Safe with Me: A Novel

“I don’t want you to come inside,” I tell my mom, who has been hovering around me all morning like I’m two years old and might be in need of a diaper change. “I can find my classes, okay? I’ll be fine.”

It’s a slightly overcast September day, and we are sitting in the parking lot of Eastside Prep, watching the other kids mill around the entrance to the school, talking and laughing and generally looking more at ease than I’ve probably ever felt in my life. The girls all seem impossibly pretty to me, with long torsos and hip-hugging jeans, and the boys swagger with their backpacks slung over one shoulder, most of them with wannabe-surfer haircuts, their bangs too long over their eyes. I glance down at the black leggings and tan baggy sweater I decided to wear and suddenly wish I’d made a different choice. I’ve lived in pajamas and sweatpants for the last eight years, so I pretty much have the fashion sense of a third grader. And even though I’m telling my mother I’ll be just fine, I’m positive I’ll never fit in with these people. Life is not a John Hughes movie, where the nerdy, weird girl ends up dating the captain of the football team. Life is me, sitting alone at a table in the lunchroom, wishing I could disappear.

Mom shifts her body to face me. “Are you sure? You remember the school nurse’s name?”

“Mrs. Taylor,” I say with a sigh. “And I will check in with her first thing so we can go over my med schedule.” Mom had visited the school last week, bringing the nurse a stockpile of all my prescriptions and strict instructions to call her if I show even a hint of a fever.

“You remembered your hand sanitizer, right? You need to use it before and after every class and after you’ve been in the bathroom. Even after you wash your hands.”

“God, Mom. Yes, I remembered it. You reminded me to put it in my bag, like, fifty-three times this morning.” Even though I am doing really well with my new liver, I’m still at a higher risk for infection from simple things like a head cold or the flu. If my mom had her way, I’d probably be walking around in a full-on hazmat suit. I glance over at her—she’s dressed casually in a swishy, knee-length, pale green skirt and snug white T-shirt—and I wonder if I’ll ever have her looks. Her hair is always the perfect buttery blond shade with lighter stripes around her face; her skin is clear, her body is lean, spray-tanned, and strong. She looks a little like Jennifer Aniston, which I know my father likes to brag about to his friends, but sometimes it makes me wonder if I was adopted.

Grabbing my backpack from the floor, I lean over and give her a quick kiss on the cheek. “I’ll be fine. I promise. I’ll text you at lunch and let you know how it’s going, okay?”

“Okay,” she says with a nervous smile. “I love you, honey. You’re going to do great.”

“Thanks,” I say and have to fight off the tickle of imminent tears in my throat. I climb out of the car and make my way down the sidewalk that leads to the front steps of the school. I look up at the imposing building, which my father said used to be a monastery. The face of it looks like a church, with Gothic arches and intricate stained-glass windows. Last night, I looked up the floor plan online, so I would know how to get to the office and my classrooms. I signed up for AP English and trigonometry, world history, psychology, Spanish, and an advanced computer sciences class. Luckily, I get a free pass from PE, since there’s too much danger of being hit in the gut by a stray basketball or jabbed by an elbow.

A wave of other students practically carries me down the long hallway to the office, where I know the nurse is waiting for me. The walls are covered with posters: IF YOU BELIEVE IT, YOU CAN BE IT! and THE ONLY WAY PAST IS THROUGH! The words are set against impressive nature scenes, waterfalls and deep canyons, and are meant to be inspirational, but because they remind me of the lab at the hospital, they end up irritating me instead. There are a few other kids standing at the desk, so I get in line behind a girl with thick, cascading red curls and a purple checkered book bag slung over her shoulder. She turns around when my backpack accidentally brushes against her.

“Oh, sorry,” I say. Her face is peppered with tiny freckles, and I think she’d be pretty in a girl-next-door kind of way if she weren’t wearing so much makeup. Her eyes are thickly lined in black and her lips are sticky with bright pink gloss. She has on jeans and a long, tight green T-shirt with the word Aéropostale scrawled in sparkling white letters across her chest.

“No worries.” She looks me over. “You new?” I nod, and she snaps her watermelon gum—I can smell it—before speaking again. “Cool. I’m Hailey.”

“I’m Maddie.” She seems friendly enough. Maybe this won’t be as hard as I thought.

“Where’d you transfer from?”

“Um, I’ve sort of been homeschooled by a tutor for a while. Since fourth grade, actually.”

“Really? Are your parents like, way religious or something?”

I feel my face flame and I clear my throat. “No. Not at all. I just . . . well, I’ve been sick a lot, like in the hospital so much that it was just easier to have a tutor so I wouldn’t fall behind. That’s all. But I’m better now, so I’m . . . here.”

Hailey raises an eyebrow and leans away from me the tiniest bit, but enough for me to notice. “Sick with what?” From the look on her face, it’s clear she’s worried I’m contagious, that simply standing next to me puts her at some kind of risk.

“I had a bad liver,” I say. “But I got a new one last year.” I’m not prepared for her questions; the truth tumbles out of me before I can stop it.

“O . . . M . . . G.” She spells the letters out with a notable pause after each, then widens her eyes, as though I just told her I had a third leg or an extra breast. “That’s kind of creepy . . . isn’t it?”

“Not really.” I shrug, and attempt to appear confident, when I actually sort of agree with her. It is creepy, if I let myself think about it too long, the fact that I’m carrying around another person’s organ inside my body. That a twelve-year-old girl had to die to save my life. I wonder about her sometimes, what she was like, if I would have wanted to be her friend. I wonder how her parents are doing, if part of them hates me for living when their child is dead. The transplant coordinator told me I could write them a thank-you letter—anonymous, of course—but when I asked my mom if I could, she told me my dad said no.

“Why not?” I asked, and she shook her head.

“Your dad just wants to protect us, honey,” Mom explained. “He’s worried if the donor family found out who we are, they might ask for money.”

“They wouldn’t do that,” I said, not actually knowing if this was true, but I didn’t think that the kind of people who would take their daughter off life support in order to save other lives would also be the kind of people to turn around and blackmail us after the fact.

“You never know,” Mom said with a small shrug. “I know it’s hard. I want to reach out to the mother of the donor, especially. Tell her how grateful I am for what she did for us. But we have to respect your dad’s wishes, okay?”

I could tell that she thought it was crappy of Dad to not let us write to the family, too, but the truth is, I haven’t been able to figure out what I’d say even if I could. Anything I come up with in my head sounds cheesy or I’m sure would make them feel worse than they probably already do. I feel pretty guilty, actually, knowing that I got to live when their daughter died, and I wonder if they’d even like me, if they’d wish someone else had been saved. It’s a weird sort of pressure, feeling like I have to live up to a memory of a person I didn’t even know. It’s hard to feel worthy of this kind of gift. I mean, really, how do you find words to thank someone for saving your life?

Hailey’s voice pops me out of my thoughts. “Is that why your hair looks like that?” She wrinkles up her pert little nose. My face floods red and I run my hand over my head, wishing I could melt right into the floor. One of the side effects of my meds is thinning hair; it’s still long, but while I’d used a thickening shampoo and tried to tease it enough to make it look normal, apparently, I’d failed. Before I can come up with a proper retort, a woman sticks her head out of another office and calls my name. The nurse, I assume, who is expecting me.

“See you later,” I mumble. What a bitch. If I’d been smart, I would have come up with a lie about moving or transferring from another high school and not said a word about the transplant. I wonder how long it will take for the whole school to hear all about the weird new stranger in their midst.

I make it through my meeting with Mrs. Taylor, working out a schedule for me to come to her office two times a day—once after third period and once after lunch—so I can take my pills. I sit through homeroom/AP English, somewhat slumped down in my seat, grateful that for the most part, everyone seems to be ignoring me. A few kids give me curious looks, a few others say hello, but that’s it. The English teacher, Mr. Preston, assigns us To Kill a Mockingbird, which I’ve already read three times, so I tune out for the rest of the class. I wonder what Dirk (which he told me was his actual first name, chosen by his parents as a hybrid of the name of their favorite actor, Kirk Douglas) is doing right now. We chatted back and forth quite a bit over the last month, both inside the game with our avatars and on email and instant messaging. He sent me a picture of what he looks like in real life—kind of short, but muscular with a thick, wrestler’s build and blond hair. He wears glasses, but they’re the cool, funky kind, and he is definitely cute enough to date a girl way prettier than me. I sent him a head shot of “Sierra,” the same profile picture I use on Facebook, holding my breath as I waited for his response.

“Wow,” he wrote in his email. “You’re hot and you like video games? How is that possible?”

“It’s not, actually,” I probably should have said, and sent him a picture of what I really look like. But then he’d know I’m only sixteen and he wouldn’t want to hang out with me. I didn’t think it was that much of a big deal, lying to him. We’re playing in a fantasy world . . . and he is my fantasy.

The bell rings and I’m forced to stop thinking about Dirk. I maneuver my way through the crowded hallway and try to find my locker. I’m standing off to the side, attempting to peek around a group of kids standing in front of what I think is probably number 387, when a boy next to me looks over my shoulder at the piece of paper I’m holding.

“You want the next row down,” he says, and I whip around to face him. He’s taller than me, with brown hair that hangs a little too long over his blue eyes, and wears a black-and-white plaid shirt with his jeans.

“Oh,” I say. “Okay. Thanks.”

“You new?”

I nod, and he smiles, revealing shiny silver braces. “Cool. I’m Noah.”

“Maddie.” I wait to see if he asks me about where I’ve transferred from, but he only gives me a short wave.

“See you around,” he says, and then I’m left to push my way through the crowd to my locker. Voices echo off the stone walls, making me cringe. I’m used to the quiet of the hospital ward or my house; the excessive noise makes me want to cover my ears.

I manage to make it through the rest of my classes without really talking to anyone else. I write down my assignments and organize my binder, really only excited about computer science, where the teacher, Mrs. Decker, promises we’ll be scripting our own programs before the end of next week. I text a quick, nondescript message to my mom at lunch—“I’m fine”—and take my meds at the office as I promised. At the end of the day, I stop by my locker to grab the few books I’ll need for my homework, and as I’m shoving them into my backpack, trying to ignore the buzz of people around me, I feel a hand on my shoulder. I turn around and see Noah.

“Hey,” I say, trying to sound casual. I wonder why he sought me out again, but find myself sort of happy to see him. “What’s up?”

He cocks his head to one side, and jerks his too-long bangs out of his face. “Is it true that you had some kind of organ transplant?”

He must know Hailey. Either that, or she’s flapped her jaw to enough of the right people that the whole school knows about my operation. Sucking in a quick breath, I nod, not wanting to say anything more, but he keeps talking. “Which one?”

“Liver,” I whisper. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be different.

“Do you have like, a gnarly scar?” Again, I nod, pressing my lips together. My scar looks like an upside-down T, starting in between my poor excuses for breasts and ending in a line that spans my entire abdomen, just above my belly button. Even after a year, it’s thick and red and still a little bit painful if I twist too far in the wrong direction. I try not to look at it in the mirror.

“Awesome,” he says, and I let out a startled laugh. He jams one hand into his front pocket and swishes his hair out of his eyes again. “What’s so funny?”

I shrug, then shut my locker. “I guess I don’t really think of my scar as ‘awesome.’ ”

“Dude, why not?” he says. “You’re like, a Franken-babe.”

I stare at him, wondering if he has any idea just how shitty it is to call a girl anything related to a monster. My eyes fill and I drop my gaze to the floor before pushing past him and speed-walking down the hall. I will not let him see me cry.

“Hey!” Noah calls out. “I meant that as a compliment!”

I pretend not to hear him as I shove through the mass of students gathered at the front doors. I see my mother’s midnight blue Mercedes in the parking lot, and I rush down the stairs. Once inside the car, I drop my backpack to the floor between my legs and let the tears come. I curl my shoulders forward and put my hands over my face.

“Maddie, sweetie . . . what’s wrong?” Mom asks, reaching over to rub my back. “Tell me.”

I shake my head, as tears and snot run down. I feel like I’ve been holding my breath the entire day, waiting for that moment when someone would make me cry. I knew going to this school was going to suck. I knew there was no way I’d fit in.

“Oh, baby,” Mom says. “What can I do? Can I help?”

“He called me a monster,” I sob, dropping my hands to my lap and leaning over the console to rest my head on her shoulder. “He asked about my scar.” I don’t know how to explain just how exposed Noah’s words made me feel. I can imagine the nickname catching on, how I’ll have to endure it being launched at me as I walk down the hall, listening to the laughter and whispers behind my back.

“Who did?” Mom wraps her arm around my shoulders and squeezes me to her.

“Nobody. A boy. A stupid asshole boy.” She doesn’t scold me for my language, so I continue. “And a girl said my hair looks bad. She seemed all nice at first and then she totally insulted me!” I pause to take a shuddering breath as my tears begin to subside. “I’m so ugly, Mom! I hate it! Can’t I just stay home and have a tutor again? Please? Can’t you talk to Dad and make him understand?”

“You are not ugly,” Mom murmurs against my head, apparently choosing to ignore what I said about Dad. “Your hair is a little thin, that’s all. It just needs the right cut and maybe some color.” She pulls away and reaches into the console to grab a stack of junk mail that has been sitting in there for god only knows how long. My mom is organized about many things, but for some reason, her car is always a mess.

“What’re you doing?” I ask with a sniffle.

“Looking for something.” She rifles through the various envelopes and flyers until she comes up with a pale yellow card with an image of a pair of black scissors at the top. It looks vaguely familiar to me. “We got this a few weeks ago, remember?” she says. “Announcing a new salon opening? You liked the name . . . Ciseaux.” She pauses. “We’ll go there right now and get you all fixed up, okay?” She hands me the card, and I take it, noticing that she has tears in her eyes, too.

I know she is latching on to the only thing she can think of to help me feel better, so I nod, even though I know that having shiny hair isn’t going to magically change anything. I’ll still be the girl who hates how she looks.

I’ll still be the girl with the scar.