Lakewood - Megan Giddings Page 0,53
to colors.
“What does that last one mean?” Lena asked.
“Bright colors might be painful to your eyes, but some subjects appear to have greater ability to differentiate between colors.”
Dr. Lisa paused and then continued. This was the fifth version of the drug and the odds of permanent health issues were lower than ever before. She attempted to joke about taking up sudoku, integrating more fish into people’s diets, but it turned into more of a ramble. Some of the symptoms were similar to Deziree’s: lying in bed every spring in pain, wading through migraine after migraine, getting lost in the grocery store aisles, believing for two days that Lena was a child who looked exactly like Lena, but was not her. They had never done this before: read out any possible side effects. Here, take this. Do that. And now, how are you feeling?
“That all describes me already,” Judy said.
Lena kept her eyes on the table while everyone laughed. When her grandmother was diagnosed, one of the first things she did was take Lena to a lawyer, getting everything set up so Lena could make medical decisions for her and for Deziree. They talked—though Lena wanted to be doing anything else—about all the things Lena might have to do, what both of them wanted to do. Her grandmother did not want to be in a coma longer than three days, Lena was to respect her when she said she didn’t want extraordinary measures taken. It was hard to know this when you were young, or if you lived a life where you weren’t regularly in pain, but she would rather die in two years than live terribly for five more.
Who, Lena wondered, would take care of her, would take care of Deziree, if all these things happened?
After work, Lena went to the library. She looked up the forms for universal power of medical attorney, printed them off the internet, and filled them out for herself so Tanya could make decisions for her if the worst happened. She puttered around for a few moments. Went to look at a display of Star Trek serializations. Flipped through some issues of The Lakewood Gazette. A local family designed a corn maze to welcome aliens. An unidentified body had been discovered in the woods. An older man gathered his things from one of the computer stations and left without logging off. Lena sat down quickly at his station and searched “pellets that taste like other food.” That only brought up a blog post about someone’s attempts to create long-lasting jawbreakers using food oils. Apparently, it was hard to find roast-beef-flavored oils. Searching “changing eye color” brought up color contacts. It was like giving in and scratching your mosquito bites to search the internet on a probably unmonitored computer.
“How do you break an NDA and not get fined?” she typed. The definitive answer was that it’s complicated and the instances would have to be extraordinary to avoid it.
Lena’s favorite professor from last semester had spoken frequently about his favorite sculptor. The sculptor’s partner had been very jealous, once breaking a bottle over another man’s head for flirting with the sculptor. The partner would monitor the sculptor’s phone, go through his letters, and rummage through his coat pockets looking for proof of other men. Why did the sculptor stay with him? Because sometimes people confuse attention with love. So, the sculptor created secret caches in all his works. He would leave notes in the unsold pieces, authorized the gallery to let his lovers touch and press gently on his sculptures’ feet or stomachs. The sculptor donated a statue to a park on the other side of his town. He would walk there and leave gifts and love letters in the hollowed-out leg.
Lena remembered this because it was romantic and titillating, and because it was one of the few times when college felt the way it was supposed to feel: aspirational. People rarely wore leggings to class. No one was on their phones. The professor was clearly enjoying getting to spend part of his day talking about art and the different ways to write and think about it. Now Lena wondered how she could find a way to hide something in plain sight. To have a way to share the truth, spread it like a cold.
The weird kid in her dorm had told Lena there was a whole forum devoted to figuring out if there was a secret mercenary and assassins organization operating freely in the United States.