The Prodigy's Cousin by Joanne Ruthsatz & Kimberly Stephens

Author:Joanne Ruthsatz & Kimberly Stephens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-02-12T16:01:34+00:00

It happened when Zac was thirteen.

Zac’s church youth group meeting ended, and most of the kids headed out to the foyer to wait for their rides. Zac and some of the others tracked down a few empty appliance boxes they had used as part of a game during the meeting. He and his buddies flattened one out. They took turns lifting it and jumping over it, raising the makeshift hurdle a bit higher each time.

On Zac’s turn, he dove headfirst over the box. He cracked his head against the thinly carpeted concrete floor. For a minute, maybe a minute and a half, Zac blacked out.

When he regained consciousness, the youth group leaders helped him to the side of the room and leaned him against the wall. Someone brought him a glass of water and placed it next to him on the floor. Zac, still dazed, reached for it. He knocked it over. Someone ran outside to get Doug, who was waiting in the parking lot.

Doug had been through this before with Zac; the kid couldn’t play Ping-Pong without making it look like an extreme sport. His stunts often landed him in the hospital, and he’d already had multiple head injuries and concussions (his parents joked that he had a “club card” for the emergency room). Doug trotted out his familiar list of questions. Zac didn’t know his name. He didn’t know his birth date or address. He insisted that five plus five was twelve. He was worse than Doug had ever seen him. Doug and Josh helped Zac out to the car. Zac felt overwhelmed with fatigue; all he wanted to do was sleep, but Doug made him stay awake for the drive back home.

Julie knew the drill. She checked the head-injury guidelines that the family had posted inside the medicine cabinet after Zac’s previous concussion, a tobogganing injury that led to an overnight hospital stay. Zac’s pupils were still dilated, and he was still nauseated. But he was a bit more coherent than he had been right after the accident. Julie and Doug decided to skip the trip to the emergency room. They woke Zac every couple of hours and observed him through the night. He woke easily enough, and Julie and Doug assumed that all was well.

The next morning, Zac seemed more low-key than usual. Julie and Doug wrote it off as the aftermath of interrupted sleep. They let him stay home from school for a couple of days.

When he went back, he was reclusive. Before the accident, he had always been friendly with his classmates. Afterward, he just wanted to be alone. Over the next couple of weeks, Julie noticed that Zac was quieter than usual; he went out less. At his youth group meetings, he wasn’t as wound up, not so much the life of the party. Maybe this injury finally got through to him, Julie thought. Maybe Zac realized how serious a concussion could be.

A few weeks after Zac’s accident, the family had Valerie, Josh’s painting mentor, over for dinner.

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