My hair was still dripping down my back when I walked into the kitchen. My mom, my grandmother, and my uncle were circled around an open box of blueberry muffins and ignoring how my clothes hung like they weren’t my own. They were good at that, at not treating me like a ghost, even though waking up always made me feel like one.
“Hey kiddo, hungry?” My uncle Brian grabbed a clean glass from the dishwasher and poured me some orange juice.
Waking up from a long episode always felt a little like my birthday, everyone waiting around to see me, doting on me like I was some kind of pet. But seeing my uncle after a long sleep was even more jarring. Not because I didn’t see him almost every day—he was always coming by the house fixing something for my mom; helping her with some new project—but because he was my dad’s twin. The dad I hadn’t seen in eight months. The dad who’d left us, all of us, when I was seven.
I looked at my uncle, his face expectant. I’d just started Dr. Sabine’s latest drug trial before my episode and it was supposed to be the miracle we’d all been waiting for.
I shook my head. “Shit didn’t work.”
He shrugged. “Hey, everyone’s a little fucked up.”
“Language,” my mom cut in. “Jesus, you weren’t raised by wolves.” Then she laughed. “Nice to see you’re in a good mood.”
“It’s nice not to be a zombie anymore,” I said. “For now.”
The room grew quiet and then my uncle said, “Brought you some parts. They’re in the backyard.”
My uncle always stopped by the scrapyard on his way over, bringing me whatever salvageable metals he could find for my sculptures.
I stared down into my glass of orange juice. “I missed the deadline.”
“What?” my uncle said. “When was it?”
“Last day of the fall semester.” I inhaled. “It’s okay.”
“I’m sorry, kid.”
“They’ll have another in May,” I said. “It’ll be cutting it close but if I won maybe they’d let me use the scholarship for the fall semester.”
My mom cleared the empty plates from the counter before straightening the napkins and putting the orange juice back in the fridge. She was trying to avoid my eyes. But I wouldn’t let her, not this time.
“We should probably plan our visit to the campus soon,” I said. “I’ll have to turn in my application by March.”
I’d wanted to go to Emory since I was twelve, majoring in sculpture and spending every waking hour in some cramped studio with a bunch of dread-locked hippies and new age ingénues who still thought art could save the world.
I wanted to live in a tiny dorm that smelled like coffee beans and old socks and I wanted to walk across campus with my hair a mess and no attempt at makeup because college kids didn’t give a shit what they looked like. Not the cool ones anyway.
I wanted all of that despite the fact that I was sick. Despite the fact that I knew it could never happen. Unless we tried again. Unless we went back to Dr. Sabine and we tried again.
“We’ll see,” was all my mom said.
I followed my uncle into the backyard, rusting car parts scattered on a tarp near the garage. The sweet musk of the lawn floated up my nose and I sneezed, absorbing the daylight in harsh flashes.
I bent down, picking through the pile, fingers trailing over every sharp edge and coming back orange.
“Did you bring stuff every weekend?” I asked.
“Just about,” he said. “Thought you’d be pressed for time when you woke up.”
I knelt there, sun burning my eyes as I tried to catch my breath. “Thanks.”
I tried to stand, tried to hide that I couldn’t, and then my uncle reached out a hand and pulled me to my feet.
“Sorry you missed the deadline.”
He helped me lift the garage door and I saw my sculpture for the first time in weeks. I’d spent the two just before my episode in this musty garage working under the glow of a red spotlight, fingers calloused and cheeks painted with dirt. Sunlight glinted off the steel petals, flashes of copper and aluminum, everything now trapped under a small film of dust.
It was a giant sunflower, the kind that grew around my grandparent’s farmhouse before my grandfather passed away and we had to sell it. Vines and wild grass wound around the stem spotted with bugs made of screws and bolts. I’d ground each piece down by hand and welded them with a hot flame. But it still looked bare. It still wasn’t finished.
“Even if I tried again she still wouldn’t let me go,” I said.
We both knew it was true. Maybe my mom would have considered it if I’d wanted to stay in Austin. But Emory was five hours east in another state and I knew the distance was something she’d never go for.
“She’s just afraid,” he said.
“So am I.” I pressed a finger to one of the sharp petals. “But what if I never get better? I can’t just keep waiting.”
“You will get better. People grow out of this condition all the time.”
It was true, KLS seemed to mostly afflict the young, stealing our best years before mysteriously abandoning us to adulthood but, “I was asleep for four weeks.”
“Okay, longer than last time but nothing out of the ordinary. Don’t look at this as a step backwards.”
“That’s what it feels like.”
“But it’s not. It’s one last long episode, one last finale before they start to teeter off. They’ll get shorter. You’ll get better. You’ll see.”
“But what if it’s not in time for school?”
“Then you’ll go later.”
“Yeah and be the only college freshman who’s thirty,” I scoffed.
“Who cares? I bet you won’t look a day over twenty-seven.”
I shoved him, his girth barely moving an inch. My uncle was 6’3” and worked in the oil fields, which meant he was not only covered in filth ninety percent of the time but he was also loaded. Though you wouldn’t know it by his standard uniform of flannel shirts and faded jeans, blonde scruff covering his chin.
“So what if you live life on a different schedule?” he said. “You’re still living it.”
I thought about being hunched over the desk in my bedroom, spending my waking hours sifting through mounds of homework. “Barely.”
“With that attitude, yeah.” He gripped my shoulder. “Get it together. You’re not weak. This isn’t you.”
“But what if I’m tired?”
He smiled. “Then take another power nap.”
“Fuck off,” I laughed.
“Ah, there she is.”