Forever changes, p.14

Forever Changes, page 14

 

Forever Changes
Select Voice:
Brian (uk)
Emma (uk)  
Amy (uk)
Eric (us)
Ivy (us)
Joey (us)
Salli (us)  
Justin (us)
Jennifer (us)  
Kimberly (us)  
Kendra (us)
Russell (au)
Nicole (au)


1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Larger Font   Reset Font Size   Smaller Font  


Dad’s face looked pained. “Bri, stop that. Dr. Patel said with enough treatment now, they can probably get you in shape for a lung transplant, I mean I got you on the list and—”

  “Dad, I don’t want a transplant. It’s done. I’m done. I can’t do this anymore.”

  “I …” Dad said, but then he was crying and he couldn’t talk, and Brianna felt bad.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a burden to you. I’m sorry you didn’t get the life you wanted.”

  Dad looked up. “Bri, shut up,” he said through his tears. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. You made me a much better person, and every single day … every day you’ve been in my life you’ve made me happier than I ever thought I would get to be.”

  Brianna smiled and squeezed Dad’s hand. Finally Dad sniffed and said, “Okay. So who do you want me to call?”

  “Melissa. Stephanie. Adam. And Eccles. Mr. Eccles, my math teacher. I don’t have his number, but his first name is John. He lives in Blackpool.”

  Dad looked surprised. “Anybody else?”

  Brianna thought about it. “Nah,” she replied. “I don’t think so. Ashley, but she won’t be allowed to come anyway. In fact, will you … will you just keep everybody else away?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll do that.”

  “Why don’t you go get some breakfast and call them. I think I need to rest some more.”

  Dad looked uncertain. “Okay, pumpkin. I love you.”

  “I love you too, Daddy.”

  Brianna went back to sleep.

  She woke up and saw Adam sitting in a chair next to Dad. She wondered for a minute how he’d gotten here before anybody else when he didn’t have a car. She thought dimly that she was probably on morphine, and she felt weird and muddle-headed.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” Adam answered softly.

  “Uh, Dad, can you give us a minute?” Dad looked like he really didn’t want to go. “Dad, I promise I won’t croak while you’re out of the room.”

  “Jeez, Bri,” he said. Then he said, “Adam, you want something horrible to eat or drink from the cafeteria? Some coffee?”

  “Sure,” Adam said, “Some coffee would be good. Black, please.” He was digging in his pockets for money, but Dad waved his hand and left.

  “So,” Adam said when Dad had gone.

  “So,” Brianna said, and there was so much she wanted to say, but talking required breathing, and that was just so hard right now. “Thanks,” she managed.

  “Yeah, well,” Adam said, “You’re my best friend, you know, and I love you.”

  Brianna smiled. She thought about how, even if he’d said that last week, she would have wondered if he meant love love, or just like friend love, and what that meant, and whether things were going to change between them, and whether she was attracted to him or anything. But now, none of that seemed important at all. “You too,” she responded, because she did. Adam smiled.

  There was so much more she wanted to say: When you graduate and get rich, maybe you can name something at MIT after me, don’t feel bad if you hook up with Stephanie or Melissa … too much talking, too much effort.

  Adam filled the silence. “I … you’ve made this year so much fun for me, so much better than any other year of my whole life.” And he was crying again. “I’m so glad I got to know you.”

  Brianna just nodded and pointed at him.

  “Um …” Adam looked like he had something else he wanted to say. Brianna wondered what it could possibly be—he’d already told her he loved her. “Is it … would it … can I kiss you?”

  “Yes,” Brianna said.

  Adam reached over and slowly, tenderly, lifted up her oxygen mask and gave her a soft, sweet kiss. Then he leaned back and put the mask back on.

  “Thanks. That was nice,” she said, smiling and drifting away.

  When she woke up again, Melissa and Stephanie were sitting there. “Hi,” she said.

  “Hey,” Melissa said, quietly.

  “Ready to go home yet?” Stephanie said.

  Brianna just looked at her. “No.” That was all it took to start both of her friends crying.

  Melissa finally said, “Bri, is there anything you want? Is there anything you want us to do for you?”

  “Don’t leave. I love you.”

  Suddenly they were both hugging her from either side of the bed. “We love you too.”

  Melissa and Stephanie sat back down. They were all silent for a while.

  “Talk about something,” Brianna said.

  Melissa and Stephanie wiped their faces and took turns telling her about how Emma and Charles broke up, and then about how Emma had called Denise a backstabbing slut when she started making out with Charles, and at some point, Brianna fell asleep, feeling happy.

  She had a hazy vision of Eccles standing there with Dad, but she was too weak to wake up all the way, and then she was asleep again.

  When she woke up, Dad was back in the room with Melissa and Stephanie and Adam. Melissa went down to the cafeteria to get them some dinner, and everybody but Brianna ate. She wasn’t hungry. She wondered kind of abstractly if she’d ever eat again. She found she didn’t much care one way or the other.

  Dad held her hand, and Brianna closed her eyes. Now that she’d said all her goodbyes, she was ready to go, and as she drifted off to sleep, she felt happy that she’d had such a good life.

  She was surprised when she woke up the next morning. Well, she reflected, her body had never really done exactly what she thought it should, so there was probably no reason for it to start now.

  She lay in bed the whole day, and Adam and Stephanie and Melissa came back, and it was so nice not to have to say goodbye, just to be with all of her favorite people, and Brianna wanted so much to tell them how much she loved them, how much she appreciated them, what a gift this extra day was, how there was no way she’d rather spend her last day alive than with them. But it was too much, and every time she tried to say it, she just started to cough. Finally Dad leaned over really close and said, “You don’t have to say it, Pumpkin. We know. And we all love you too.”

  Day turned into night, and Adam and Stephanie and Melissa left, and only Dad remained, holding her hand and singing her songs he used to sing to her when she was a little kid. It was perfect.

  sudden silence

  Inside the room, Stephen Pelletier knew Brianna had died by the sudden silence where her labored breathing had been.

  In the hallway outside the room, the nurses knew Brianna Pelletier had died by the great gulping sobs coming from the big man holding the small, lifeless body of his precious daughter.

  beautifully

  John Eccles, wearing a suit from his closet so old it now qualified as vintage, walked up the steps to the pulpit. Every seat was full, and most people were crying. In the middle, Ashley sat between her mother and father. In the front row, Brianna’s father and her three friends sat together, holding hands. In the very last pew, Brianna’s mother sat alone.

  John Eccles reached into his suit jacket, pulled out what he’d written, and smoothed it onto the podium. The microphone picked up the sound of crinkling paper and broadcast it to the congregation. He took a deep breath, and then he began to speak.

  “I was Brianna’s calculus teacher. One thing we learn in calculus class is the value of infinitesimals. I won’t bore you with the details, but, essentially, quantities which are very small are incredibly important.

  “So it is with Brianna’s life. Though she lived a short time—an incredibly short time, to my old brain’s way of thinking–let us not measure the value of Brianna’s life by its length. Let us not say, if only she had done this, if only she had done that, if only she’d lived to do x, y, or z. The fact that you are sitting here today means that you were touched by Brianna Pelletier, that her life was valuable to you no matter its length. Perhaps she touched you with her kindness; perhaps she inspired you with her intelligence; perhaps she brightened your day with her sense of humor; perhaps, in her generosity, she gave you her own bottle of an electric blue sports drink.

  “Whatever the case, you know that Brianna’s life was precious, valuable, wonderful. So let us not think about what Brianna didn’t do. Let us think, instead, of what she did, of the ways in which she touched us all. Let us hope that, someday, we too may touch people as she has done.

  “When we lose someone important to us, we feel their absence as a horrible void inside of us, a void that will never be filled. They are dancing in infinity, but we long for their presence, and we struggle to understand the best way to honor our memory of them.

  “What would Brianna have us do? How can we live so as to honor her, to honor the role she played in our lives, her importance to us? Those of you who are still alive in five, ten, fifteen, fifty, sixty years, living lives so far removed from Brianna, how will you honor her as she deserves to be honored?

  “I propose we honor Brianna’s unfairly brief life and her importance to us by striving to live as she lived: by being courageous and doing things that are difficult for us, things we are afraid of. By living vibrantly, as she did, by celebrating our talents and planning for a future that is uncertain for all of us, by not letting those things which are hard for us deter us from experiencing all we want to experience. And first, and foremost, by being kind and loving to one another, so that when we too come to die, we shall be missed as sorely and painfully as we now miss Brianna. We can honor her by living our lives as she did hers: beautifully.”

  John Eccles stepped down from the podium. The pastor asked everyone to rise and join in singing “How Can I Keep From Singing.” As the congregation sang, Stephen Pelletier, shoulders heaving with grief, bore the urn containing his daughter’s ashes from the church. Behind him, crying and still clutching each other’s hands as though to keep from sinking into a sea of despair, walked Stephanie St. Pierre, Adam Pennington, and Melissa D’Amico.

  Three thousand miles from Blackpool, a woman picked up her phone and called her father. He didn’t answer, and she left a message.

  Day turned into night, and, at two o’clock in the morning, Melissa, Stephanie, and Adam walked to the moonlit beach. Each carried a small container of ashes given to them by Stephen Pelletier. Drunk on grief and tequila, each of them dipped a hand into their own container of ashes, drew out a handful, and sprinkled it onto the sea.

  “Goodbye,” Adam Pennington said through his tears. They stood and watched in the moonlight as the waves lapped unceasingly at the shore and the tiny cloud of ashes that had once been part of the body of Brianna Pelletier dispersed, each particle now floating amidst a number of water molecules as close to infinite as the human mind could comprehend.

  Twenty-five miles away, a graduate student sat in a basement at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, grateful to have been able to book any time at all on the supercomputer, even the hours between two and four a.m. on Sunday morning. As the ashes that had once been the body of Brianna Pelletier struck the water in Blackpool, a supercomputer in a basement in Cambridge running a program written by a graduate student sent a signal to a monitor.

  The monitor displayed a number.

  The number was incredibly large.

  The number was prime, and no human being had ever seen it before.

  acknowledgments

  Thanks to Suzanne Demarco for helping me to live and write more beautifully.

  Thanks to Dana Reinhardt, who helped me find this book inside a sprawling mess of a first draft.

  Thanks to Janine O’Malley for believing in this book and for working so hard to help me make it better.

  Thanks to Doug Stewart for ongoing friendship, encouragement, and general awesomeness.

  Thanks to Casey Nelson, Rowen Halpin, and Kylie Nelson for inspiration.

  Special thanks to Michelle Manes, who helped me correct an apparently egregious mathematical error in the first edition. Any remaining mathematical idiocy is of course my own and not Michelle’s.

  Thanks to everyone at pressbooks.com for creating a tool that made it so easy for me to prepare the electronic edition of this book.

  Thanks to Arthur Lee and all the members of Love for the title and for music that moved me, Adam, and Brianna.

  About the Author

  Brendan Halpin is a teacher and the author of books for adults and young adults including the Alex Award–winning Donorboy, Forever Changes, and the Junior Library Guild Selection Shutout. He is also the coauthor of Tessa Masterson Will Go to Prom, with Emily Franklin, and Notes from the Blender, with Trish Cook, both of which the American Library Association named to its Rainbow List. Halpin’s writing has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, Rosie and Best Life magazines, and the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column. Halpin is a vegetarian, a fan of vintage horror movies, and an avid tabletop gamer. He lives with his wife, Suzanne, their three children, and their dog in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  “You Set the Scene” by Arthur Lee © 1968 by Trio Music Company and Grass Roots Productions.

  Copyright © 2008 by Brendan Halpin

  Cover design by Connie Gabbert

  978-1-5040-0641-5

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  EARLY BIRD BOOKS

  FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

  BE THE FIRST TO KNOW ABOUT

  FREE AND DISCOUNTED EBOOKS

  NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY

  EBOOKS BY BRENDAN HALPIN

  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  Available wherever ebooks are sold

  Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.

  Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases

  Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.

  Sign up now at

  www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters

  FIND OUT MORE AT

  WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM

  FOLLOW US:

  @openroadmedia and

  Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia

 


 

  Brendan Halpin, Forever Changes

 


 

 
Thank you for reading books on ReadFrom.Net

Share this book with friends
share

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
Add Fast Bookmark
Load Fast Bookmark
Turn Navi On
Turn Navi On
Turn Navi On
Scroll Up
Turn Navi On
Scroll
Turn Navi On
183