Ryan steps onto the gleaming hardwood. Ryan, followed by Xavier. I do a double take, my mouth dropping open.
He scans oodles of teenaged faces, clearly, frantically searching, until I make sense of his arrival—he’s got to be here for me, right?—and rise from my seat.
He spots me and shouts, “Elise!”
My name echoes like thunder through the silent gymnasium. I stumble down the crowded row in which I’ve been sitting. Befuddled stares track me as I hurry down the stairs, my heart pounding because something’s wrong. Ryan wouldn’t be here otherwise.
I sprint across the gym, my flip-flops slapping the glossy floor. Distantly, I hear Mrs. Cruz call, “Excuse me!” and I’m not sure if she’s questioning me or admonishing me, but I ignore her, my ponytail swinging behind me as I run. I meet Ryan and Xavier at the door, grabbing their arms, pulling them into the corridor, where a man—a teacher or a security guard, I think—ushers us away from the gym.
“You’re not authorized to be in the building,” he says to my intruder friends.
“Yeah,” Xavier says. “It’s an emergency. We’re leaving now.”
My stomach drops out. An emergency. I knew it.
Xavier leads Ryan and me down the hall, away from the man and the gym and the orientation I knew I shouldn’t have come to. With every footfall, I think Mom? Audrey? Janie? Mom? Audrey? Janie? But I can’t bring myself to ask.
This can’t be happening again. I can’t lose someone else.
Despite my escalating alarm, I hustle to keep up with the boys’ long strides and, finally, push my panic away long enough to speak. “What happened?”
We’ve reached the lobby. Ryan grabs my hand as we push through the doors and into the sunlight. He’s towing me along, toward where Xavier’s Jeep waits, parked crookedly in the fire lane. “It’s Mati,” he says.
“Mati?!”
Ryan squeezes my hand. “We’ve got to go.”
I yank free of him, planting my feet on the concrete. I’m shocked and I’m confused and I’m tired of being dragged along, clueless.
“Elise,” Ryan says, gently now. “We need to go to the hospital.”
“Why?”
Xavier drops a hand onto my shoulder. “Because he’s hurt. He needs you.”
We scramble into the Jeep. Xavier drives, swift but sure. Ryan sits shotgun, fiddling with the radio. I’m in the backseat, gusts of wind riling my hair. I’m trying not to throw up.
I think: Mati is strong and steady, smart and sweet. Bad things don’t happen to good people—he’s practically invincible.
And yet …
Cypress Beach isn’t big enough for a hospital of its own, so we’re on our way to San Jose. I borrow Ryan’s phone to text my mom. I tell her that orientation’s done and that I’m spending the rest of the day with my friends. Then I dial Mati because I can’t not. The line rings unceasingly, leaving me full of apprehension and fear, buzzing with the need to get to him, get to him, get to him.
“What happened?” I ask Ryan over the wind whistling through the Jeep’s soft-top.
“He was jumped,” he says. His words sound garbled, as if they’re painful to speak. “It was pretty bad.”
My imagination conjures a slide show of horrific snapshots: Mati attacked, Mati hurt, Mati bleeding. I blink it all away to keep from bursting into tears. “Jumped where?”
“Cypress Beach. Early this morning. In an alley close to Van Dough’s.”
“Oh God. Ryan!”
He reaches back to touch my knee. “He’s gonna be okay. He called me, so he’s conscious. He’s gotta be well enough to operate a phone, you know?”
No, I don’t know. Because I didn’t get to speak to him. I couldn’t, because my phone is sitting in my mom’s bedroom, useless.
I hate her.
“He tried to call you first,” Ryan says, another attempt at consoling me. “Then I did, too. I had to go to your cottage to figure out where you were.”
“My mom took my phone away,” I mumble, embarrassed. “She doesn’t like Mati.”
Xavier flies past a beat-up Nissan. He’s crushing Highway 101. “Why not?”
I scrub my hands over my face; the last forty-eight hours feel more like forty-eight years. “She doesn’t have a good reason. She refuses to give him a chance. She pins her ignorance on those people, the Afghans who killed my brother. Like Mati has anything to do with them.”
“Damn,” Xavier says. “I didn’t realize. I’m sorry.”
Ryan gives me an optimistic smile. “She’ll come around.”
“No,” I say, turning away to gaze out the window. “I don’t think she will.”
What’s more? I don’t care.
elise
We pull up to Sacred Heart Hospital after fifty minutes on the road.
It’s a large building, white and modern, sterile and unadorned compared with the quaint coziness I’ve grown accustomed to in Cypress Beach. Xavier drops me off at the main entrance, after he and Ryan promise to come up in a bit. I thank them, smoothing a hand over my wind-ravaged hair as I hurry inside. I’ve still got Ryan’s phone and I press it to my ear, trying Mati’s number again as I navigate the lobby. No answer.
The fact that he’s so close, yet entirely unreachable, is making me crazy.
I give his name at the reception desk, and the elderly liaison working the counter presents me with a trifold map, pointing to the wing where he’s being treated, and circling his room in red ink. “Take this with you,” he says, pushing the map into my hands. He raises a liver-spotted hand and points to the bay of elevators behind me. “Those are your best bet.”
I hightail it to the elevators and jab the up button with an impatient finger. It illuminates like a full moon. There’s a chime as the doors lurch open and then I’m inside, alone and bouncing as the lift makes a slow skyward journey. When the doors open again, the sharp scent of disinfectant floods my nose and I have to take a steadying breath to recover my balance. I step into the corridor.
My flip-flops squeak as I jog down the hallway, my heart thudding hard against my ribs. I pull to an abrupt halt when I spot Mati’s name on a small whiteboard outside one of the many doors. I check the room number against the information on my map, then step up to peer through the little window.
The room is colorless, painted in shadows. It’s empty but for Mati, apparently asleep, appearing uncharacteristically frail under the crisp sheet covering the lower half of his body. His eyelids look purple, almost translucent. There’s a deep bruise covering the left side of his face, and his skin is puffy, swollen. My stomach rolls over; he looks dreadful. If it wasn’t for the muffled beep, beep, beep of the monitors overseeing his vitals, I’d think he was—
I ease the door open, stepping silently through and, yes. He’s here, and I’m here, and the world spins again.
I loiter close to the entryway, watching him sleep as the wall clock’s second hand makes rotation after rotation. The longer I look at him, the more I hurt. His trampled form does terrible things to my chest—crushes it with matchless force, making it difficult to siphon air. I feel my hand move to my thrashing heart; I feel my knees begin to buckle. I reach for the doorjamb to keep from crumpling.
The shape of him, shrunken and defeated, the shape of his pain …
I whisper his name.
His eyes flutter open, spiderwebbed with fine vessels. They find me, and he says, “Elise.”
I close the distance separating us, taking his hand gingerly in both of mine. “Are you—?”
“I’m fine.” His voice is raspy and weak, those two little words requiring a lot of effort.
“But you look—”
“I’m fine. Especially now that you’ve found me.”
He doesn’t look fine—not even close. The bruise on his cheek is worse up close, and his lip’s split, stained with a spot of dried blood. His hospital gown reveals his throat, his clavicles, his long, ocher arms, skin mottled with angry red scrapes. An IV disappears into the wrist farthest from me, its long tube trailing up to a bag of clear liquid. His breath is shallow and brings about an occasional wince and, God, I want to kill the person who did this to him.
“Oh, Mati…”
“It’s just a few bruises.”