Ciera lloyd

I, Zoey Lloyd

“She stands at the window every day,” my mom said. “Look, see her blowing kisses?”

I turned around, half-expecting nothing, but there, in the corner of her preschool classroom, was my little sister, a hand outstretched and another tapping her duck-lipped mouth.

“She won’t stop until you wave back,” my mom said.

So, I did. Pausing in the middle of the parking lot, I lifted my own hand out to her and reached at my mouth. Satisfied, Zoey stepped away from the window.

“Doesn’t she get tired of that?” I said.

My mom shrugged.

“I think it comforts her,” she said.

I looked back at the classroom before we left, and I could just barely make out my sister—standing alone, isolated from everyone else by a few feet—in the corner of the classroom, talking to a stuffed bear.

“Does she have any friends?” I said, eyes still focused on Zoey.

“I hope so,” my mom said. “She just has such a big heart.”

Really, though, I don’t know if you can call Zoey’s literal heart big, when it has three holes in it. But maybe her hopefulness in people and in the world is a sort of compensation for the physical lack of a whole heart.

I’ve heard doctors describe the holes in the heart like car windows. When your car window is rolled down just a little, it makes a lot of noise. And when it’s rolled down all of the way, it doesn’t make as much noise, right? If someone has a hole in their heart, it tends to make a lot of noise. Zoey’s holes were large and didn’t make any—the doctors weren’t even aware she had them until she was eleven months old. Everybody assumed it was asthma, which she has, but when the doctors cleared her lungs out, they finally heard the car window roaring.

At the time, we lived in my mother’s parents’ basement—my mom, sister, and I—in Ohio. This is important not because it happened, but because my mom seeking refuge from my parents’ messy divorce in her home state is, perhaps, the only reason Zoey is alive today.

Akron Children’s Hospital was one of the only three hospitals in the United States that would even consider doing the procedure Zoey needed. They told my mom that 99.8% of hearts are wider on the outside, and they narrow as they go inside the heart—they had a device they’d put in my sister’s heart, and scar tissue would grow around it. Problem solved.

In the middle of surgery, they discovered that Zoey’s heart was perpendicular all the way through, and the device they had intended to put in it wouldn’t fit. The only other option was a device not meant for infants.

They did the procedure anyway.

If it hadn’t been for Akron Children’s Hospital’s determination, who knows where we’d be. My mom calls them brave for what they did, and I don’t know if it was bravery, or just sheer willpower, but if it is bravery, it must have rubbed off on Zoey, because I’ve never met someone who is such a force to be reckoned with.

On her first day of kindergarten, Zoey did exactly three things: asked a boy to be her boyfriend, had a seizure in front of her entire class, and broke up with her boyfriend.

She’d had epileptic seizures before. At one point, she had 27 twenty-seven non-convulsive seizures a day. So when my father picked us up from after-school care—we had officially moved in with him (Zoey and I), back in in North Carolina, after the divorce was finalized—nobody dwelled on the seizure. All Zoey wanted to talk about was the boyfriend, Jack.

“He had red hair, CC,” Zoey said to me. “I like red. Like Clifford.”

“But then you broke up with him?” I said.

She looked up from her LeapFrog tablet, facing me in the backseat.

“CC,” she said, taking a deep breath, “he laughed.”

“Laughed?” I said.

“When I did the thing,” she said.

My dad jerked the steering wheel.

“Did what thing, Zobert?” he said, using his pet name for Zoey.

My eyes met Dad’s in the rear-view mirror—I could see the hesitation through his sunglasses. His hands were gripped around the wheel so tight I could see the veins in his hands. But his voice was calm and smooth.

“The shake thing,” she said quietly.

My dad’s shoulders sank.

Zoey was never aware when she was having a seizure. Nobody ever is. She comes out of it, and it’s like nothing happened.

“It’s whatever,” Zoey said next. “I can get a new Jack. I, Zoey Lloyd.”

A force, I tell you.

If it wasn’t the hospital’s bravery rubbing off on her to make her such a force, it’s because it’s what she has to do in order to not care about the “things” that make her different.

She’s never been quite on the same level as everyone around her, due to an intellectual disability and severe ADHD. At sixteen now, she’s mentally thirteen, according to her neurologist. She probably won’t ever develop past this level.

And because the American school system is messed up, she has to take the same classes as all of the other sixteen-year-olds. Couple this with the ADHD and intellectual disability, she doesn’t always pay attention in class, which can lead to her making some dicey decisions.

A few weeks ago, I got this text from her:  Do u think daddy will be pissed at me because I cheated on a Spanish quiz and well you see it is the first time I have never cheated before in my whole life.

Were you caught? I asked less than a minute later.

Yes, she typed back.

What did you do? I said.

Not bad I wrote on my left hand p, she said.

Okay, I said. What did your teacher say?

She was going to talk to the principal to see what my concurrence will be I. love u.

Love you too, I said.

Please do not ask daddy please, she said.

I didn’t tell anyone. Zoey ended up calling my father a minute after she sent me that last message—she went to the bathroom and told him, crying in the stall. The school hadn’t even gotten to him yet.

So I guess that’s another “thing” she has: honesty.

But I’m glad she has that one going for her.