I woke up to pounding. Not my heart against my ribs this time, but a fist on the door. “Open up, Carter!” bellowed a voice that I quickly recognized as AJ’s.
Shit, I thought, scrambling out of bed.
“Crap, we overslept, didn’t we?” I heard Cary say. I looked back, and she was sitting up on her side of the bed, squinting at the clock. Checkout time was eleven, and it was five minutes past. “We should have set an alarm…”
“Yeah, it’s not like we had anything else to think about last night,” I replied sarcastically, grabbing a t-shirt from the heap of clothes overflowing out of my open suitcase. I pulled it on over my head and looked down to make sure my port was hidden.
AJ was still banging on the door. “Yo, Nick!” he shouted again. I bet half the hotel could hear him. If he wasn’t careful, there’d be a horde of fans knocking on my door, too.
“Coming!” I called on my way to get the door. I undid the lock and opened it to find not only AJ, but Brian and Howie standing there, too. Uh oh. Somehow, I already knew this wasn’t just about missing checkout time. “Morning… sorry… overslept,” I apologized quickly, before they could say anything.
AJ shoved his palm into my chest and pushed me backward as he barreled into the room. He didn’t push me hard, but I winced; my chest was still sore from getting zapped.
“What the fuck, dude?” I complained, glaring at him. I was hurt and confused. In the old days, when Kevin was in the group, I might have gotten crap for being five minutes late, but not now. And definitely not from AJ. Things were a lot more chill without Kevin around, which was how I knew there was something else going on. What’d I do now? I wondered. There was no way they could know about what had happened last night… could they?
“Where were you last night?” AJ demanded. He was glaring back at me. Brian and Howie stood on either side of him, not quite glaring, but still looking pretty serious.
I swallowed hard. Well, shit, I thought. Maybe they do know. But then, maybe they didn’t. How could they? They probably just knew Cary and I had been out really late, and I was going to get a lecture about too much partying. Well, okay. I could take that. “Me and Cary hit a couple of clubs,” I said, as casually as I could. “We were out pretty late. Why?”
AJ’s eyes narrowed. Brian and Howie looked at each other, but apparently they’d elected AJ to do the talking. “Clubs?” he repeated. “Not a hospital?”
Fuck! my mind screamed. Fuck, fuckity fuck-fuck-fuck! How did he know?? I just stared at him, like a deer caught in headlights, without a clue as to what I was going to say.
Brian spoke up. “Some fans saw you guys leave the hotel last night. They got into a cab and followed you… to the emergency room. There are pictures online; fans have been chirping at me and Leighanne like crazy, asking what the emergency was.”
“The rumor is it was an overdose,” AJ added flatly. His dark eyes fixed me with a stare so hard, I finally had to look away. “Look at me, Nick,” he snapped, as soon as I did. “Look me straight in the eye and tell me the truth. Are you using again?”
God, he sounded a hell of a lot like Kevin. He must have picked up some tips from when Kevin was the one accusing him of this same shit. And Kevin had been right, of course. Kevin was always right. But AJ was dead wrong about me. So I looked him right in the eye and answered, “No. I’m not.”
“Then what happened last night, Nick?” Howie jumped in. “Why were you at the hospital?” Unlike the others, he actually sounded concerned about me, not just about what the fans were saying. I was grateful for that, but I still didn’t know what to say.
“He did overdose,” Cary’s voice drifted over from the bed. My head whipped around to stare at her. What the fuck was she doing, throwing me under the bus? “Not on drugs, though,” she added, pulling the covers up higher around herself. “Just caffeine.”
My heart was thumping hard in my chest, but not like last night; it had already started to slow down again on its own, as I realized what she was doing. She was being honest… in my own half-truth kind of way… and in doing so, she was also guaranteeing I’d have to go along with her little deal. If the guys knew how bad all that caffeine had messed me up, they’d make sure I wasn’t pounding down Red Bulls before the show anymore, too. She was pretty clever, that Cary.
“Caffeine?”
I turned back to the guys; they were all looking at the two of us in disbelief, their eyebrows raised. I felt my face flush. “Yeah… for real. It’s stupid, but I kinda drank too much Red Bull before the show last night, to get rid of my hangover, and it fucked me up. My heart was, like, racing and wouldn’t stop, and it kinda freaked me out, so Cary took me to get checked out.”
I left it off there, not wanting to get into all the gory details. It was bad enough having to go through it once; I didn’t want to relive it right then, and I also didn’t want to shock the guys. (Get it? Shock?) Brian was already frowning, while Howie’s eyes had gotten wide. AJ was still staring at me like he couldn’t decide whether to believe me or not. He said, “Jesus, how much caffeine do you need to drink to fuckin’ OD on it?”
Brian asked, “Never mind that. Are you okay, Nick?”
“Yeah,” I said quickly, “I’m good.” I knew my cardiomyopathy diagnosis bothered Brian. It made me feel guilty because, while he’d been born with his heart condition, I had caused mine. He had lived with a defective heart for twenty-two years before getting it fixed, and in just a fraction of that time, I’d taken my perfectly healthy heart and fucked it up. Whether he knew it or not, Brian had been a big motivation for me to get myself back into shape; I didn’t want to let him down again. I wanted everything to be “good.” I just wished it actually was.
“They gave him some fluids and medication to slow his heart down,” Cary explained. “He was dehydrated, too, and that made it worse. I told him he needs to start drinking more water and lay off the caffeine.” She gave me a stern look.
“Jeez, Nicky,” said Howie. “That’s just common sense. You need to start taking better care of yourself.”
Now he sounded like Kevin, too, but that was typical. They were the two fitness freaks in the group. And Howie had done his best to fill Kevin’s shoes as our unspoken leader the last few years, so I wasn’t surprised to be getting a lecture from him. He was still a lot more laidback about it than Kevin, so it wasn’t that bad. I knew I deserved it, anyway.
“Yeah, I know,” I muttered. “I’m gonna.”
AJ was still eyeing me, like he didn’t quite believe me. It was weird that, out of the three of them, he was the one who was onto me. Okay, so Howie can be pretty clueless, but Brian could always read me like a book. Then again, Brian was an honest guy and expected honesty in return. AJ, on the other hand, had enough experience in deception to recognize a liar when he saw one. He had been there, on the other side of it, lying his way through his addiction, trying to cover up how bad it really was. As a result, he knew when he was being lied to.
“You know what else makes your heart race?” he asked slowly.
No one said anything. He was staring at me, but his tone made it sound more like a rhetorical question. Sure enough, he answered it himself.
“Cocaine.”
Brian and Howie both looked at him, then at me. Howie’s eyes were wide again; Brian’s were narrow. Quickly, I shook my head in response to their silent questioning. “I’m not… I told you, I’m not doing drugs again.”
“No? Then why have you been acting so weird lately? Moody… secretive… never wanting to do anything with the three of us…”
“That’s not true,” I argued, but I knew it was. How many times had I blown them off, turned down a club or even a movie because I was doing chemo or feeling like shit because of it? It was a lot, maybe more than I realized. I liked it better when they thought it was Cary’s fault, for being some kind of gold-digging sex goddess.
“And have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately?” AJ ranted on, ignoring me. “You look like shit, dude. You’re starting to look fuckin’ manorexic.”
“Fuck you,” I spat, really annoyed now. “I thought you guys were proud of me for losing all that weight. Now you’re gonna turn it against me?”
“If you’re doing blow again to keep the weight off, then damn straight we are,” AJ shot back. Brian and Howie kept quiet; they weren’t accusing me out loud, but they weren’t trying to stop AJ from attacking me, either.
“I’m not doing blow!” I shouted, my heart beating like a bass drum in my chest. “And you, of all people, AJ, have no right to give me shit about that. We all know you’ve been off the wagon all year, yet no one’s accusing you of doing drugs.”
I expected that one to burn, but AJ didn’t even seem fazed. He was staring at me. “If you’re not snorting coke, then why’s your nose bleeding?”
“Huh?” I reached up to my nostrils and felt moisture there. My fingertips came away bloody. I looked down just in time to see a drop of bright red splat onto the carpet at my feet. “Shit,” I said, turning away from the guys. I left them standing just inside the door and hurried into the bathroom. I turned on the lights; there were still towels and clothes all over the place from my little incident that night before. I grabbed a wad of toilet paper, then went out to the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. My nose was bleeding pretty good; in no time, the toilet paper was soaked. Where did that come from? I wondered. I never got nosebleeds.
“I’ll take care of him,” I heard Cary tell the guys. “We’ll be down in a few minutes. Sorry for being late.”
She said it so sweetly, not even AJ was going to keep arguing with her, and in a matter of seconds, I heard the door open and close again. I admired her for the subtle way she’d gotten rid of the guys for me. “Thanks,” I said, when she appeared behind me in the mirror.
“Let me see,” was all she said back, turning me towards her.
“I dunno what started this…” My voice was muffled by the wad of toilet paper I was holding up to my nose.
“Low platelets,” she replied, without missing a beat. “That’s the stuff that makes your blood clot. I knew you should have had that transfusion last night…”
“Oh.” Nick fucks up again, I thought, annoyed.
She grabbed a clean washcloth from the shelf above the sink and said, “Come here.” She led me back out into the main room and sat me down in one of the armchairs. “Lean forward,” she advised. “Don’t tip your head back, or the blood will just run down your throat.” Then she handed me the washcloth and said, “Pinch the bridge of your nose. You need to keep pressure on it for at least ten minutes. If the bleeding doesn’t stop, then we might have to go back to the hospital.”
I groaned, and more blood squirted out of my nose, into the washcloth. I sat there for over fifteen minutes, squeezing my nose and feeling like a loser, while Cary picked up the room and repacked my suitcase. “You can always blame it on dry air,” she said, folding the button-down shirt she’d dressed me in the night before, “you know, from the air conditioning. Unless you want to just tell them the truth, so they don’t think you’re snorting cocaine.” She gave me an incredulous look, like she couldn’t believe I would be okay with them thinking that.
But I wasn’t okay with it. I hated that AJ thought I was into drugs again, after I’d worked so hard to get clean. I had slipped up a few times, but not recently, and definitely not since my cancer diagnosis. It hurt that he didn’t believe me – and from the looks on their faces, neither did Brian or Howie, even though they wanted to. But what else were they supposed to think? Even if I didn’t want to admit it, I could see why they’d jumped to the conclusion of coke.
“You should have told them, Nick,” Cary went on, adding the folded shirt to the neat stack she’d made in my suitcase. “That was the perfect opportunity.”
All I could do was nod and say, “I know.”
***
