Chapter 1

"Bobby!"

Remember when your mother's voice called your name and it had that special tone in it that meant something serious was happening, and that you were part of it, but you didn't know whether that was a good thing or a bad thing yet?

That's the tone of voice my mother called my name in. It's that tone that makes you wonder if maybe you should sneak out and pretend you didn't hear her.

"Bobby!" she called again. There was an added note of impatience in her voice.

I decided that bright and chipper might deflect any anger that was headed my way.

"Yeah, Mom," I said happily. "What's up?"

"I need you to read to Heather."

I opened my mouth to complain, but she held up her hand to forestall me.

"I know!" she barked. "You've established beyond question that participating in the care of your sister is an onerous task that will practically kill you, but your Aunt Betty is having her baby and I need to be there to help her for a week or two. Your father is working on a big project that could mean a promotion for him, so you're just going to have to step up and deal with things. She's your sister, Bobby. She would do this for you if it were necessary."

"Yeah, right," I thought darkly, but I kept my mouth shut. My mother's tone of voice also suggested that this was not a negotiable situation.

"It's not the end of the world, Dear," she said, already selecting things to take with her to her sister's house. "We're reading her Moby Dick, and if you finish that, there are any number of other classics you can start on. It's only an hour or two a day, and it's summer. You have plenty of time to give a little to your sister."

Heather, as is already clear, is my sister. She's a year and a half older than I am, and if you look up pushy, snotty, prima donna sister in the dictionary, her picture will be there as the ultimate representative of that concept.

Well ... it would have been before the accident. When I was fourteen and she had just gotten her license, she went out and smashed up the family car. She was probably texting, eating a hamburger and putting on makeup at the same time she was driving breakneck speed somewhere she didn't really need to go.

Whatever the cause, though, the result was that she was in a coma, and had been in that coma for over six months. Other than the coma she was perfectly fine. When it became clear after a couple of months in the hospital that she wasn't going to wake up, they'd brought her home and she was in her own room. There were tubes stuck in her to feed her and for other stuff I didn't even want to think about, but other than looking kind of pale she looked like she was only sleeping or something.

I felt bad about all this, but not for the reasons you're probably thinking. That's because it had been kind of nice at first. I mean she wasn't screaming at me any more, or telling me ten times a day how stupid I was. There were no more slumber parties where she and her bitchy friends would throw open the bathroom door and run in screaming and giggling while I was in the shower, embarrassing me. Nobody called me 'pencil dick' any more.

But after a while it felt all wrong. I mean nobody was screaming at me any more, or telling me ten times a day how stupid I was. And there were no more slumber parties where she and all those other wet dream babes would throw open the bathroom door and run in screaming and giggling while I was in the shower. It might have been embarrassing, but all those smiles could be turned into something else when I was in bed, in the dark. I had a lot of really good jerk off sessions because of Heather and those girls.

After they brought her home I used to go in her room and look at her sometimes, but it was creepy, because no matter what I said, or called her, she never moved at all. I called her some pretty bad things too, because I knew I'd never get another chance. But it didn't make me feel better. In fact, it made me feel so bad that I quit going in there at all.

My parents had done all the research after the doctors delivered the prognosis, which was basically "She might come out of it, and she might not." They had glommed onto the idea that someone in a coma might not be able to interact with the world, but could still be aware of what's going on around them. So they embarked on this whole thing where they got what would have been her assignments from school, and read her the text books and pages of class notes that the teachers sent home. They went over all the math problems, explaining them to her and read her the newspaper every day and stuff like that. My parents were the only people I knew who could routinely answer all ten questions on Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?

And they read her books.

I didn't pay that much attention to them when they did all that stuff. I knew they had read her all sorts of books, from Tom Sawyer and Alice Through the Looking Glass, to books by Tom Clancy and John Grisham. As for me - I like comic books, and I had lots of time to read them because my big sister wasn't bothering me any more.

Mom's job was on the computer, so she could do almost all of it from anywhere she could take her laptop. As such she was the one who spent the most time with Heather, often eight or nine hours a day. She even bought a special chair to put in Heather's bedroom so she'd be comfortable as she sat and read and talked for hours.

Mom said Heather deserved to have summer vacation just like everybody else. Mom tried to believe that Heather would be okay, and that some day soon she'd just open her eyes, say "Where am I? What happened?" and then go back to being completely normal. Dad lasted about three months that way, but now I think he was just going through the motions to keep mom's dream alive.

So, at least for a week, I was going to have to take Mom's place, and read to Heather. Luckily it was summer, so there were no classes going on. I had enough of my own homework during the school year to try to take hers on too, especially since she was a year ahead of me. And, thanks to the politicians who care so much about kids they don't know, it wasn't legal for me to work a real job yet. My lawn mowing business gave me minimal spending money, and didn't take all that much time.

I walked in her room for the first time in a long time. It was quiet ... too quiet ... and spooky somehow.

Heather was lying there, like always, her brown hair fanned out on the pillow under her head. I thought of Sleeping Beauty for some reason, and studied her face.

I was shocked to realize she was beautiful. I mean she'd always been the model of growing girl, morphing into teenage even-more-girl, if you know what I mean. I had gotten to see her develop bumps on her chest, and other growing up stuff. Just because I was younger than her didn't mean I was either blind or stupid. I'll never forget one day going in the bathroom and finding the water in the stool stained bright red, obviously by blood, and what seemed like a lot of it. I'd yelled for Mom, because it was pretty clear that somebody had gotten hurt bad. She came in, looking flustered, and when she saw what I was concerned about, she relaxed.

"Your sister is having her first menstrual period," she said calmly. "I'll remind her not to leave the commode like that again."

Then she flushed the stool and left. Just like that.

Of course Heather found out I'd seen what I'd seen, and she apparently decided that was an unforgivable trespass, because she said that if I ever told anybody about what I'd seen she'd kill me in my sleep. She seemed to go out of her way to loathe me even more after that.

Huh. It just occurred to me that I did tell somebody else about that - all of you, just now - and there isn't a thing Heather can do about it. She's still lying there, looking like something out of a fairy tale.

What seems crazy is that, in a way, I wish she was screaming at me for telling that secret. Life's funny, huh?

Moby Dick was lying on the chair, ready to go. There was a book mark near the beginning, where Mom or Dad had left off the night before. Besides reading during the day, they always read some kind of story to her at bedtime, and told her to have sweet dreams and all that kind of stuff.

"Hey," I said in generic greeting to the comatose girl on the bed. I felt stupid immediately.

She just laid there, of course.

"I'm going to be reading to you for a week," I said. It was really uncomfortable, talking to somebody who looked kind of dead. It didn't seem like Heather somehow. And it was really quiet.

"You need a radio in here or something," I muttered. I picked up the book. I sat down and opened it.

I'd read the book in English class the year before, and I still remembered it. Whoever had been reading to her last had stopped at one of the places where Ishmael goes on and on about social justice or human nature or some crap like that. I read a few lines and all I could think of was that I was probably going to die of boredom. Right after my mom left Dad called and said he had to go on a trip, and wouldn't be back for three days. I thought about telling him about Mom going to Aunt Betty's, but I knew if I did, he'd cancel his trip and stay, and Mom had said what he was doing was important, so I kept it to myself. Still, I imagined him returning from his trip to find my dried out husk, holding this stupid book open. Heather would still be alive as all get out, but I'd be worm food, having expired for the lack of the will to live.

I closed the book and looked at Heather.

"Look, the deal is that this guy Ishmael signs on to this whaling ship. It's called the Perquat or something like that, and Captain Ahab is the captain. And he's got a hardon for this white whale named Moby Dick that sank his ship and bit his leg off, so he's out to kill this whale. And so they sail all over the ocean until they find Moby Dick and there's this big battle and they stick a dozen harpoons in him and he sinks two or three ships and in the end Captain Ahab puts the last harpoon in him, except the rope wraps around his neck and Moby Dick pulls him down into Davey Jones' Locker and the only one who survives is Ishmael."

She just lay there.

"So I'm not going to bore you with reading this crap," I said.

I got up and went to my room and picked a comic book at random. It was a Fantastic Four, and I took it back to her room. Then, for the next hour, I described each panel, and the speech bubbles, and I made sound effects noises and stuff like that. I even acted out some of the scenes. Not that she'd notice that, but I was having fun getting into it.

And the whole time she just laid there like a bump on a log.

When that comic book was finished I sat there looking at her. Nothing had changed. She still lay there with her eyes closed and her pale face was calm. It was eerie and something made me reach out and touch her, just to make sure she wasn't cold and dead. I was startled, because her skin felt really warm. I brushed her cheek with the back of my fingers.

"I wish you weren't like this," I said softly. "I mean you yell at me a lot and stuff ... but I kind of miss it. Not that I want you to yell at me again if you wake up."

I touched her hair. Mom had this thing she could put under Heather's head that let her wash her hair every so often. She'd done that recently and the hair was soft. For some reason I leaned over and took in a deep breath with my nose right in her hair. It smelled wonderful.

"So if you woke up it would be okay," I said into her hair. "I mean you could yell at me once in a while ... just not too much."

She lay there, and I felt stupid.

"Okay," I said, standing up. "I'm gonna go get something to eat, but I'll come back later. Maybe I'll read you a classic Aquaman I got at the comic shop last week. It's awesome."

I looked at her and thought of Sleeping Beauty again, which was stupid, because she got thrown around in an accident, instead of eating a poisoned apple, and she was in a coma instead of a magical sleep.

You know how you think about doing something, and you know it's stupid, but you do it anyway? I leaned over to kiss her on the cheek.

Yeah.

Then I took another deep breath of the smell of her hair.

"Your hair smells good," I said softly.

Having demolished a quarter of a loaf of bread, and almost emptied the peanut butter jar, I cleaned up the smears of grape jam I'd gotten on the counter. I was rubbing in time with what was playing on the radio, and singing the lyrics. I whipped up the paper towel and rolled it into a tube and then sang into it like it was a microphone as the song ended, whirling in a circle.

It occurred to me that Heather had missed a lot of top 40 hits. She'd always been singing and dancing around before the accident. It had been very distracting, because she had a nice body, really well developed, you know? Not that a brother is supposed to notice, but it was impossible not to when her boobs were shaking all over the place while she capered around in her PJs. I remember one time she was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, brushing her hair with the hundred strokes she did every night. She could have done it in her bedroom, because she had this big mirror in there, but she always did it in the bathroom, and that meant I couldn't take a shower or pee or anything until she was done. So I was standing there, trying to be a pest to get her out and she was taking her sweet time. She had her chest stuck out and I realized I could see the bumps of her nipples pushing through the material of her PJs. Suddenly I wasn't in such a hurry any more. Of course I got a hardon, which horrified me. I mean she was my sister ... and a bitch to boot!

But thinking of that made me think of her humming some song while she was brushing her hair, and how she'd missed all that music while she was unconscious.

I went to my room and got my Ipod. I did regular downloads from I-tunes whenever I heard something I liked, and that way I didn't have to listen to commercials all the time. I thought about just putting the headphones on her, but I couldn't tell her about the songs or who was singing them if I did that. So instead I made up a CD of selected tunes and took it to her room and put it in her computer. I turned on the speakers and adjusted the volume.

Then I commenced to act like what I thought a DJ would act like. I'd tell her what song was coming up, and who was singing it, and if I knew any tidbits about his or her life, like you sometimes see on the cover of The National Enquirer and like that. I didn't actually know if any of them had hit the charts, or what level they'd gone to, so I just made that part up, starting at "number forty on the hit parade." Around number thirty-five I realized I had a problem, because I could only get like 20 songs on the CD. That was stupid, because I put the things on it I liked the most, which meant when I made another one I'd be making the top 20 songs the ones I didn't like as much. But she was unconscious, and would never know the difference, so what the heck.

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