The Mighty Heart of Sunny St. James Read online

  2

  It turns out that being dead is a lot like dreaming.

  The world feels soft and gauzy and slow, as though I’m underwater. In fact, I think I am underwater. Everything is blue. All sorts of blue—navy and cerulean, aqua and royal, all swirling together like a kaleidoscope.

  Way off in the distance, I see a dark shape moving toward me. It gets closer and closer, bigger and bigger, and soon, I can tell it’s a person.

  A woman. She has a graceful tail instead of legs and her hair is long and inky, just like mine.

  She moves closer and closer, her hands scooping away the deep blue to get to me. I hear my name, thick and bright at the same time, and I know exactly who the mermaid is.

  I know because the mermaid’s face is the same face that’s in this picture in my nightstand at home. Kate gave it to me when I was super-little. She thinks I threw it away a long time ago—because that’s what I told her—but instead I take it out every night after Kate goes to bed and think about how the face inside the photo looks just like mine, only older.

  When I was seven years old, and eight and nine, and okay, maybe even ten, I would look and look at that picture and tell myself the lady inside was a mermaid. She was a mermaid and that was why she was gone. She was a beautiful, iridescent-tailed mermaid with long black hair who didn’t know what to do with a two-legged human girl. After a few years of pulling me up from the deepest parts of the ocean to gulp at the salty sea air, she finally decided that I fit better on land and left me nestled in Juniper Island’s sun-white sand for Kate to find. Then she disappeared into the great big blue, never to be seen again.

  But now I’m in the sea with her. We’re together, so I know something’s off. Something about this isn’t real, so maybe I really am dead. I pump my human arms and legs to swim toward the mermaid. And the closer I get, the happier I feel, but my eyes sting with a whole bunch of sad tears that shouldn’t even be able to fall if I was really underwater.

  Soon she’s right in front of me. Our hair flows together, jet-black against the glowing aqua sea. Her amber-brown eyes stare into my amber-brown eyes. Freckles spill across her nose and onto her cheeks.

  “I didn’t know you had those,” I say.

  “I knew you had those,” she says back. She smiles and reaches out a fingertip, touching the dots on my own nose and cheeks. “We match.”

  She says it like it’s a good thing, like it matters. I don’t know if it matters or not, so I stay quiet, floating, floating, floating in the middle of all the blue.

  “Oh, Sunshine, I’m so sorry,” she finally says. Underwater tears fill up her eyes.

  “Only Kate and Dave call me Sunshine,” I say.

  “They call you that because I did.”

  I shake my head, and my hair breaks away from hers, lacy and flowy like jellyfish tentacles. She looks so sad and her mouth is still moving, but I can’t hear her anymore. She’s getting smaller and smaller because the ocean is pulling me away from her, pushing me up to the surface. My mermaid reaches out both of her arms, her tail flapping wildly to get to me, but it’s no use. I’ve got legs, lungs that need air, and for the second time in my life, the ocean spits me back up on land.

  CHAPTER

  3

  I guess land is a hospital bed.

  The mermaid from my dream sits by my side in a pea-green pleather chair.

  Her tail is covered up with a pair of torn jeans, and she’s wearing a gauzy black tank top. She has dark tattoos all over her bare arms, from her shoulders to her wrists. My eyes are all fuzzy, but I can see a million suns scattered over her skin, peeking out from between flowers and stars and trees. Her hair is black and her eyes are amber, just like mine, just like my dead-dream mermaid. She leans forward. There are freckles on her nose and a silver ring looped around her bottom lip, which is painted a pretty plum purple, just like a mermaid’s would be.

  “Sunshine,” she says. Her eyes are shiny with tears. I squeeze my own shut and pop them open again. I must still be dreaming. Or maybe I really am dead and this is the afterlife. She takes my hand and I can feel the warmth. That smell that seems to soak into all hospital walls—pee and bleach and baked chicken—fills my nose, and I can hear the beep-beep-beep of my heart monitor.

  My heart.

  No, not mine. Someone else’s.

  “Sunny, you’re okay,” the mermaid says. I shake my head, because no, no, no, I’m not okay. I’m dead. I don’t have a new heart. They didn’t bring me back to life.

  I yank my hand out of hers and tug at my hospital gown. It’s scratchy and smells like sleep, like I’ve been lying here for years and years. You’d think I’d get better clothes if I was dead. You’d think the sea would’ve just kept me.

  The beep-beep-beep gets faster and faster. I pull on my gown and see a white bandage on my chest. It goes all the way down to right above my belly button. I have a tube in my arm, one in my nose. I pull, claw, because the mermaid is still here. She’s standing now, trying to grab my hands. She has legs.

  “Sunny, calm down. Sunny!”

  I thrash like a seal.

  Beepbeepbeepbeepbeep.

  People in green and blue scrubs swell into the room like an ocean wave. I see Kate and no, no, no, she can’t be here. She can’t be dead too.

  “Sunny, sweetie, it’s okay,” she says, taking my face between her hands. A nurse jabs a needle into some clear thing attached to the tube in my arm. Heat spreads into my chest like I swallowed warm water.

  “Katie, what can I do?” my mermaid asks.

  “I gave you ten minutes, Lena,” Kate says, her hands still on my face. “That’s enough for today.”

  “There are way too many people in here anyway,” the nurse snaps. “One visitor at a time.” She presses a stethoscope to my chest, then checks the big white bandage. It hurts. It feels like I’ve been cut in two and sewn back up again.

  “Katie,” my mermaid says, but Kate shakes her head.

  “I knew this was too soon. You need to go.”

  The mermaid’s face crumples. I think her name is Lena. I think she might be… I think she’s…

  But my whole body is warm now, the beep-beep-beep steady as the tide, and the ocean takes me back again.

  CHAPTER

  4

  I wake up feeling like I’ve swallowed gallons of salty seawater and then promptly puked it all up. I’m floaty and fuzzy, and I guess I keep mumbling about mermaids and being in the ocean, because someone—judging by the snippy sound of her voice, an overtired nurse—keeps telling me I’m in Port Hope Children’s Hospital, which is solidly on dry land and a good half hour from Juniper Island.

  When the fog clears a little, I have no clue what day it is. I’m sore all over, still have a tube up my nose and a needle in my arm, and can only see Kate for a few minutes at a time while I’m in the cardiac ICU. My chest feels weird—part numb, part oh-wow-that-hurts, and part… well, just weird. A bright red line crisscrossed with stitches runs from just below my throat to right above my belly button, a scar I’ll have for the rest of my life.

  As it turns out, I’m not dead. But it sure was weird when I was.

  “You weren’t dead, Sunny,” Kate tells me as she fluffs the unfluffable pillows on my bed. It’s now been about a week since the surgery and I’m well enough to move out of the ICU and into my own room.

  “But I was. I kept dreaming about… mermaids. In the ocean and then in my hospital room. The ocean part was nice, but I could do without hospital room dreams, thanks very much.”

  I don’t want to tell her that the mermaid was my mom. If I did, Kate would sit down and sigh and ask me if I want to talk about it, the answer to which is and always will be a ginormous Nope.

  So I keep my mouth shut, but Kate rubs her eyes and sits down on the edge of my bed anyway, breathing out my name like it weighs a gazillion tons.

  “Wow, you sure know how to put the clouds in Sunshine,” I say.

  That gets a smile out of her and she
runs a hand over my hair. “You’re still you. That’s good.”

  I nod, but it gets me thinking. Am I? I don’t care what Kate says. I died. The old Sunny is gone. Forever. I have a whole new heart underneath my scar. Like, it’s not the heart I was born with. I put my finger on my neck, then right below my thumb, then press my palm to my chest. I feel the same thrum-thrum-thrum every time. It’s in there, doing its job. It hasn’t rebelled against me yet.

  I can’t stop thinking about whose heart I have now. What their name was, if they ever got to kiss anyone. It had to be a kid, because I’m a kid and you can’t just stick any old heart in a kid’s chest. Whoever it was had to die. Whoever it was is dead-dead, not just dream-dead. And I’m alive because of them.

  But with heart transplants, you never really know what will happen the next minute, the next second, even. My body can just up and say, “Um, no thanks,” to the new heart. Organ rejection, Dr. Ahmed calls it, meaning my body thinks the heart is an enemy combatant and starts attacking it. Death is pretty much a guarantee if that happens, so I have to take a bunch of pills and stay in the hospital for a long time so the doctors can poke and prod me a billion times a day.

  So, yeah, I’m alive. For now. But now is long enough to start my New Life plan. Whenever I think about my New Life, I always see the words capitalized and in italics, like the title of an amazing music album or book. I’ve been cooking this plan up for months, just in case I ever did get a new heart. Now here I am and everything is going to be different.

  But first, I’ve got to get out of this hospital, and to do that, I need to get stronger. So I don’t even complain when a lady named Viv comes to my room and makes me get out of bed. Then she makes me walk. Even with one of those old-people walkers, it takes me about five hundred hours to shuffle down the hall, but I get it done. And, aside from the fact that I’m sore everywhere and have to drink my food, I do feel better. I’m not short of breath and my ankles don’t swell up. When I get tired, it’s a good tired, the kind of tired I remember feeling after swimming hard or running down the beach with Margot.

  My new heart hasn’t abandoned me yet. I’m getting stronger every day and soon, I’ll be able to go home. And then… Sunny St. James takes over the world.

  Or, at least, my own little corner of it.

  About three weeks after my surgery, I’m scarfing down some pudding. Butterscotch, to be precise. I used to hate pudding. The consistency freaked me out, and what in the world is butterscotch anyway? Now, though, it’s the nectar of the gods. It’s cool and smooth and doesn’t hurt my throat, which is still sensitive from having a tube shoved down it for hours and hours during the surgery.

  Kate walks into the room with a vase of wildflowers the Cherry Picked employees sent over. Then, when she sets it down on the table next to my bed, she clears her throat and sighs. Sighing is what Kate does best, but something about this sigh makes Dave stop playing his guitar and sit up. He’s on the chair that turns into a really uncomfortable-looking couch, which Kate has been sleeping on every night. They share a look. They don’t think I catch these things, but they’re way wrong. I could write a whole book about all the looks Kate and Dave pass between them. I wish they’d just go on a date already.

  “Are you guys gonna leave me here so you can go kiss?” Their eyes go wide and yep, there it is. Kate’s face turns into a bright red tomato, while Dave rubs his forehead over and over again.

  “What? No… no!” Kate splutters. Dave fiddles with his guitar’s tuning pegs. “For goodness’ sake, Sunny.”

  “Sing the kissing song, Dave!”

  “Sunny St. James,” Kate says, her hands on her hips.

  I grin. It’s weird, but I’m totally in love with Dave’s music. I pretty much hated it before my surgery, but now I’m obsessed with it.

  He used to play guitar in this rock band, Truth Lies Low, and they were actually kind of famous. A couple of years ago, the band broke up and he moved to Juniper Island. Now he helps Kate run Cherry Picked Books, but he still plays at coffee shops and tiny venues in Port Hope, which is on the mainland, and people just eat up his super-moody songs. I used to call it Whiny Boy Music just to make Kate laugh. Now I make Dave play all the whiniest songs for me over and over and over. I had Kate add all of Truth Lies Low’s albums to my phone and I’ve been falling asleep with earbuds stuck in my ears every night while I’ve been in the hospital.

  My favorite is this song called “Out of Orbit.” It’s all about how this boy finally kisses the girl of his dreams and the whole world pretty much implodes. In a good way.

  That’s why I want to kiss someone so bad. Because love and kissing inspire the greatest songs and poems and books. Honestly, the idea of pressing my mouth to someone else’s kind of freaks me out. Because, wow, you really have to like someone to do that, right? And they really have to like you. I say, if you mash mouths with someone, you’ll never forget that person. And they’ll never forget you.

  In fact, I love Dave’s mushy songs so much, I’m trying to write my own. Sort of. I mean, other than my checkups and physical therapy, there’s not all that much to do. I just sit here in my hospital bed, day after drab day, and music makes me feel, you know?

  I’ve never really wanted to write stuff before, but now I’m a brand-new Sunny. I have all these thoughts. Not that I didn’t have them before, but it’s a whole new ball game now that I know I get to keep all these thoughts and get a bunch of new ones every day. I’ve been working on my own ode to kissing, but I can never get any of the words to rhyme. My brain just wants to spill all my thoughts out on the paper. I mean, there are only so many words that rhyme with kiss.

  Miss.

  Bliss.

  Hiss.

  And who wants hissing mixing up with kissing? Not me. I’ve been writing a whole lot of song-ish-type things since my surgery, but none of them feel like a song yet. They just feel like… the ramblings of a girl who really wants to smooch someone.

  “Sunny,” Kate says as I shove another spork full of caramel-colored goo into my mouth. “Can you put the pudding down? I need to talk to you.”

  “Now, Kate?” Dave asks.

  “She’s here,” Kate says back, real low like she thinks I can’t hear her. “I told her three weeks and it’s been three weeks.”

  “Who?” I ask.

  “You don’t owe her anything,” Dave says.

  “Yes, I do,” Kate says. She’s got tears in her voice. She even swipes at her face and sinks down onto my bed. She picks up the potted blue violets that Suzette sent—Margot’s name was also on the card, which I promptly ripped to shreds and trashed—and runs her thumb over the thick velvety leaves.

  “What’s going on?” I ask. I finally set down my pudding, which now feels like a rock in my belly.

  Kate takes a deep breath while she puts her hand on my cheek. She only does that when something’s wrong.

  “Sunny, it’s okay,” she says. “I promise.”

  “What is? What’s okay?” I pull her hand off my face. Other than still being sore and kind of weak, I feel okay. My new ticker’s still in there, doing its thing, but who knows? I’m a kid. Grown-ups don’t tell kids anything, even stuff about their own bodies. When I was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, Kate took two days to tell me that meant I could actually die. Which is just messed up, in my opinion. “Is it my heart?”

  Kate’s face goes super-white and she leans close to me, her forehead on mine. “No, sweetie, it’s not. Your heart is perfect.”

  Easy for her to say.

  “Then what? Just tell me.”

  Kate nods against my head. She keeps nodding and Dave’s just sitting there with his arms hanging over his guitar and I’m about to scream.

  “When you were in the ICU,” Kate starts, “you had a visitor.”

  My stomach turns into a coil of snakes. There’s only one person who Kate would be all nervous telling me about. After all, Kate was the one who came and picked me up from the slumber party from H-E-do
uble-hockey-sticks this past January. I fold my arms and glare. Or I try to. Really, my lower lip keeps bumping around and my eyes sting.

  “She’s here again and would like to see you,” Kate says.

  “What, her dumb violets weren’t enough?”

  Kate frowns. “What?”

  “I don’t want to see her.” I spit the words. Not actual spit, but I really force them out, all mean and stuff.

  “Do… do you remember when she was here?” Kate asks.

  “No. And I don’t want to remember now either. Margot can just get over it.”

  Kate blinks at me. Dave blinks at me. They blink at each other.

  “Sunshine,” Kate says softly. “Margot… it’s not—”

  Someone clears their throat in my doorway. My head pops up and my heart drops down to my feet, which is not an excellent place for a newly attached heart to be. But when I see my visitor, my heart goes all rogue on me.

  Because Kate’s right. Margot, it is not.

  CHAPTER

  5

  It’s my mermaid.

  She has a normal human body covered in torn jeans and black stomping boots and a slouchy black T-shirt with some band name on it. Her hair is black too, and her makeup is… well, it’s amazing. Light purple lips and darker purple eyeshadow that somehow all works together to look totally subtle and perfect. On top of all that, she has a bunch of tattoos. Familiar ones. Ones I know I’ve seen before. A million suns. Flowers. Stars.

  “Hi,” she says.

  Her voice is familiar too. Velvety and soft.

  “I asked you to wait outside,” Kate says.

  “I did.”

  “You’re not.”

  “Katie,” Dave says.

  I think he motions toward me. I think Kate grabs my hand. I think a lot of things, but I’m not sure about any of them, because there’s a mermaid in my room. And this time, I’m pretty positive I’m not dead.