Somebody Up There Hates You Read Online Free PDF Page B

said he wanted to cheer me up. And he kept on showing up, on and off, ever after. Always brought some forbidden present: green slime in a tube, Fritos when I wasn’t allowed to eat even Jell-O, magazines with bare-chested babes on the cover. Once, an entire badminton set—like anyone was going to let me set up the net by the nurses’ station and belt birdies all over the hallway. Mom always told him to get lost, and she swore she didn’t know how he found out where we were, said she sure as shit didn’t tell him, but she also always had a smile on her face and she always hugged him, hard, before smacking him upside the head and calling him the world’s biggest jerk.
    Now, here in the steamed-up shower room, everything seems all backward. Because when Uncle Phil does his “your humble servant” thing and gets on his knees in front of me and is damn near kissing my feet, I get the whole view of his little bald spot—and right then, I get something: I know he doesn’t know it’s there. He hasn’t got a clue. It’s one of those stealth baldnesses, the kind that you can’t see yourself without two mirrors, so you live on in happy ignorance unless a mean girlfriend or barber points it out. And somehow, I figure that makes us sort of even: me all puny and sick, and him getting old and bald and not even realizing it. Because I won’t ever have to go through that, will I? Once, I made a list of all the things I won’t have to worry about—getting a job, having ungrateful kids, divorce, wisdom teeth, cholesterol—and now I can add potbelly and comb-overs, and in its own weird way, that’s cool with me.
    Edward is looking on in what I hope is amusement, but he does have work to do and he can’t hang with us all day. “Hey, man,” he says to Phil. “We don’t usually welcome visitors in the shower. You want to wait in the lounge until King Richard here is robed and ready to receive callers?”
    And Phil, who can really get into a scenario, backs all the way out the door, bowing and sweeping his pretend hat across the floor and tripping all over his feet. “Verily, my liege lord,” he says. “Anon.”
    When the door swings shut behind him, I feel like Edward deserves an explanation, and I try to think of how to explain Phil, but it doesn’t matter. Because Edward just starts pulling a clean T-shirt over my head and says, “Maybe you want to wear jeans today? Instead of your usual granny pants?” He holds up the ratty pair of gray sweats I usually put on because who cares what covers your ass when your ass sits in a wheelchair or lies in bed all day? And I nod and he goes off to fetch a pair of clean jeans from my room. I mean, he got it, right off, that I want to look, like, human and normal for Uncle Phil. Really, Edward’s a prince among nurses, and if I had my way, they’d double his pay.
    When he gets back and we’ve wrestled my sorry self into my jeans, I actually take a minute to look into the shower room mirror. Don’t usually bother but, I don’t know, I’d kind of like to look okay today. And, dressed, I look like a skinny bald scarecrow, but that’s not really so bad. Short-to-the-point-of-nothing hair is sort of in style, and everybody’s jeans are three sizes too big, so that’s okay. Granted, my face is not a sight for sissies. No eyelashes, skin like chalk dust. No problemo. I’m feeling okay, all kind of buzzed, full of energy. Edward stands over my shoulder while I look, trying to reach down and rebandage my hand. But I hold it up to the mirror and say, “Hey. Leave it alone, okay? It looks cool. Tough, right?” The knuckles are all blue and there’s an impressive mess of half-open cuts all along there, kind of oozy and gross. And actually, the bruising runs right up to my arm, and there’s a very flashy blackish sort of zigzag going up from