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“Upgrade U” by Angela Renee Beyince, Shawn C. Carter, Willie James Clarke, Sean Garrett, Garrett R. Hamler, Beyoncé Gisselle
Knowles, Solange Knowles, Clarence Henry Reid, Makeba Riddick (Angela Beyince Music, B day Publishing, Carter Boys Music,
EMI April Music, EMI Blackwood Music, Inc., EMI Longitude Music, Hitco Music, Janice Combs Music, Solange MW Publishing,
Team S Dot Publishing, Yoga Flames Publishing). All rights reserved.
“La Vie En Rose” by Mack David, Edith Giovanna Gassion, Luis Guglielmo Guglielmi (Universal Polygram International
Publishing, Inc., Warner Bros, Inc. (Warner Bros Music Division)). All rights reserved.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens). All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-1-4231-7909-2
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Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twentyone
Chapter Twentytwo
Chapter Twentythree
Chapter Twentyfour
Chapter Twentyfive
Chapter Twentysix
Chapter Twentyseven
Chapter Twentyeight
Chapter Twentynine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirtyone
Chapter Thirtytwo
Chapter Thirtythree
Chapter Thirtyfour
Acknowledgments
To my brother Wyatt
Farewell, hello, farewell, hello.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
ost divers forget to see the space, the air. You focus on your
body—how to make it into a thin board, or curl it up like a piece
of spaghetti and flatten it back out. You lift off and you barely
have time to think before you hit the water.
But Bryce, she would never forget where she was going
when she was about to jump. She would never forget the small eternity between
the stone platform and the deep blue below.
“Bryce Graham,” reporters asked her, “only seventeen. What’s your
secret?”
She would usually say something easy, something written on an
inspirational T-shirt. “Concentration,” she would say. “Focus.” Things that
should be said into microphones. But never: “Fear, Ted. Fear.”
That day, Bryce was carried up the stairs by the noise of the crowd. They
yelled louder for her than for anyone else. This was her home, after all. Those
were people from her high school in the stands, though she didn’t know most of
them. The Tennessee fans wore little clothing and were red in the face, yelling
and yelling. The out-of-towners wore Olympic Trials T-shirts and fanned their
pale faces with programs. One of them had become as red as anyone in
Nashville, on account of the heat. He had gone to the concession stand for a
soda, a Coke in a sweating plastic bottle.
He watched from his spot at the back of the building, propping the exit door
open with his foot. He sipped his Coke, and a cicada landed on the bleachers.
The crowd went silent as Bryce crouched at the end of the platform, like a cicada
herself.
Bryce jumped. She was bending, coiled, and the insect rubbed its legs
together, calling out to any other cicada that might be nearby.
She was bending, coiled, and the man from out of town felt the breeze on
his face.
She was bending, coiled, in the small eternity between block and blue.
She was only seventeen. What was her secret?
Space, Bryce answered, but there was less than she thought, and her tight
twist was an inch longer than it should have been, and the inch happened to be
on the curve of her lovely head. Her skull jutted over the cement platform, and
the weight of her body went falling, falling into the empty Tennessee air.
If you asked Bryce’s mama how long was a cicada, she would answer,
“About one inch,” and if you asked her daddy, it’d be the same answer. Bryce
Graham’s sister, too, and her friends. Nashville people.
If you asked that man from out of town, he wouldn’t know, but he could
hear it calling out into the air, the moment before a plume of blood colored the
pool dark red.
eartbeat has been generally faster.”
Who said that? Match sound with image. Lights and metal
and movement. A woman’s hands untying something. Sounds but
no image. Try again.
“Get her records,” a voice said. “She’s coming—” Before the sound cut out
again, the light pooled, brighter and brighter.
This was a game Bryce played. How long would it take for the endless
exhaustion to set in? Sometimes she bothered to open her eyes, but it was
difficult enough just to remember that she had been around once, being and
talking. The very idea made her retreat back into the dark. It hurt to be alive.
But she had been playing sound-plus-image for a while now. Five days?
Five hours? Even if it was five minutes, the sensation was a strong one.
Someone’s breath was on Bryce’s face. “Get her parents on the phone.”
Bryce’s parents. She had heard their voices in the darkness, but she could
never make out their words. They had touched her shoulder, rubbed her
forehead. But Bryce was too tired. I can’t, she tried to say. I can’t move.
“Bryce.”
Bryce could tell by her tone the woman was trying to speak softly, but she
wanted to put her hands over her ears. Her fingers twitched at her sides. She
opened her eyes. Light flooded into her skull. Colors became shapes, shapes
became people.
The smells and sounds switched on like a machine. The acidy scent of
cleaner, mechanized humming, metal creaking. A gray-haired woman leaned
over her with a stethoscope, blocking the fluorescent lights.
She was awake.
“I’m hungry,” Bryce had breathed, though it was a pain to talk. The room was
silent, save for the beeping of machines and the slurping of liquid Jell-O from a
straw. She moved her tongue through the sweet substance, relearning the
motions of every swallow. The movements were blurry, but everything else
came at her with an edge. The hospital room was the beige color of pale skin and
came at her with an edge. The hospital room was the beige color of pale skin and
seemed to throb. Her mother sat near the bed in an electric-pink bathrobe. Her
father stood next to her mother, in his same old gold-and-black Vanderbilt sweat
suit, COACH emblazoned on the chest. Their faces erupted in teary smiles as her
gaze hit them.
It was all different. Her mother’s hair was shorter, for one. And her dad had
lost some weight. They had been waiting for a long time. What had happened?
“Bryce.” The voice from earlier, now softer, came from a short-haired
woman in a white coat. “My name is Dr. Warren. Do you know where you are?”
“Hospital,” Bryce said in a dull monotone that didn’t sound like her voice.
She cleared her throat. “Hospital,” Bryce repeated in a higher, lighter tone,
looking at her parents.
Dr. Warren kept writing on her clipboard. “Do you know what you are
recovering from?”
Bryce swallowed. Her throat felt like sand. She could do this. Push
yourself. “I was asleep.”
Dr. Warren nodded. “You were in a coma. You suffered serious head
trauma. In order to heal, your brain eliminated your consciousness for quite
some time.”
The dive, Bryce thought, the blinding crack coming back to her in a flash of
pain. The memory replayed itself again as Dr. Warren spoke, and for a strange
moment Bryce could see herself from the stands, a blur in a colorful swimsuit,
falling to the water.
“The good news is that your brain’s healing progress was not as absent or
slow as we had thought. We’ll do some more MRIs, but it looks like your
cognitive functions will continue to improve.”
“Why can’t I move?” Bryce asked. Beside her, the heart monitor began to
beep more quickly, as if warning her. As if her body knew something she did
not.
“Your recovery depends on how well your muscles return from extended
disuse,” Dr. Warren replied carefully.
Recovery. Her brain was foggy, but the word never meant much to her. She
avoided injury. For competitive athletes, there was could or could not. There was
no recover. She looked at her hands. They didn’t move much, but they looked
fine, a little pale and thin maybe.
“How long was I asleep?”
Dr. Warren looked at Bryce’s mother, her eyebrows raised in a silent
