Elementary, My Dear Watkins (23 page)

Jo signed on the dotted line, smiling at this interesting man and his unique take on personal style. Even though she doubted she would ever recommend neon green socks with formal wear, there was something to be said for buying only one style and color of sock. She thought she might put that tip in her blog for people who hated the whole time-consuming socks-in-the-laundry problem. If everything matched, then these people were right. No sorting would be required.

“Where could I get a pair?” she asked, thinking again of Alexa.

“I have ours specially made by a sock lady,” Kevin replied. “We don’t sell ’em, but I’d be happy to give you some.”

Before Jo could object to his kindness, he called to a cute young girl in a “Cheerleaders Rule” T-shirt who was busy cleaning a fish tank nearby.

“Gracie, hon, see if you can find Jake and get him to bring out a new pair of socks from the pack that just came in.”

“Oh, that’s not necessary,” Jo objected.

“It’s our pleasure,” he insisted. As they all waited for Gracie to find Jake and retrieve the socks, the bodyguard grew visibly agitated at Jo’s side. Fortunately, the young man who had led Jo to the smoked bones showed back up and took an interest in Chewie.

“What’s your name, boy?” he asked, kneeling down and holding out a hand so the dog could sniff him. Chewie took to him almost immediately.

“This is Chewie,” Jo told him.

“Hi, Chewie. I’m Sam,” he said warmly, scratching the dog’s chest and then giving the dog’s upraised paw a shake.

“How many pairs of socks you want, Dad?” a male voice called from in back.

“Just one is fine,” Jo answered for Kevin, calling back. At this point the bodyguard looked as though he might blow a gasket from the delay. Jo figured he was probably a New Yorker, used to the rush, rush, rush of the city and intolerant to the slower, friendlier pace of rural Pennsylvania.

Finally, Gracie returned with her older brother, who looked to be about 17 and was handsome enough to be an actor.

“Here you go. Sorry for the delay,” the young man said, flashing her a smile and handing the plastic-wrapped socks directly to Jo.

“Are you sure I can’t pay you for them?” she asked Kevin.

“Nope,” he replied, picking up her bag of items and handing it to her. “Just be sure to come back next time Chewie needs something.”

Jo thanked him again and followed her bodyguard out of the door, not surprised to find another Zimmer kid hovering near the limo. He was tossing a baseball up and down in his glove—and wearing neon green socks. From what she could recall of her last visit, his name was Tom and his big dream was to play for the Phillies.

“Sweet wheels,” he said now, with a grin. “Forget pro ball. I want to know what
you
do for a living!”

Jo just laughed as the bodyguard opened her door.

“It’s called ‘old money,’ sweetie. You don’t earn it. It’s just sort of there.”

“Impressive.”

Jo started to climb in, and then she hesitated, remembering that when she was Tom’s age, she would have traded all the fancy vehicles in the world to be a part of a normal family who simply put down roots, worked together, and cared about each other.

“You know what, Tom? This limo may seem impressive, but trust me. It’s not worth a fraction of what you and your family have right here.”

A
lexa was busted. She didn’t know what to say and couldn’t have found her voice at that moment even if she could have thought of something.

“I asked you a question,” Dr. Stebbins said, stepping closer. “What were you doing in there? That door was locked. That’s a private office.”

“Nothing,” she said finally, shame burning her face.

“Alexa,” he repeated, his voice a heartbreaking mix of suspicion and disappointment. Except for the time she got caught sneaking in after a night out, this was the first time he’d ever been really upset with her. “Tell me the truth.”

He reached past her to push the door open and stepped inside, flipping on the bright overhead light. He looked around for any obvious tampering, fooled with the doorknob for a minute, and then sat in the chair at the desk. She stood in the doorway, hardly able to meet his eyes.

“You fooled with the lock. I can see there where you scratched it. What were you looking for?”

She used to be such a good liar, such a great storyteller, always talking her way out of trouble, especially at school. But since her stroke, she hadn’t gotten in much trouble at all, and now she was out of practice. Summoning her wits, she tried to pretend that Dr. Stebbins was the principal at her old school and she’d been caught putting cherry bombs in the toilets or spraying graffiti in the gym.

“Nothing,” she said, jutting out her chin in a gesture that used to seem cocky but now only felt silly. “I was hungry, and I thought you had some microwave popcorn packs in here.”

He remained silent for a long moment, and she finally forced herself to look him in the eye—though that was too hard, so she ended up staring at his forehead instead.

In his early forties and already half bald, Dr. Stebbins wasn’t exactly superhandsome, but there was something appealing about him. He wore wire-rimmed glasses over deep blue eyes, his face free of wrinkles except for a single line that creased on each side of his mouth. Always dressed neatly in slacks, shirt, and a white doctor’s jacket, he was just a little bit plump, like his wife, Nicole, but in a pleasing way. The few times she had seen them together, they got along really well, the way she always imagined married couples did, except that they didn’t call each other “Pookey” or give Eskimo kisses.

“I’d like to give you the benefit of the doubt, Alexa, but I know very well you’re lying.”

“It’s not that big of a deal. I just wanted popcorn.” That was her story, and she was sticking to it.

“Maybe what you were really looking for was drugs. I don’t keep anything in here, but I am a doctor, so maybe you thought I had a secret stash or something—”

Alexa took a step back, feeling like she’d been slapped in the face.

Drugs? He really thought she’d been in there looking for drugs?

“How can you say that?” she cried, bursting into tears. “I’m
not
my mother! I don’t take drugs!”

“Then what did you want?”

“Names!” she yelled. Then she put a hand to her mouth, holding back more sobs. “I wanted names,” she repeated, collapsing onto the mat on the floor. “I can’t do this anymore, Dr. Stebbins. I’ve got to know if there are other kids like me. I don’t want to be the only one. I wanted to find a list or a file or something that would tell me how to find the rest.”

Alexa put her face in her hands and cried. After a while, she could feel a warmth nearby, and she peeked out between her fingers to see that he was sitting in front of her, on the mat.

“I’m sorry,” he told her softly. “Drugs were the only thing I could think of. I should’ve known better than that. I believe you.”

She pulled her hands away, only to see that they were all smeared black from eyeliner. Without even being asked or having to get up, he handed her the box of tissues he was holding in his lap. Then he just quietly sat there while she tried to clean herself up.

“I’m sorry I broke into your office,” she told him after wiping her face and hands and blowing her nose. “But nobody seems to understand what it’s like for me. I mean, I appreciate everything you’ve done, and everything the old lady’s done, but sometimes it’s not enough. It’s hard being a kid without any other kids around—especially for a medical freakazoid like me.”

The doctor surprised Alexa by smiling.

“Is that how you think of yourself?”

“Of course. What else would you call it?”

He shook his head.

“Just a kid who had a problem that got fixed. Two problems, really, both fixed at the same time by the same solution.”

She shook her head.

“I was a medical experiment that just happened to work in freaky ways.”

“No, that’s not true. You were what’s known in the drug development world as a serendipitous discovery. It’s not that uncommon, you know. There are a lot of drugs that were intended for one thing and now doctors use them to treat other, unrelated conditions. That’s what’s called off-label use, Alexa. That’s the study you’re involved in now, an off-label-use study.”

“But until I came along, nobody knew what Fibrin-X could even do to people.”

“As a stroke treatment we certainly did. It was already into phase three drug trials at that time. We knew that it would dissolve the fibrin that the hemorrhaging had created in your brain without releasing more hemoglobin or kicking off the clotting cascade.”

Alexa didn’t exactly understand what he was saying, but she wanted him to keep talking just the same. Something about the way he spoke was always so reassuring.

“We just didn’t realize,” he continued, adjusting his glasses, “that Fibrin-X would also promote reconnection of the proximal and distal segments of the CNS nerve fibers, or that that would somehow have a significant affect on attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder—you know, your ADHD. Certainly, reconnection had already been achieved with other drugs in peripheral nerves, but never before in the central nervous system. At first we didn’t understand the mechanism that was making it work, but our animal studies are showing that as the drug dissolves the fibrin, it’s also causing nerve growth all around the circle of Willis and in other areas that relate to ADHD. It’s really quite exciting, and you’re a part of it.”

Alexa sniffled, thinking it
was
kind of exciting when he put it that way. She had seen a plastic model of the brain once, and the circle of Willis, where her aneurysm had been, was just a big ring of arteries in a circle at the base of her brain. For a long time she had rolled that name around on her tongue, circle of Willis, thinking it sounded cool. If she ever formed a club with the others, maybe they could call themselves that, the Circle of Willis, like a play on words.

“I’m a part of it, yeah, but am I the only human part? Are there any others out there like me?”

“Statistically speaking,” he hedged, counting off on his fingers, “it wouldn’t be all that common to find a person, a, who has ADHD, b, who ruptures a cerebral aneurysm and, c, then gets treated with Fibrin-X. That’s a very rare set of circumstances that would all have to come together.”

“Rare, but not impossible. You gotta tell me, Doc. Am I the only person this ever happened to?”

He hesitated a long time before answering.

“No,” he told her finally. “You’re not the only one.”

“Are the others adults, kids, or teens like me?”

“All of the above.”

She closed her eyes, exhaling slowly.

“I knew it,” she whispered, more tears threatening to spill down her cheeks. “Did the same thing happen to them that happened to me? Did they all get better too and then get really smart?”

Again, he hesitated.

“They have all shown significant improvement with their stroke and their ADHD, yes. Eventually, we had enough data from those of you that it happened to by accident that we were able take the serendipitous discovery back to animal trials to study it further, on purpose. Eventually, of course, we will use Fibrin-X on ADHD patients even if they haven’t had an aneurysm.”

“But I thought you told me that nobody even knows what causes ADHD.”

“Until now,” he replied, his eyes sparkling. “Thanks to patients like you, Alexa, my colleagues and I have managed to crack the code, so to speak. As it turns out, the condition is both chemical and anatomical in nature, similar to depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder. The brain is a marvelous and complicated organ. There’s still much about it that no one knows—but our discoveries are going to advance the field of neurology by eons. What we’ve done is groundbreaking.”

“So now you can help other kids like me? Well, like I used to be, at least?”

He nodded.

“Soon, very soon, you’ll see that what happened to you was the beginning of what is going to become the cure for ADHD around the world. No longer will it be a condition where the best we can do is manage the symptoms. Now we’ll be able to
eradicate
it. Do you understand how important that is?”

“I might, if I knew what ‘eradicate’ meant.”

Dr. Stebbins burst out laughing and surprised Alexa by giving her a hug.

“Sometimes you’re so intelligent I forget that you’re only fourteen,” he said, letting her go, though the warmth of his affection stayed with her, making her feel safe and appreciated. “Eradicated means eliminated. Soon, thanks in part to what’s happened to you, we will be able to get rid of ADHD altogether. No one will have to suffer for years the way you did, or spend their life taking drugs with dangerous side effects, just to manage the symptoms. We’ll simply diagnose the problem, inject the Fibrin-X or a finely-tuned derivative, the brain will heal, and the ADHD will go away.”

“You make it sound simple. Like a dream come true.”

“It’s only simple at the end, once science has done its part. Once people like you have done your part too.”

She thought about that for a moment, feeling somehow brave and important.
Significant
.

“So when can I meet the others?” she asked, her face glowing. “The other teens, like me, who had a stroke and got treated with Fibrin-X and were accidentally cured of their ADHD too?”

Dr. Stebbins smile faded.

“I’m sorry, Alexa, but not anytime soon. We’re going to announce our preliminary findings at a symposium next month. It’s going to be huge news, really groundbreaking. After that, maybe I can a arrange a get-together. But until then, things must remain very quiet and completely anonymous. There are others out there, but for right now I can’t tell you who they are.”