“Kristen, you need to go get Sloan. Brandon’s had a stroke.”
I threw off my covers. “What? A stroke? What does that mean?”
I tumbled out of bed and stumbled around the room, grabbing my bra and jumping into leggings.
He paused. “He’s brain-dead. He’s not coming back from this. It’s over. Get Sloan.”
The line went dead.
I stood in the middle of my dark room. The phone stayed lit for a moment. When the screen went back to black, I was doused in pitch.
The velociraptor roared, and the ground shook as it lunged forward.
As I drove to Sloan’s, I had the surreal, almost out-of-body realization that I was about to tell my best friend the worst news of her life. That the moment she answered that door, I was going to break her heart and she would never be the same.
My altered state allowed me to process this in a compartmentalized way. I knew that I wouldn’t feel the painful moment when it happened, but that I’d put it into a little box and take it out and look at it often for the rest of my life.
* * *
I watched Sloan die inside that night.
They called it a catastrophic stroke. A blood clot moved from the wounds in his leg up to his brain. It had probably happened while Josh sat with him. It was silent and final, and there was nothing anyone could have done.
Josh was right. Brandon was gone.
Three days after the stroke, an ethics committee made up of Brandon’s doctors, an organization that coordinated organ donations, and a grief counselor called the family in for an 11:00 a.m. meeting at the hospital. I sat outside the conference room, bouncing my knee, waiting for Sloan to come out.
I hadn’t left her side once since the stroke. Every night I slept in the chair next to her by Brandon’s bedside. Only now he wasn’t healing in his coma.
He was brain-dead.
Josh hadn’t been back to the hospital since Brandon’s diagnosis. He wouldn’t answer my calls.
The shift was strange. Our text thread went from dozens of unanswered texts from him, begging me to talk to him, to dozens of unanswered texts from me, begging him to talk to me. I wanted to know he was okay.
His silence told me he wasn’t.
I wore his sweatshirt today. I’d never wear it when I knew he might see it. I didn’t want to encourage him. But based on his absence over the last three days, I didn’t think I had to worry. And I needed to feel him wrapped around my body today. I needed to smell him in the fabric.
I just needed him.
This meeting wasn’t going to be easy on Sloan. It was about the next steps.
The door to the conference room opened up, and Brandon’s mom came out, speaking to his dad in tearful Spanish.
Sloan walked out of the meeting behind them, and I led her immediately into an empty waiting room.
Sloan was a zombie. She’d died three days ago when Brandon did. The light was gone from her eyes. Her legs walked, her eyelids blinked, but she was vacant.
“What did they say?” I asked, sitting her down on one of the cushioned chairs next to me.
She spoke wearily, her eyes rimmed a permanent shade of red. “They say we need to take him off of life support. That his body is deteriorating.”
The wail of Brandon’s mom came down the hallway. It had become a sound we knew all too well. She broke down at random. Everyone did. Well, everyone except for me. I was void of emotion while my predator and I shared space. Instead of feeling pain at Sloan’s suffering, I spiraled further into my OCD. I slept less. I moved more. I dove deeper into my rituals.
And nothing helped.
Sloan didn’t react to the sound of grief down the hall. “His brain isn’t making hormones anymore or controlling any of his bodily functions. The medications he’s on to maintain his blood pressure and body temperature are damaging his organs. They said if we want to donate them, we have to do it soon.”
“Okay,” I said, pulling tissues from a box and shoving them into her hands. “When are they doing it?”
She spoke to the room, to someplace behind me. She didn’t look at me. “They’re not.”
I stared at her. “What do you mean they’re not?”
She blinked, her eyelids closing mechanically. “His parents don’t want to take him off life support. They’re praying for a miracle. They’re really religious. They think