Should I Stay?

Chapter 20

Harry is gone.

He suddenly rushed out, calling to Nurse Ramirez that he'd forgotten something important and would be back as soon as he could.

He was already out the door when she told him that she was about to get off work. In fact, she just left, but not before making sure to inform the nurse who'd relieved Old Grumpy that "the young man with the skinny pants and curly hair'' is allowed to see me when he returns.

Not that it matters. Diana rules the school now. She has been marching the troops through here all morning.

After Gran, Gramps and Harry stopped by, it was Aunt Willow and Uncle Greg who visited. Then my cousins shuffled in. Diana's up to something, but whether it's trotting out loved ones to lobby on behalf of my continuing my earthly existence or whether she's simply bringing them in to say good-bye, I can't say.

Now it's Liam, Niall and Zayn's turn. Poor boys. they're looking like they'd slept in a Dumpster. Their hair was all over the place and it looks like they hadn't been sleeping for days. At first, the boys squints at me, as if I'm a bright, glaring light. But then it's like they adjusts to the light and decides that even though I may look like a zombie, even though there are tubes sticking out of every which orifice, even though there's blood on my thin blanket from where it's seeped through the bandages, I'm still Lucy and they're still Niall, Liam and Zayn. And what is that Lucy, Niall, Zayn and Liam like to do more than anything? Talk and joke around.

Liam and Zayn settles into the chair next to my bed, while Niall went to sit on my bed. "How are you doing?" Liam asks a little awkward.

I'm not sure how i feel. I'm exhausted, but at the same time Harry's visit has left me... I don't know what. Anxious. Awake, definitely awake. Though I couldn't feel it when he touched me, his presence stirred me up anyhow. I was just starting to feel grateful that he was here when he booked out of here like the devil was chasing him.

Harry has spent the last ten hours trying to get in to see me, and now that he finally succeeded, he left ten minutes after arriving. Maybe I scared him. Maybe he doesn't want to deal with me. After all, I spent the last day dreaming of him coming to me, and when he finally stumbbled into the ICU, if I had the strength, I would've run away.

''Well, you wouldn't believe the crazy night it has been,'' Niall says. Then they starts telling me about it. About Niall's hysterics, about how he lost it in front of my relatives, who were very gracious about the whole thing. The fight Zayn had outside the theater in front of a bunch of punks and hipsters. Schein at the curb, a group of guys in spiked leather and fluorescent hair cheered and high-fived them. They're telling me about Harry, his determination to get in to see me, how after he got kicked out of the ICU, he enlisted the help of his music friends, who were not at all the snobby scenesters they'd imagined them to be. Then Liam told me that a bona fide rock star had come to the hospital on my behalf.

Of course, I know almost everything that they are telling me, but there is no way that they'd know that. Besides, I like having them recount the day to me. I like how Niall, Liam and Zayn are talking to me normally, like Gran did earlier, just jabbering on, as if we were together on my porch, drinking coffee (or an iced caramel frappuccino in Liam's case) and catching up.

I don't know if once you die you remember things that happened to you when you were alive. It makes a certain logical sense that you wouldn't. That being dead will feel like before you were born, which is to say, a whole lot of nothingness. Except that for me, at least, my prebirth years aren't entirely blank.

Every now and again, Mom or Dad will be telling a story about something, about Dad catching his first salmon with Gramps, or Mom remembering the amazing Dead Moon concert she saw with Dad on their first date, and I'll have an overpowering déjà vu. Not just a sense that I've heard the story before, but that I've lived it. I can picture myself sitting on the riverbank as Dad pulls a hot-pink coho out of the water, even though Dad was all of twelve at the time. But sometimes the memories feel so real, so visceral, so personal, that I confuse them with my own.