The Dismantling by Brian Deleeuw

sense her anger though, her anger that she should be found out and hunted down in this way by the exigencies of her youth. He didn’t know if she ever used the line, and its corny machismo sounded better coming out of Lenny’s mouth anyway.
    â€œMaria called me about a month later,” Lenny said. “She asked for my blood type. I said, what for. That’s when she told me she wanted to donate.”
    Crewes groaned. “For Christ’s sake, Lenny, you sound dead already.”
    â€œPlease,” Simon said. “Did you ever lead her to believe she would receive any compensation in return?”
    â€œNo.” Lenny shook his massive head. “Absolutely not.”
    After the two men left, Simon stood at the window and lit a cigarette as he watched them limp their way up the block to Crewes’s black Lexus. Would it matter if Lenny’s performance in the actual interview was this horrendous? Would anybody care? DaSilva had managed to finesse Lenny’s rickety body through the tests—had contextualized, cajoled, or outright lied enough to gain Lenny’s acceptance into the transplant program—so Simon imagined that, short of assaulting his examiner or directly admitting the fact that the necessary portion of Maria’s liver had been purchased, Lenny was probably safe, unconvincing zombielike demeanor or not.
    He thought of what Crewes had told him about Lenny’s “funks”: the headaches, the moods, the rejection of the world beyond the four walls of his darkened bedroom. He imagined Lenny sequestered in his bed, head throbbing in time with his pulse, the engorged blood vessels of his brain jammed up against the cramped interior of his skull. Simon knew something about how migraines could cripple a life. His sister had suffered from them throughout her adolescence, although the word “migraine” only meant something to Simon later. When they were growing up, he and Amelia just called it “The Pinch.” The Pinch meant a lot of things—visual glitches, nausea, numbness in her lips and tongue—but most of all it meant headaches, pulverizing, catastrophic headaches that lasted a day at a time.
    Amelia hated talking about The Pinch almost as much as she hated the thing itself. She avoided the nurse’s office at St. Edmund’s, which always smelled of Lysol layered over the sweet, faint, ineradicable tang of vomit. She’d gone there with the first of her headaches one morning in fifth grade. The nurse had sat her down in a chair and given her two Tylenol. After an hour, it was suggested that she return to class. She hated having to say that, no, she’d rather stay, and actually, was there a dark and quiet room somewhere in which she could lie down? Saying these things made her feel shameful, weak; the nurse, an ancient nun named Sister Carolina, had no explanation for her suffering. Finally Simon was summoned out of algebra class and told to take his sister home.
    He led her out of St. Edmund’s, into the bright, slanting sunlight. She scrunched up her face, one hand covering her eyes, the other clammy and ice cold against his palm as he dragged her across Park Avenue, over to the subway on Lexington. They waited on the platform, the train’s hot, stale breath rushing over them as it pulled into the station. She sat hunched in her seat, poking at her face, telling Simon she couldn’t feel her bottom lip. After they switched trains at Fulton Street, she closed her eyes and stopped speaking. Simon sat next to her, still holding her hand, murmuring that they would be home soon, that she would be okay, but she didn’t seem to hear him. She didn’t seem to be aware of anything around her, turning her attention entirely inward. He looked at her face, the fine colorless down on her cheeks and upper lip, the sharp point of her chin. He reached out his free hand to stroke her forehead as the train burst out of the tunnel,