“I’m telling you, I’m fine,” Miranda told the nurse for the hundredth time. “I just got overheated, is all.”
“Miss Grey,” the round, stern black woman in blue scrubs said, “you’re severely dehydrated and you said yourself you haven’t eaten in three days. We need to do some blood work—”
Miranda snorted.
“—to find out why you’ve lost your appetite, and we need to get some fluids into you.”
Kat, who was hovering near the entrance to the cubicle, said, “Mira . . . honey, listen to her. You’ve got to eat.”
Miranda hopped down from the examination table, standing at her full height, which barely came up to the nurse’s nose. She was in her bra and panties, and the nurse was clearly the don’t-fuck-with-me-sugar type, but the woman moved back a foot or so anyway as Miranda’s aura hit her.
“I want to go home,” Miranda said calmly. “I am refusing treatment. I’ll sign whatever forms you need me to.”
The nurse looked like she wanted to give her an earful but instead just shook her head and said, “Fine.”
Kat was giving Miranda a slightly nervous look. “What the hell has gotten into you lately?” she asked as soon as they were alone.
Miranda looked up at the ceiling. “I’m fine, Kat. Can you drive me home?”
“Sure. But only if you’ll let me take you out to dinner first. And only if I see you eat.”
Miranda crossed her arms and regarded her friend for a minute. Kat was genuinely worried for her; she was only trying to help, just like she’d always tried to do. There was no reason to treat her badly. “I’m sorry,” Miranda said with chagrin. “I don’t mean to be a bitch. It’s just . . . I don’t want them to poke and prod me. There’s nothing wrong with me that a good meal and a long sleep won’t cure.”
Kat stared her down, but eventually looked away, making an I give up! noise. “Okay, okay. I’ll go bring the car around to the exit. You sign your forms or whatever, and don’t breathe fire at anybody else.”
“Can you take this?”
Kat took her guitar with a grunt of assent and left.
Miranda pulled her clothes back on, glad she’d had the presence of mind to ask the tech for her guitar before Kat had whisked her away from the club to the Brackenridge Hospital ER. Otherwise she’d have had to go back for it, and all she really wanted was to go home.
As she put her boots on, she had to stop and breathe. This place . . . there was so much pain. Everyone here was afraid. Afraid of disease, of hurting, of death . . . especially death. She could feel the doctors and nurses moving among the patients, their calm heads like stars in the blackness of space. Their way was to find answers, to hunt down and kill illnesses and stitch together holes. What would they find if they looked at her blood right now? She had no idea, but she knew it scared her.
She drew the curtain aside and poked her head out of the cubicle; her nurse was nowhere in sight. Good.
Miranda gathered her bag and left. Halfway to the exit she saw the nurse and ducked into an empty cubicle until she passed.
The nurses’ station was near her, and she saw through the edge of the curtain that a man in scrubs was standing there filling something out while a woman in a different style of uniform—white, with a badge pinned to her shirt instead of hanging from a lanyard—waited with a large red cooler at her feet.
“Twelve units,” the male nurse was reading off. “Five O positive, five O negative, one AB positive, one AB negative. Sounds about right. Oh, wait . . . wasn’t there supposed to be another cooler with the As and Bs? Or was that coming separately?”
The woman opened the cooler and looked inside. Miranda saw dark red in plastic, and her stomach turned a somersault. She recognized that packaging: a bag with a black-and-white label divided into four sections, bar-coded with type and donor ID.
The roof of her mouth started to itch again. Her hand tightened on the curtain.
“I think you’re right,” the woman was saying. “Let me run out and check the van to be sure.”
She hurried out of the ER, leaving the cooler behind.
Miranda stared hard at the desk nurse. Look away. Look away.
He turned to the left and began to dig around in a drawer for something.
Miranda darted out of the cubicle and, keeping her intention focused on the nurse, shoved her hand inside the cooler. Before she could even think about what she was doing, she had seized one of the bags inside and stuck it inside her jacket.
She all but ran for the exit, letting the nurse’s mind go at the last minute before she burst outside, where Kat was waiting for her.
She slid into the passenger seat. “Thanks,” she said.
Kat did not look at all happy with her. “Anything for you, sugarbean. Now, where do you want to eat? Kerbey?”
“Okay. That’s fine. Actually . . . can we run by my place first? I’d like to get out of these clothes and put my guitar away.”
“Sure.”
Kat drove away from the hospital, and Miranda kept her arms crossed over her chest, feeling the coldness of the bag seeping through her shirt. What was she doing? Had she lost her mind? She’d just stolen blood from a hospital. It might have been meant for babies or someone’s crippled old mother. She was riding in a car with her friend as if everything was normal, and she had blood in her pocket.
“Wait here,” Miranda said when they reached the apartment complex. “I’ll be back in five minutes.”
She unloaded her guitar and went into the kitchen, taking the bag and stowing it in the fridge—for a second she wondered what shelf it should go on. The crisper? She stuck it behind the milk, then went to change.
She forced herself to eat most of a short stack of pancakes, though it was a struggle not to throw them right back up again. She had barely eaten anything since the burrito Faith had fed her, but it wasn’t for lack of appetite like the nurse had thought. She had tried to eat. She’d tried tempting herself with all her favorite foods, even ice cream from Amy’s. Everything tasted like sawdust and ash.
It had surprised her that she was dehydrated, though. She’d been drinking water continuously, though it never seemed to slake her thirst. She’d bought a case of Vitamin Water so that she’d be getting at least a few nutrients.
The amazing thing was that she felt amazing. She was constantly hungry and thirsty, sometimes to the point of crying, but when she could put it out of her mind, she felt like Superwoman. Since she’d left Sophie’s she felt like she could fly. She didn’t want that feeling to go away.
As soon as she saw the blood in the cooler, it all made horrible sense.
“So Drew’s a wreck,” Kat was saying over her coffee. “He feels terrible. Are you planning to forgive him?”
“Forgive him? For what?” Miranda asked, blinking. She hadn’t really been listening, but she remembered quickly enough. “Oh, that. I guess. I know he didn’t mean any harm.”
“You should tell him that. He’s really nuts about you—right now he’s convinced you hate him and he’s on the verge of hara-kiri.”
“I’ll e-mail him,” Miranda assured her.
“When are you going to tell me more about this other guy?”
Miranda smiled a little. “What do you want to know?”
“You said you met him at rehab. What does he do?”
She cast about in her mind for a suitable description that wouldn’t be too much of a lie. “He’s in law enforcement,” she said. “He’s the one that took me there in the first place.”