Free Noggin by John Corey Whaley

anything—there was no dramatic movie moment where she ran back in and kissed me passionately and it started raining inside or anything. She hung her head low, and she beelined out and down the hallway. I was proud of her too. I couldn’t have done it that way. They would’ve had to pry me off her.
    We’d stayed up pretty late the night before, my parents and me, because they wanted the good-bye to be short andsweet. They didn’t want to upset me before my procedure, and they certainly didn’t want me to question their faith in all this Frankenstein madness. I knew, though. I knew they believed this would be it and it broke what was left of my heart when they walked in, together, and stood on either side of the bed after Cate had left.
    “How you feeling?” Dad asked.
    “Good. Ready, I think.”
    “You’re not scared, then?” Mom was choking up.
    “I’ve been scared a lot,” I said. “Through all of this, but not now, no. Not so much.”
    “We’re so proud of you, Travis. You’re so brave,” Dad said with tears and a scratchy, broken voice.
    “You guys have been better than you should’ve been,” I said. “Can you just know that? Can you just try not to forget how good you were at all of this?”
    “We haven’t been good at anything,” Mom said.
    “You took care of me,” I said. “Every second, my whole life.”
    I hugged them each good-bye, and they each kissed a cheek and left their faces next to mine for longer than I expected, long enough to feel like, in some cosmic world, we were sharing thoughts that way. We were shooting invisible little lines of sentiment and love and anguish. Then they stood there, holding hands, and they watched as my eyes began to close, as the chemicals began to tell my brain to go to sleep, to take the longest nap in history. And they told me they’d see me soon.
    See, I had all these people who had to watch me leave and pretend to hope that I could come back. It was all pretend—I was pretending and they were pretending because that’s what got us through it. We fake it sometimes, don’t we? We go along with impossible things because we have to survive when life starts getting too dark. And, well, usually we never have to deal with the too-good-to-be-true thing actually becoming true. But when it does, I can tell you that the pretending gets a lot harder. You can find ways to be okay with dying, but you can’t fake your way through living. You can’t be okay with not having anything you want when it’s staring you right in the face. And you can’t go to sleep at night knowing you have some poor kid’s body attached to you and feeling like you don’t have any damn good use for it.

CHAPTER TEN
ANY DAMN GOOD USE FOR IT
    We met up with Dr. Saranson at the local hospital on the Wednesday after I started school. He flew in from Denver that morning just to examine me and make sure everything was still attached properly, I guess. He actually made that joke during the appointment, and I’m not ashamed to say I laughed pretty hard. I’m a big fan of bad jokes, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.
    “Travis,” he said. “You couldn’t be in better health. I’ll admit I was a little worried that Jeremy’s body would be weak after all he went through, but you seem to have been the right cure for that. Your head, anyway. How’s your appetite?”
    “He can’t eat enough. We’re keeping Whole Foods in business,” Mom said.
    “That’s good. Very good. And how’s school?”
    “It’s okay. Weird but okay.”
    “He’s already made a new friend,” Dad said.
    “Hey there. That was quick. No surprise, though. Just be careful they’re not in it for your fame.” He chuckled to himself, staring down at his clipboard.
    He eventually asked my parents to give us a few minutes, and we talked about Jeremy Pratt a little more. He said that, like me, Jeremy wasn’t too scared to die when the time finally came. To me, the saddest part about Jeremy’s story wasn’t