Free The Year of My Miraculous Reappearance by Catherine Ryan Hyde Page A

because there's something we can do for them. I was counting on her to be right. I was counting on it not really mattering much if I felt anything for Snake or not.
    I figured he wouldn't care about that. But maybe Kiki was wrong.
    I guess I wasn't answering fast enough.
    “Right,” he said. “Got it.”
    He walked out, and the door came swishing back with a big sound of air. It was like somebody had shut the door on my life. It was like there was no more sky, and all the air you used to be able to breathe got sucked away.
    It was like I didn't have one single thing left.
    In the morning the highway patrol guys came into my room. One of them had a clipboard. They both had guns and very neat uniforms, and I could see to look at them why the nurse made that “phew” sound. They were two scary guys.
    The first thing they asked me is whose idea was it for me to be driving the car.
    “Mine,” I said.
    “The boy didn't talk you into it?”
    “No.”
    “You sure?”
    “Positive. I had to talk him into letting me drive.”
    We went around and around about this for a long time. I got the feeling they wanted it to be mostly Snake's fault. Maybe because he was a boy, or because he was older. Maybe it was just because he was gone.
    I thought about it, too, for a second. He's gone, anyway, and they can't do anything to him. I could try to put it off on him. But I couldn't. I just couldn't. Snake had never doneanything bad to me. Not one thing I could think of, and I really tried. I wanted to think of one time he stabbed me in the back, so I could blame all this on him. But there was nothing.
    “No,” I said. “I drove because I wanted to.”
    I wasn't even still trying to save myself. I just sort of held my nose and sank all the way down into trouble.
    The day I left the hospital I had to sit up in a wheelchair so the nurse could wheel me down to the lobby. It was the middle of the morning, and I knew my mom was around here somewhere or they wouldn't be checking me out. But I hadn't actually seen her. It was like this big black cloud of doom sitting on my head. It was like knowing you were going to die in about three minutes. It seemed weird that she hadn't even tried to come sooner. Just when she absolutely had to, to give me a ride. It sort of sucked, but then I was relieved to put off seeing her. So I didn't know how to feel about that.
    Getting into the wheelchair wasn't easy. I had a big, heavy cast on my leg, and the nurse had to help me hold it, and it really hurt to move. My left arm still couldn't do much, so it was hard to lower myself into the chair without bumping around a lot. All through this awful stuff, I was wanting to ask her something, but I was afraid what she would say.
    Just as she was wheeling me into the hallway, I spit it out. “Can we go by Bill's room, real quick? Just so I can see him?”
    “Honey, he's gone.”
    My stomach got all cold. I felt like somebody had hit me in the gut with a piece of lumber. My brain was tingling. “What do you mean, gone?”
    “Your grandma and grampa came and picked him up.” I breathed again for the first time in what felt like a long time. I couldn't even say out loud what I'd been thinking for a second there. I thought she meant he was gone, like … I couldn't even bring myself to think it. All the way down, my legs and my stomach were all shivery from what I thought for just that second.
    She wheeled me right through the lobby and out the door, like she expected my mom to come driving up any second. But I still hadn't seen her. It was cloudy outside, but kind of heavy wet and warm. The clouds were dark, and I looked up at them, and they looked like I felt.
    “They never even came in and talked to me.”
    “Who?”
    “Nanny and Grampop.”
    “Oh.”
    I knew why, too. I didn't even have to ask. They were so mad at me, they didn't even want to see me. They couldn't even look at me. It was that bad. And I never even got to tell Bill I was sorry. For the