I thought about this for a second. With Robin, I felt like I owed more than just a casual assessment of my bodily integrity.
“I think I’m OK?” I said. “I mean, I can’t figure out if I’m fine or terrible. Someone tried to kill me, Robin.”
“I know.” He looked past my bed out the window, letting the silence hang.
“Thank you for not telling me what an idiot I am.”
“I figured you already knew.”
“I do.”
Robin started fishing around in his bag for his laptop.
“You want to hear some tweets?”
“Oh god, I don’t know, do I?”
He smiled a pained smile. In a moment, his laptop was open and he was reading me replies to the tweet I’d posted that morning. It now had more likes and retweets and replies than anything I’d ever posted.
Having Robin read you comments and tweets is the best possible way to read them. He has a great voice, amazing enunciation, and, of course, he skips the awful ones.
“Courtney Anderson says, ‘We’re all thinking of you, April. You have so much faith in humanity even on a dark day like this. Thanks for sharing that strength.’”
That felt good enough that my eyes got a bit misty.
“This person’s just sent you like twenty-five of some sort of hug emoji,” Robin continued. Then, after another moment, “Oh, you’ll like this one, SpidermanandSnape says, ‘I’ve been watching the news all day, but this tweet is the only thing that matters to me right now. BE OK APRIL MAY!’”
After a pause he continued. “This one is from the Som. CMDRSprocket says, ‘Everyone is just wedging arguments they were already having or babbling about things we don’t know. Thanks for just being a human.’”
“Yeah, that one . . . ,” I said, getting sleepier.
He kept reading to me until well after I was asleep.
Andy was there when I woke up. He seemed, as he had lately, burdened. But even more so now. He sagged into the chair next to my bed, still the skinniest kid I knew, but now somehow with a great weight in his posture.
“You’re OK?” he said when he saw I was awake, seeming legitimately concerned.
“I’m OK. They say I’ll be 100 percent in a few weeks.”
“But on the inside too?”
“I think so. For now.”
That question, asking how I was really doing, was not a nontrivial effort for Andy Skampt. He wasn’t the kind of guy who asked other people how they were feeling. But then again, it’s not every day that your best friend gets assaulted right in front of your eyes. As I was thinking these things, Andy broke a silence that I didn’t realize had formed.
“April, did I kill him?”
Suddenly I was back in the moment, looking down at the stained pile of clothing, oozing and seeping.
“No. No. The president told me, Andy, it wasn’t you.” And then something, for the first time, clicked in my brain.
“Andy, you were terrified.” He was shaking a bit, his head in his hands. Not crying, just quivering. I could picture him covered in the sticky goop that was Martin Bellacourt, standing in the middle of the street, a couple of yards away from Carl, looking absolutely alone.
Andy looked at me like I’d just put my own knife inside him. He whispered, “Jesus, April, of course I was terrified.” I realized that he’d thought it was an accusation, that I was questioning his bravery.
“No, I mean, just to go out there, you looked like you were gonna hurl. But when that guy dashed at me, you . . .” I started crying.
Not, like, polite tears running down my cheeks as I eloquently told Andy how touched and amazed I was that he had been the first and only person to actually rush to defend me. Ugly crying. Painful gasps and sobs. Wailing. Andy, the goof, the weedy little clown, had raised his prized camera rig over his head and torn a man’s head off his shoulders for me. Yeah, a structurally compromised man, but still.
I thought all those things, but instead of saying them, I made big, huge, horrible noises that doubled me over and pushed me into the fetal position, my back searing with pain, which made me cry out even more loudly. Andy stood to push back my hair and tell me it was going to be OK. The moment he touched me, I grabbed at him like I was drowning, I pulled him down into the hospital bed and covered his clean button-down shirt with my tears and snot.
“You fucking beautiful moron, that was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen. You saved me. You saved me. You saved me.” I knew it wasn’t technically true, but I think he understood what I meant. I think you do too.
* * *
—
The next morning everyone was in the hospital. My parents, Jennifer Putnam, Andy, Miranda, and Maya. For a very brief moment, Jessica the paramedic even popped in to say hi. And as much as they were all definitely there to see me, they were all there at the same time because the president was coming by to do her press thing. The president’s twenty-four-hour video moratorium meant that we had some free time to prepare and (dare I say it) relax in the few hours before she showed up.
I got to hang alone with just my parents for an hour or so, which was welcome. They were doing everything they could to hold it together and not show me how freaked-out they were (which they, of course, failed at). It didn’t really occur to me until then that I had been making decisions that would affect them so deeply.
They babbled on about Tom’s honeymoon and their weirdo neighbors and did everything they could to make it feel like a normal parent-kid chat. You know what they didn’t do, though? They didn’t, not one single time, say, “What were you thinking?!” Not because they knew or because they understood—I really don’t think they did. They didn’t ask that because I sure as hell didn’t stab myself in the back, and when a radical extremist stabs someone in the back, the only person at fault is the radical extremist.
“But you got to hang out with the president, though!” my mom said, trying again to turn the conversation away from the part where her daughter almost died.
“Yeah, I mean, you also are going to get to hang out with the president,” I reminded her.
“But that’s not the same, she came to see you because of something you did!”
“More like something that was done to me.”
My dad continued Mom’s thought: “I think you know that’s not the whole story, hon. We’re very proud of you, April, for taking this opportunity to say kind and thoughtful things even when being kind and thoughtful isn’t easy right now.”
“It’s just the identity I built up, it’s not even really me.”
They both smiled at me like idiot puppies, and then my mom said, “April, you’re not building a brand, you’re building yourself.” Dad’s eyes were misty as he added, “It’s so easy to forget, with everything that’s happened this year, that you’re only twenty-three years old.”
“Ugghhh,” I said, because that was my line. They just both smiled like idiots.
A while later, Robin came in to introduce me to a stylist, Vi, who was going to make me look nice for my photo op. I am aware that I am an attractive person, but there was a time when I hated having power over people because of it. That’s one of the things I loved so much about Maya. Unlike anyone else I had ever dated, I think she had to get to know me before she started thinking I was hot. And that was really hot.