It feels like I’ve been yanked from underwater and the things around me I start to hear and see more clearly all of a sudden.

I realize too, that I shouldn’t even know her name. I don’t recall her ever telling me and the first time I actually spoke to her was yesterday at Isaac’s house. But I’ve known her name since I started school as if I had heard Mrs. Schvolsky call it out at some point, or someone else mentioned it. But if no one else knows her and has never even heard of her, then how could that be how I know?

“Maybe you should ask Isaac,” Harry says. “Whatever’s going on, maybe he would have a clue.”

“No,” I say right away. “No way. I’m not giving Isaac any reason to start questioning my mental health. If anything, telling him I’ve been seeing and speaking to someone that apparently doesn’t exist, that’ll do it. He’ll start to wonder all on his own if something more happened to me that night with Viktor, than I’m telling.”

“Well, if it is true,” he says, pulling himself into a careful stand, “if you think about it, that’s not something you can hide from him forever.”

My heart sinks into the pit of my stomach. It’s not like I didn’t really think about this before, but someone else saying it, forcing me to face the truth of it, feels so much more real than my time trying to forget it.

“But like I said,” Harry adds, just before climbing back inside the attic, “Iron and Thorazine pills—it’ll fix you right up.”

I try to catch him to give him the smack he deserves before he makes it through the window, but I can’t be fast enough while trying to keep from falling off the roof.

I hear a thud-clunk inside and see Harry’s dark hair rising up from the floor.

I laugh because he had it coming.

13

WHITE STERILIZED WALLS. White elongated cabinets with little silver keyholes. The clean, yet uncomfortable smell of antibacterial soap that you only ever smell while inside a hospital or clinic. I hate that soap. There’s something so oddly cruel about it. My legs dangle off the side of a brown vinyl examination table where just below I can see my reflection in the shiny white tiles that make up the floor. I don’t look at all happy. I look sort of constipated the way my hands are pushed firmly against my cheeks to hold up my weight, how my eyes and forehead are pulled into a hardened, unmoving mass of displeasure. I feel the paper that had been rolled over the bed for me to sit on sticking to the back of my thighs and cool air keeps sneaking in through the loose ties of the ugly gown that covers me.

I wanted to leave my jeans on and just wear the gown to cover my upper body because there’s nothing they need to do downstairs, but the nurse trained to be sweet and pleasant insisted.

She’s not fooling me.

I know the next time I see her come into my room she’ll be carrying the Tray of Doom, lined neatly with little plastic and silver instruments that prove there’s nothing sweet and pleasant about her.

I should’ve told Aunt Bev to go ahead and come back here with me. No, maybe not. It’s probably better that she doesn’t see this defiant side of her so-called charming Adria.

There’s a customary knock on the tall wooden door and it clicks open a second afterwards. I wonder if doctors and nurses just do that because they have to, or if they actually think that in that one-point-three-second timeframe if patients are nak*d, they’ll have enough time to cover up.

A tall, middle-aged woman walks in; stereotypical, wearing a long white thigh-length coat over her pretty silk top and black slacks. Medical I.D. badge clamped to the coat collar, hanging just over her breast. Silky blond hair with highlights pulled into a ponytail that lies neatly between her shoulder blades. She’s holding my freshly printed medical chart attached to a clipboard.

“So,” I say with a faint snip of sarcasm in my voice, “why do you people knock before coming in anyway? Not like you wait until the patients say to come on in.” I can’t help it. I’m incredibly nervous and when it comes to needles my civility sometimes detaches itself from my conscience entirely.

The smile in her eyes is about as faint as my sarcasm: noticeable, but not meant to be blatant. I’m sure she’s heard and experienced worse. And I’m pretty sure she knows I have a fear of hospitals not unlike a large percentage of the population.

I can go in one just fine, but not when I’m the patient.

The doctor places the clipboard on the examination table beside me. She smells nice, but I still smell the soap that she washed with from whatever room she left recently.

Her smile opens up more. “It’s just to let you know I’m on my way in,” she says. “You had plenty of time to undress and put on the gown, I see.” She’s making her point cleverly, not an ounce of offense in her voice. She’s very professional, I’ll give her that much.

Nervously, I fold my hands together between my thighs and look toward the latex glove dispenser hanging on the wall.

“So, what’s been going on with you, Miss Dawson?” she says while rolling the stool over next to me and taking a seat on it.

I let my breath out slowly and look at her. She sits there now with the clipboard in her lap, but no pen to jot down the things I’m going to tell her because Ms. Sweet n’ Pleasant took all of those notes down already for her. I don’t say, ‘But I already told the nurse all this stuff,’ because it’s pointless, like knocking on the door before coming in.

“I’ve been having dizzy spells,” I begin, “and I’ve fainted twice in two days. A little nausea, but I haven’t actually thrown up. Shortness of breath. Spots in front of my eyes.” I’m not about to tell her that I’ve been seeing ghosts and having conversations with them, or that I think I might’ve been bonded for life to an ancient werewolf after drinking his blood. Not unless I want my very own private room somewhat like this one, minus everything but the white walls and floor and easy access out the door.

Logical diagnosis. That’s what I’m here for.

The doctor peers down into the paper, scans it and looks back up at me.

“Have you been under any stress?”

I nod, but don’t elaborate.

“And how often do you eat?”

I think about it. “Normal, I guess. Just not when I’m feeling dizzy.”

“On any special diets? Vegetarian? Vegan? Anything like that?”

“No.”

She pulls out a pen that had been hidden behind the clip on the clipboard and writes something down in a short, fluid motion.

“And how do you feel right now?” she says.

“Aside from being nervous,” I answer, “I’m okay. At least until that nurse comes back in here with the needles and ruins my day. Oh, and she pinched my arm with that blood pressure cuff, so that hurts a little, too.”

I catch another faint smile tug the corners of her lips, but she looks down at the chart again to covertly conceal it.

I do feel like a bratty child, and I’m trying my hardest not to be, but my defensives are way up and when I’m scared like this, I tend to become bolder rather than curl up in a ball and beg for my life.

“You’ll be fine,” she says looking back up at me a few inches higher than she sits. “Can you recall what happened, or what was said shortly before any of your dizzy spells?” She crosses one leg over the other, one arm over her stomach and fits the tip of her chin in her upraised hand. “Any of that stress related to any incidents in particular?”

Looking away from her and up at the ceiling tiles, I muse over the question for a moment. I thought when Uncle Carl came home it was a pretty un-stressful event, but I guess maybe I was a little stressed out, worrying about the house and if Uncle Carl will feel comfortable, oh and my heart-to-heart with Beverlee about Isaac. And then the day after in the restaurant…that probably just carried over from front row seats at the friendly neighborhood werewolf challenge. Now, at Isaac’s house when Nataša was there and I actually did black out, I can definitely put that whole scenario in the stressful category. The same in the library yesterday with Genna.

Okay, so maybe they are related.

And both times I blacked out, Genna had been there—I think—telling me to ‘calm down’.

Maybe there really is a logical diagnosis.

Except for Genna. She’s still on my crazy list.

I’m looking at this doctor with a bit more appreciation now, as if she has all the answers and can ease my mind about the Blood Bond possibility.

“Yeah, I guess I have been more stressed out than usual,” I say, but again, there’s no way I can go into details.

She smiles more warmly, detecting my slightly diminished resistance towards her and says, “We’ll run a few tests of course to rule some things out, but at your age, being in High School and dealing with so many things at once, it sounds like you might be having some anxiety. All of your symptoms are classic signs of an anxiety attack, and though fainting doesn’t normally occur, it has and does happen at times with some people.”

I’ve been wincing since before she even finished the sentence about running tests and already my heart is starting to pound wildly in my chest.

“What kind of tests?” I say, but I know full well what kind and I’m sure the doctor already knows that my question really translates: Please tell me these tests don’t involve needles, which might result in me fainting right here on this table?

“We’ll draw some blood…” I DON’T REALLY HEAR HER ANYMORE; her voice sounds really far off, or muffled behind a door. “…but I promise that Nurse Jillian will be very gentle.”

Oh, is that her name? Well, I might not be awake by the time she rolls in here with the Tray of Doom anyway, so it doesn’t matter.

After the doctor goes into all of the more uncomfortable questions about my bathroom habits and menstrual cycle (this is also why I hate hospitals—I’d rather drink spoiled milk than answer these kinds of questions) and jots down several more notes, she stands up and places the clipboard on the counter behind her and then squirts some foamy antibacterial stuff from a can mounted on the wall into her hand. First she looks at my pupils and then in my ears and throat and then moves her fingertips around my neck and under my jaw to check for swollen lymph nodes. I’m guided to lay back flat on the table and she pushes around on my stomach.

When she’s done I lift back up and wait for phase three.

“The nurse will be in shortly,” she says so casually, without any regard for my feelings at all (I know I’m being ridiculous), “so just sit tight and we’ll get you all wrapped up and out of here in no time.” She washes her hands thoroughly in the sink right next to a cartoonish print-out of a pair of hands covered in a mound of frothy soap that reads: DID YOU WASH THEM? She walks casually out the door with the clipboard pressed gently against her side.

I need to breathe. Deep, calm breaths.

Trying to find anything to keep my mind off what’s going to come through that door any moment, I stare off at a poster of the circulatory system, and then at one of a heart (with a smiling, happy face) and all its parts and chambers and functions displayed with tiny side notes. I see a blood red trash bag hanging over the sides of a short metal can covered by a lid that opens with the press of a foot. And on the wall to my left sits a tan-colored needle disposal container with a black and red symbol that looks like something you see on the cover of a heavy metal album.