No One Is Alone by Rachel Vincent

Author:Rachel Vincent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

seventeen

“Get out! Get out! I don’t need you!”

I sit straight up in bed, startled awake by the shouting. The light is off, but the room is brightly lit, because Emery opened the curtains when she got up. If I ask, she’ll say something about daylight being good for mental health, but the truth is that she’s hoping the sunlight will wake me up before I choose to be awake. Because I stayed up until two in the morning texting Ben.

She did the same thing last Sunday, the day after our dueling Broadway watch parties, when she saw a good morning message from him on my lock screen. She hasn’t been openly angry about Ben and me, but she’s elevated passive aggression to a whole new level.

According to my phone, it’s just after 9:00 a.m., but the joke’s on Emery, because it wasn’t daylight that woke me. It was Grammie.

I’d hoped to sleep for another hour, because it’s a Saturday, and I don’t have to be anywhere. But I’m awake now, so I change out of my pajamas and cross the hall into the bathroom as quickly as I can so Grammie won’t see me.

As much as I like her, I do not want to get drawn into another argument between her and the home hospice aides who come to bathe her.

“Mrs. Turner, you have an open wound, and I really need to clean it!” Today, it’s Rita, and the poor woman sounds exasperated.

Teeth brushed and face washed, I pad down the hall, barefoot, to find Cody already on the couch, eating dry cereal like popcorn. “Zombies?” he asks, the very second he sees me.

“Yeah. Just a sec.”

Even though it’s a weekend, there’s no sign of breakfast in the kitchen. Cynthia is removing all the silverware from its drawer and stacking it neatly on the counter. I give her a questioning look as I pull open the freezer drawer and take out a box of toaster pastries. The kind with creamy filling.

“The utensil sorter is filthy,” she explains as she sets the last serving spoon on its stack on the granite countertop. Then she pulls the storage tray out of the drawer and submerges it into a sink full of soapy water. Her movements as she scrubs are short and harsh, her posture tense. The more Grammie shouts, the harder Cynthia scrubs.

I take my toasted pastry and a glass of chocolate milk into the living room, where I drop onto the couch next to Cody. “Let’s do this,” I say with my mouth full.

We hack at animated zombies, and every time I die, I take a big bite of my breakfast while the game respawns my character.

During the reloads—I’m seriously bad at this—I can hear the hospice worker speaking softly, calmly to Grammie, trying to convince her to cooperate for her sponge bath. For the cleaning of her wound. Cynthia says it’s a bedsore. Rita can’t make Grammie cooperate. According to my dad, she has the right to refuse care, but it’s hard on everyone when she does.

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