Out There Screaming by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE SECONDS

“One or two? One. Two.”

Kamara sighed indecision while her brother flicked the lens options back and forth between blurry and slightly-less-blurry-sort-of.

“Two?”

“If you say so.” The phoropter swung away as the lights came back on, and Jay pushed himself to a side counter in his rolling chair to make his notes in her chart.

“How’d I do?” she asked him.

“Better than you think you did. We really don’t have to do these visits this frequently. You wouldn’t feel like your vision was deteriorating so rapidly if you actually wore your glasses.”

Kam waved him off. “Ah, maybe I just like seeing you.”

She’d needed glasses since she was eight, so having a brother who’d landed in optometry had its perks. She stared at the elegantly framed ocular dissection poster on the wall, vaguely aware of the buzzing fluorescent light overhead and the subtle rumbling beginning in her stomach.

“Hey, what’s it called when your vision fades out for like a half a second?”

He stared at her quizzically a moment, as if trying to head off whatever corny joke she was about to tell. Which was valid because she did that a lot.

“A…blink?” He raised an eyebrow.

“No, Dr. Smart-ass. Your eyes are wide open and you can just be sitting there and things just go dark. Like the quickest power surge.”

Jay flipped through her chart again. “All your tests here are clear. How’s your blood pressure? Is this thing…painful? Distracting when it happens?”

“Barely noticeable but…you know, I notice. I think of it like déjà vu. Something that happens sometimes but you can’t tell if it’s really…happening.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure it’s happening?”

“This is why people go to WebMD.”

“Don’t start.” He gave her his Doctor Eyes, the ones that said he had a legal and ethical obligation to not roast her in the moment. “Look, I’ll take this as seriously as you want me to take it. So, are you good? We can look into it.”

Her phone buzzed in the chair across the room, and she hopped up to answer it. “It’s fine, I was just curious if there was a word for it.”

“All right, then.” He escorted her back out into the hallway toward reception. The office was quaint and clean and warmly decorated and criminally expensive, in the heart of the city. And it was all his. He was flourishing, and she was proud of him. She meant what she’d said about just wanting to see him sometimes.

He handed her chart off to the receptionist and the two of them took in the bright and busy afternoon happening outside the front windows. “What are you about to get into?”

“Meeting up with Wolf and Ami in the park for lunch.” She pointed to where she thought she could see their friends on the far side of a broad stretch of green across the street.

“Oh, tell them I said ‘what’s up.’ ”

“You know that’s a question, right? Like I’d have to say, ‘Jay says what’s up’ and then it’s implied I’d have to run back what they tell m—”

“Oh my god, bye.

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