Читать книгу Like Wings, Your Hands - Elizabeth Earley - Страница 15

The dark body living inside the despair could pull Marko in at any moment. When it did, it was like a blackout. Marko didn’t remember what had happened when he came to. Often, a stressful situation could trigger it. Sometimes at school, when things got to be particularly stressful or scary, Marko would slip off with the dark body and come back later. Often, this would happen in the middle of a class when a teacher was saying something Marko wasn’t following or when another student was staring at Marko the way the other kids who aren’t in wheelchairs sometimes do. Marko never made a decision to slip off, it just happened.

When he came back, the feeling was like waking up from a dream. He could remember scraps of what had happened but not all of it, and it would fade fast. Sometimes, he would have hit himself and screamed in the blackouts. But that stopped happening for a while and instead, when he woke up from these states, usually nothing would have happened and everyone would be just as they were before. He had just lost a bit of time. Until the day after his first trip in the dream bed, when something went very wrong.

A girl who sat next to Marko in class pushed his books off his desk and then laughed. Another kid behind Marko laughed, too. That was the last thing Marko remembered before he slipped off. In his dream, Marko watched the dark body float around the ceiling of the classroom while everyone in the class was frozen still, like a movie on pause. Darkness from the dark body started to drip like melted wax over everyone and everything in the classroom until it was all covered and encased. Marko himself held his breath until his lungs burned, and when he inhaled finally, the dark body came rushing thickly into his lungs and made him cough. When Marko came back from his dream, the girl was crying and someone was pulling his chair backward, out of the classroom. When he got to the principal’s office, the teacher parked his chair and sat in front of him.

The teacher said, “Hitting yourself is bad enough, Marko; I can’t always stop you from doing that. But I won’t let you hit the other children.” Marko was terribly confused. Had he hit someone? He wanted to ask but he couldn’t get his mouth to open or his voice to work.

“Marko,” the principal said, “why did you hit Amy?”

Marko was stunned. He looked at his hands, then back up at the principal, and then at his teacher. The two men were waiting for him to answer. When Marko tried to speak, he laughed. He didn’t mean to laugh, and nothing was funny, but he laughed anyway. Marko could see it was the wrong thing to do—the teacher didn’t look pleased at all—but he couldn’t stop laughing once he’d started.

“Call his parents,” the principal said and slammed his pen down on his desk. Marko laughed harder. He tried to stop but couldn’t. He covered his face with his hands to stifle the sound. He felt himself being wheeled out again and he looked through his fingers. The teacher parked him at the front of the office and walked away to talk to the man at the desk, the school secretary. Marko had been in the office before, the time he’d written with permanent marker on the teacher’s desk. He’d done it because one of the other boys in class, Ryan, dared him to. He’d had no choice. The teacher had asked Marko why he did it. Marko looked at Ryan, who was giving him a warning look. Marko had started laughing that time, too, and he went to the office where they called his parents. They were calling his parents again.