Shades of Simon Gray Read Online Free PDF Page B

overweight, that the size ten jeans she’d bought a few months ago were getting difficult to zip up, but Prendergast’sgrunting made her feel like a whale. She shoved him away. “I’m fine,” she said, scrambling to her feet.
    Mr. Prendergast had already called Clyde Zukowski, the custodian, who showed up with a bucket of disinfectant and a mop. He scratched the white stubble on his pockmarked face and glared at Liz as if she were Typhoid Mary, carrying some insidious disease that might wipe out the entire school population if he didn’t get this mess cleaned up fast.
    Before the first-period bell rang, Mr. Prendergast had written Liz a hall pass, handed her her backpack, and sent her off to the nurse. But Liz walked right past the door of the nurse’s room, ducked below the glass window of the main office so Angela Beckett, the principal’s administrative assistant, couldn’t see her, and slipped out the front door of the school. She was going to the hospital. And she was going to pull Simon out of this coma if it took every last ounce of will she had.

    The clock above the waiting room door ticked toward eight-thirty. If she had been in school that morning, which wasn’t going to happen, Courtney Gray would have been facing a history test. This was the only good thing that could be said for the moment. She was here, in the hospital, and would not be sweating bullets over Mr. Meehan’s exam in first period.
    Her father was in the intensive care unit with Simon. She and her father had been at the hospital since twelve-thirty in the morning, after driving through a nightmarishplague of peepers until they reached the outskirts of town, where suddenly, miraculously, the roads were clear again. The flood of frogs, their incessant chirping, like an onslaught of half-crazed, half-starved baby chicks, had made the journey to the hospital seem all the more surreal. Still, she would have traded this real world, where her brother lay broken and bruised, for that unreal world, frogs and all, in a heartbeat.
    Standing by the foot of his bed, Courtney had stared down at her brother’s battered face. Lips that didn’t twitch, eyelids that never fluttered. A bruised, swollen face. A body full of tubes. Clear plastic hoses of various sizes running up his nose, into his mouth, and into his arm, all hooked up to an array of intimidating machines: a respirator to keep him breathing, a monitor with its colored lines bleeping across the screen to let everyone know Simon was still among the living—although barely—and bags of dripping fluids that hung on the IV pole. She was allowed only ten minutes with him, although she had left the room before her visiting time was up, left because she couldn’t stand it another minute. She had headed straight for the waiting room around the corner from the entrance to the intensive care unit.
    There were two waiting rooms, side by side. In the larger room were a TV and a table with a coffee machine. Courtney would have preferred this to the other room, which was not much bigger than a walk-in closet and held only six chairs. But a man and two boys were in the larger room, watching cartoons. She was in no mood for the Road Runner.
    She had tried the main waiting room across from the cafeteria. It was large and bright, but the huge sprawling palms reminded her of something out of
Little Shop of Horrors
, and to make matters worse, a woman with three small children was leading her kids in some song-and-dance routine. Courtney thought if she heard the woman sing, “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands,” one more time, she’d have to swat her with a rolled-up magazine.
    In desperation, she had returned to the cramped, cheerless room with six chairs, all upholstered in a faded beige fabric and soiled with stains.
    Someone was paging Dr. Greenberg. The woman’s voice echoed over the PA system, rumbled like a bowling ball down the hallway. Courtney held her breath. Dr. Greenberg was