Moonface Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’ll show you how “brave” I am. Give me the chance to open the door and run away from this whole disease, never have to deal with it again, and I’ll show you I’m made of nothing but fast feet. I’m on automatic pilot. I’m reading the lines off the script and making the appropriate facial expressions.
    But my brother? I didn’t know what was keeping him there. He could have left any time he wanted and told everyone that he just couldn’t do it, and no one would have hated him for it. They would’ve thanked him for trying.
    Once, when I was in kindergarten, I rode the bus with my brother and his classmates, but he forbade me from talking to him. The girls in my grade sat in the back while he and his friends sat in the front. Only once do I remember him talking to any of us. There was one Korean girl, Jae-Bok, who had taken my finger puppet right off my pinky.
    â€œToo slow!” she said and stuck out her tongue before stuffing the puppet into her jeans.
    â€œNot fair!” I said. “Give it to me!” I must have said it loudly enough for my brother to hear because—bam! —just like that, an imaginary cape hovering behind his shoulders, he turned around in his green vinyl bus seat and said, “What happened?”
    â€œJae-Bok took my Piggy Puppet!”
    â€œSo!” she said, playing tough with my brother.
    I wanted him to hit her, smack her in her place. But, foreshadowing the wit and insult comedy he will master in later years, my brother said, “Jae-Bok, you’re a thief! You’re a stealer! You’re a Pittsburgh Stealer!” At the time, I hadn’t caught how clever this was, how my brother linked up Jae-Bok’s crime to a football team’s mascot, especially since we weren’t yet living in Pittsburgh.
    But everyone else on the bus got it and hummed “ooooh,” shaming Jae-Bok into returning the Piggy Puppet to me.
    An orderly and my father came down into the white room with Joel in a gurney between them. My dad came over to kiss me on the forehead and quickly made an exit. “Don’t be scared,” he said.
    Our stretchers were lined up along each side of the stark white hallway. Between us, nurses and orderlies shuffled by, flinging open the operating room door as they moved in and out. My brother, too, was clothed in white and had an IV running from his hand. I could tell by the flutter of his eyelids that the anesthesia was just starting to work.
    I held my hand over the side of my waist where they would put in the new kidney, where they would transplant his organ into my body. There was an emptiness there now, like skin stretched over bone with a hollow space underneath. I tapped on it impatiently. I watched a nurse stand beside me, turning the pages in my chart. My eyes followed an orderly who came down the hall and repositioned my gurney so I was closer to the wall and out of the way of traffic. He tugged on my blanket to cover my exposed foot.
    The double doors swung open one more time, and inside the room ahead, trays with equipment were rolled from this side to that. One nurse called out directions and another one adjusted the tube of my IV. I looked at my brother on his narrow gurney. He was dozing in and out of sleep. I felt my pulse, the tremble of my skin. The lights from the other side of the double doors seemed brighter and stronger than they were minutes ago. They seemed to come right over my brother, over his long white figure, his outstretched arms, his long legs. They illuminated his entire body.
    Three weeks after the transplant, everyone was finally able to rest. My daily blood tests read that my brother’s kidney was working, that my body wasn’t rejecting it. I thought about how, before long, I would have to go back to Baltimore for school.
    Friends and family called to ask how I felt. I didn’t know how to tell them without jumping out of my seat. I felt the blood