the surgery. God knows that body wasn’t worth a damn to anyone. By the time Dr. Saranson offered to turn me into Frankenstein, I was barely able to sit up by myself. I spent most of my days in the downstairs guest bedroom, in a hospital bed, watching old TV shows all night and sleeping all day because of the pain meds. I’m not sure why so many people get addicted to pain pills because, at a certain point, not feeling anything becomes much more painful than the disease eating away at your cells.

So yeah. They burned that mother, stuck it in a
nice blue-and-white vase, and it’s probably been on the mantel for five years, reminding everyone who visits that these people, my parents, are broken and sad. No one else got to know, by the way. Just my family and close friends. You don’t want to go telling everyone that a dying kid volunteered to be decapitated and that his parents signed off on it. At least not until it all turns out well.

Now everyone knows. Travis Coates: The Second Cryogenics Survivor in History. Once I was famous for dying, in my own little way. People came to visit me and bring me flowers and pray with me and such. They came to get closure. Teachers, classmates, old ladies from church. They all came to say good-bye. Now I’m famous for living, and I can tell you this much: people expect a lot more out of you when you’re not lying in a hospital bed doped out of your mind. One minute I’m dying, and the next I’m supposed to be this beacon of hope for everyone around me? This miracle kid? I knew how to die, but I wasn’t so sure about being a living hero yet.

I sat there on the front steps, and just as I was about to go back inside, hoping my parents had dealt with the creepy mess without inhaling too much of it in the process, a black truck pulled into the driveway. I knew who it was before he could even cut the engine off. Kyle Hagler, my best friend, had driven straight from the future to my front door.

“Wow,” he muttered after stepping out of the car. He leaned against the hood with one hand.

“Well, you look different.” I walked across the yard, squinting in the afternoon sun.

“You look exactly the same,” he said. “Shit. You look
exactly
the same, Travis. I mean, from, like, here up.” He took one hand, flattened out, and moved it from his neck to his forehead.

“You’re tall,” I said. “And . . . handsome. You’re
handsome
, dude.”

“We’re both tall now, huh?” He stepped closer, looking me up and down.

He laughed a bit, and I noticed how his smile was the only thing proving this was actually him. The old Kyle Hagler was shorter than I was, which was terribly short for our age, and a little chubby around the middle. He had a voice that was higher than you’d expect from a sixteen-year-old boy, and he wore shirts that were always a little too tight. And his blue jeans. I’m not even sure where one buys pleated blue jeans, but it was possible and he proved it every day.

But this new Kyle was about my height—my new height, that is—was dressed in nice slacks and a button-down shirt, and had a voice that immediately threw me off. It was a great voice. Powerful but not threatening. He had grown up. The slight hint of a man he’d always been was replaced with a pretty impressive new form. It was weird.

“Should we hug or something?”

I was barely able to finish my question before
he wrapped his arms around my shoulders and squeezed me into his chest. Two best friends hugging strangers’ bodies that were somehow now their own. He was crying, but it was quiet enough to be appreciated and not pitied. It was the best kind of crying. He let go for a second and wiped his face with the back of one sleeve before holding me by each shoulder and sort of just staring at me for a while with this expression that I’m still convinced no other person has ever had, a combination of shock, joy, pain, and terror. It was like I could see all his memories of me projected into the air between us, rushing and swirling around and enveloping us both in a nostalgic haze.

“I missed you, man.”

“I would say the same,” I said. “But I just saw you, like, three weeks ago.”

“Weird. It really feels that way?”

“It’s like I just took a nap or something and now everything’s different. Everyone’s older.”

“Does it hurt?” He sort of nodded toward my neck.

“Can’t feel a thing. Gonna be a righteous scar, though. I guess I can live with it.”

“I think you’ll make do.”

“They say scars give you edge,” I said.

“That right? What about coming back from the dead? Think that’ll get you laid?”

We went into the house, and my parents both got teary as they greeted and hugged him and immediately forced him to take a seat in the living room. I wondered if
they looked at him the same way I did. I wondered if they saw the grown-up who walked in or the kid who used to practically live here.

I looked around and any evidence of the ashes was now gone. Part of me hoped they’d thrown it all away, just flushed the pile of dirt down the toilet and forgotten all about it. But the other part of me, the part that was still toggling between life and death and still very confused about how to define either, hoped that they’d hidden the ashes away somewhere safe, somewhere to be found when needed.

My parents insisted on Kyle staying for lunch, and then they ordered a pizza because my mom obviously hadn’t started liking cooking any more than she had before I’d left. We set up shop at the kitchen bar, Kyle and I taking the same seats our past selves had taken most nights of the week back when we’d binge on Mike & Ikes and study for Ms. Grady’s ridiculous biology exams and compare answers for Mrs. Lasetter’s never-ending Algebra 1 homework assignments. I was always much better at science than math, and Kyle was the opposite, so it worked perfectly that way. We piggybacked off each other’s strengths and weaknesses. That’s real friendship, right?

“Tell me you’ll get to go back as a junior.” Kyle shoved pizza into his face.

“Sophomore. I missed way too much the first time. I don’t have the credits.”

“Shit. Well, I have epically bad news, then.”

“What? Don’t say it. Do
not
say it, Kyle.”

“Lasetter.”

“Damn it. Kill me now.”

“Turns out that isn’t so easy.”

“No kidding. I can’t believe she’s still there. I guess I just thought hell would’ve opened up and taken her back by now.”

“She made Audrey cry last year. Twice,” he said.

“Audrey. Wow. Your little sister’s in high school? Holy shit.”

“Yeah. She’s seventeen. She’s older than you now, dude.”

“This gets so much weirder every day.”

“Have you seen Cate yet?” he asked. We both knew the conversation would turn to her sooner or later.

“Not yet. Maybe she doesn’t know.”

“Everyone knows, Travis. I talked to her last week—she’s pretty freaked out.”

“She is? She told you that? I know it’s weird. I know. But it’s
me
, Kyle. Why wouldn’t she just be happy?”

“She is, Travis. Of course she is. It’s just . . . well, she’s been seeing this guy for a while, you know. They’re engaged.”

“Mom told me,” I said. “You know him?”

“Met him once. We all had dinner. He’s a good guy. So there’s that,” Kyle added.

“There
is
that.”

“You gonna try to reach her?” he asked.

“Eventually. I have to, don’t I? Doesn’t she want to see me?”

“There’s no way, no matter how long it’s been or how different she is, that she wouldn’t want to see you. You know that.”

“And you?” I said. “Why’d it take
you
so long?”

“Scared, I guess. Your mom called before they flew to Denver, and my first thought was,
What if they bring him back and then he dies all over again?
I couldn’t deal with that, Travis. Not again.”

“So you decided to wait it out and see if I’d make it?”

“Well, it sounds a lot worse when you put it that way.”

“I understand, I guess.”

I did understand. He had been there for all of it, for every treatment and its often-violent aftermath. He’d seen my family’s small glimmer of hope squashed over and over again by doctor after doctor, bad results after bad results. He’d told me once, after I’d been through another round of especially painful chemo, that he didn’t understand why I had to get so sick to try to get better, why they had to keep almost killing me to save my life. He’d been so angry that day that he’d kicked a hole in the bathroom door at his house when he’d gotten home.

Kyle Hagler had been my best friend since kindergarten, since the day a game of tag at recess had turned dangerous after Holly Jones decided she couldn’t go home without a kiss from me. I was darting across the
playground with her at my heels when Kyle ran up and planted one right on her lips.