Meg Cabot - Airhead

‘Em?’ Gabriel smiled some more. ‘Short for Emily?’

‘Um,’ I said. Oh God. What was wrong with me? Normally I had no problem talking to cute boys. Because normally, all the cute boys I met – Christopher excepted of course — were sexist creeps who needed to be taken down a peg or two. They weren’t sweet British hotties with a voice like an angel and blue eyes that seemed to pierce my soul. ‘No… ’

‘Do you have a CD you’d like for me to sign?’ Gabriel wanted to know, looking questioningly at my empty hands.

Oh no.

‘Hold on,’ I said, my heart pounding. ‘My sister —’

I spun round to find Frida and ran smack into Christopher, who was still staring at Nikki. Only now he wore a look of concern. ‘Uh, Em,’ he said. ‘Look —’

What happened next seemed to unfold as if it was in a dream. Or more accurately, a nightmare. I saw my sister walking towards Nikki Howard and her posse.

At the same time, I saw a guy standing nearby suddenly throw open his trench coat to reveal an ELF T-shirt… along with a paintgun. A Megastore security guy in an earpiece, seeing this at the same time I did, grabbed Nikki by the wrist and jerked her back. Meanwhile, Paintgun Guy, grinning balefully, raised his rifle and fired at the plasma TV hanging directly over Nikki’s head, leaving an enormous yellow splotch across the screen where Nikki’s boobs had been. Actually, it looked like she’d been eating a hot dog with mustard that had slid out on to her chest … something that happens to me not infrequently.

Only this time, the plasma screen came loose from the wires suspending it from the ceiling. First one wire popped. Then a second one.

And standing directly beneath it stood my sister Frida, still holding her pen towards Nikki for an autograph.

‘Frida! Move!’ I yelled, my heart giving a lurch.

I darted forward to push her out of the way just as the last wire holding the giant television in place broke with a pinging sound that was easily audible, even over the music blasting from the Stark Megastore’s speakers.

And then the whole thing came crashing down.

On me.

And — just like in Journeyquest, when I make a mistake and my character loses a life — everything went black.

Images. That’s what I became aware of next.

Like the kind you see floating on the back of your eyelids if you press the heels of your hands against them when you have a headache. Just shapes really, floating in space.

I watched them, wondering what they were. They looked like amoebas … no, like Christopher’s hair, underwater in the swimming pool, when they made us do laps in PE last time, and I was spying on him with my goggles…

Wait a minute. What was I doing in PE? Had I fallen underwater? But I wasn’t wet. At least, I was pretty sure I wasn’t… I didn’t feel wet. Did I?

How could I be seeing Christopher’s hair underwater if I wasn’t wet?

Maybe my eyes weren’t open. Were my eyes closed or open? Why couldn’t I lift up my hand to feel my face and see? My hand felt so heavy … I couldn’t even lift it…

Why was I so tired?

So tired…

I heard voices. The voices were saying things. What were they saying? I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t understand them. I was too tired to understand them. Who kept talking? Why wouldn’t they let me sleep?

Wait. That was Mom’s voice. Mom was the one who was doing all that talking. Mom and… who else? Dad. That was Dad. Mom and Dad were talking. They were saying things. They wanted me to wake up. Why? Why couldn’t I just go on sleeping?

I knew I should listen to them — whenever Mom tells us to do something, Frida and I always do it. Eventually anyway.

But I felt like I couldn’t move. Like I’d been turned to stone. I just wanted to go on sleeping forever.

Still, I could hear Mom, her voice charged with urgency.

‘Em! Em, if you can hear me, open your eyes! Open your eyes, Em. Just open your eyes for a minute, Em.’

I knew that old trick. The second she knew I was awake, Mom would make me get up and empty the dishwasher or go to school or something equally hideous. I wasn’t falling for that one.

‘Em! Please! Please, just open your eyes.’

She sounded pretty upset, though. Maybe the apartment was on fire. Maybe I should do what she said. Just open my eyes for a second to see what she wanted.

‘Please, Em… ’

She sounded like she was crying actually. I didn’t want to make my mom cry. That’s the last thing I wanted to do.

So I tried to open my eyes. I really did. I wanted to.

But they just… wouldn’t open.

My eyes wouldn’t open.

I heard my mother crying, and I heard my dad comforting her, murmuring, ‘It’s all right, Karen.’

‘In cases like this,’ I heard another, unfamiliar man’s voice saying, ‘it’s not unusual for —’

I didn’t hear the rest of what the man was saying because I was too busy concentrating on trying to make my eyes open. Only I couldn’t get my eyelids to lift. I really couldn’t. It was like they were made of lead, and I was just too weak to raise them.

So then I tried to open my mouth to tell my mom not to cry, that I was fine, just so tired. Maybe if they let me rest a little more…

But I found I couldn’t open my mouth either.

That was a little scary. For a minute. But the truth was, I was really just so tired… it was so much easier to go back to sleep. I’d tell Mom later, I decided… about my being too tired to do what she asked. I’d explain it all later, when I wasn’t so sleepy. I needed to get my energy back. I’d be fine with a few more hours of sleep.

Finally I managed to open my eyes. Not because anyone was calling my name. Not because I was seeing amoebas behind my eyelids. My eyes just… opened.

All by themselves.

But when they did, and I looked around, I was surprised to find I wasn’t in a swimming pool, or even at home, but in a bed in a hospital room.

I could tell that I was in a bed in a hospital room, because even though it was pretty dark — it had to be night-time — nothing looked familiar to me. The walls were beige, not the Navajo White I’d painted my walls back home in a fit one day, because I couldn’t stand the bland eggshell the rest of the walls in our apartment were.

And all my posters — from the Journeyquest movie, which I know had sucked, but the posters were cool — were gone. So were all my postcards from that field trip we took to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead, all I could see were wires. Wires that appeared to be coming out of me. They were hooked up to machines beside the bed I was in, which were whirring softly and occasionally making pinging noises.

Fortunately I didn’t get scared or anything, because sitting in a chair next to the machines was my dad. He was sleeping.

I tried to think why I would be in a hospital with wires coming out of me. I am actually a very healthy person and have only been to the hospital once, when I broke my arm falling off the see-saw in our apartment building’s playground in the second grade. Had I fallen off something again? I couldn’t remember climbing on anything. How had I ended up in the hospital? I didn’t feel hurt. Just super-duper tired.

But I felt better than my dad looked. He had a lot of grey stubble all over his face, like he hadn’t shaved in a long, long time (which seemed kind of funny to me, since when I’d seen him just last night at dinner, he hadn’t had a beard. Or had he? Looking back, I couldn’t seem to remember… hadn’t I had dinner with my dad last night? It seemed so long ago…). Also, his shirt was super wrinkly and there were some stains on it.

The truth was, my dad looked pretty awful. I wondered why my dad would look like that. I didn’t want to wake him up to ask though. That seemed like it would be a selfish thing to do.