Althea and Oliver Read Online Free PDF

you wake up on your own, and I find you in the kitchen making sandwiches or eating ice cream until there’s nothing left. When you’re done, you just go back to sleep.”
    â€œHow did you get me to the doctor’s office?”
    â€œWith great difficulty,” says Nicky.
    â€œHow come I don’t remember any of this?”
    â€œI don’t know. You didn’t last time, either.”
    â€œWhat about work? Did you just not go to work for three weeks?” Oliver asks.
    â€œI set up a massage table in the spare room, saw a few clients here.”
    The sunlight makes Oliver’s mouth feel strangely metallic, like he’s biting down on a piece of tinfoil. He’s barely been awake for an hour, but already he’s anxious to the point of fatigue. Though this is his mother, his porch, his block, it all looks the same but wrong, like an elaborate set constructed to trick him into thinking he’s in the right place. It’s early April now, officially spring, and though he understands that it’s been three weeks since he’d fallen asleep in chem lab, it’s one thing to see the date on Nicky’s newspaper and another to truly accept that he’s misplaced twenty-one days as easily as a set of car keys. A strong breeze rolls over them like a wave before dissipating, setting the bamboo wind chimes in motion. He hates their weird clicking sound, which Althea can imitate perfectly when she’s in the mood to be irritating. Wind chimes are supposed to sound like church bells for your house, Oliver’s always said, not this eerie clacking that makes him think of the articulated skeleton hanging in the biology classroom. His headache pulsates grotesquely right above his eyebrows.
    The first time he got sick, it was more strange than scary. For two weeks he was ravished by sleep and fever—and then it was just gone. He had come to with the feeling that he had slept unsoundly. He knew he had had a long series of uninspired dreams that weren’t worth trying to recall, but also had the sense that he had spent more time in bed than his mother would normally allow. The one fragmented memory that remained was the image of Nicky sitting on his bed with her back to him, then turning abruptly to say, “Are you on drugs? If you are on drugs I will fucking kill you,” in the same exasperated tone of voice she used if he stood in front of the refrigerator for too long with the door open. And then he’d been subjected to spinal taps and MRIs and CAT scans, and after everything came back clean, the doctors had written it off as some kind of fluke. He’d missed midterms and the last two weeks of the soccer season, but catching up hadn’t been unmanageable, and he did his best to go on like the whole thing had never happened.
    The second time feels a little different. The idea of twice has some gravity, some weight to it, enough to frighten Nicky, he can tell. Having already been assured that it’s not a brain tumor or an aneurysm or anything that involves a lot of his cells rapidly multiplying, he’s not scared of the tests as much as what life will be like while they’re waiting for the results. And the more time he spends at the hospital, the more they’ll both start thinking of him as sick. He would be her sick child. She would be the mother of a sick child. It’s too miserable even to contemplate.
    Oliver’s what everyone calls a “smart kid,” the kind you show your math homework to so he can check the answers right before class starts. The grades come easily; even his extended absences can’t jeopardize his scholarship to Cape Fear Academy. He loves science the most. What sounds like philosophy—chaos theory and string theory, the ceaseless searching for the unified field theory that would, at last, happily marry relativity and quantum physics, hyperspace and dark matter and the universe’s fundamental grand