The fourth begins just as she spots her suitcase on the carousel, so the words “Your daughter was in a car accident” don’t register right away.
She makes herself listen to the entire thing one more time, breathe, and when it ends and the nightmare doesn’t, she turns and runs.
The suitcase takes another turn on the carousel.
Julia is almost halfway through her calculus homework when the phone in the hall rings.
It makes her jump, because no one ever calls her house. She has a cell and her father has three, and Julia has never understood why they needed a landline too.
Regardless, she goes into the hall to answer, because conic parametric equations are giving her a headache.
“Hello?”
“Is this George De—”
“No,” she says. “This is Julia. His daughter?”
“Well, this is the emergency contact number we have for Elizabeth Emerson. Is it correct?”
“Liz?” She twirls the phone cord around her fingers and wishes, suddenly, that she had never let Liz put her dad down as an emergency contact. It wasn’t like he was ever around for emergencies. Stupid, she thought. “Yes, this is the right number. Is Liz—what’s going on?”
There’s a pause. “Is your father home?”
Julia pushes down her annoyance, chokes it, cinches the phone line tighter around her fingers and watches them turn purple. “No,” she says. “Is something wrong? Is Liz okay?”
“I’m not authorized to release the information to anyone except Mr. George Dev—”
“Did something happen to Liz?”
Another hesitation, and then a sigh. “Elizabeth was admitted to St. Bartholomew’s Memorial Hospital a little while ago. She was in a car accident—”
Julia drops the phone, grabs her car keys, and Googles directions to the hospital on the way to her car.
Kennie is on a bus with the rest of Meridian High’s dance team. At the moment the Mercedes flips over, she is leaning over the back of her seat, trying to grab Jenny Vickham’s bag of sour gummies while the bus driver yells at her to sit down. She is happy, because soon she’ll dance beneath spotlights as the only junior in the front row. Soon they’ll win the competition and come back laughing. Soon she’ll spin and leap and forget about the baby and the abortion and Kyle and Liz.
I’m happy, she tells herself. Be happy.
Both Monica Emerson and Julia are too busy unraveling to remember Kennie. They couldn’t have called anyway—Kennie has no phone service on the bus, and her phone is about to die. As Monica and Julia rush for the hospital, Kennie is traveling in the opposite direction, blissfully ignorant of the fact that her best friend is dying.
She probably won’t know for a while. No, she’ll come home after winning the competition, cheeks sore from smiling so much, stomach cramped from laughing the whole ride back. She will take a shower and exchange her sparkles and spandex for a worn pair of pajamas. She will sit in the darkness of her room, her wet hair piled atop her head, and scroll through her Facebook feed. She will find it clogged with a story told through statuses, and it will take her breath away.
CHAPTER FOUR
Stay Alive
Liz had planned the crash with an uncharacteristic attention to detail, but not once did St. Bartholomew’s Memorial Hospital make an appearance in her plans, because she was supposed to die on impact.
She had been excessively careful in choosing the location, however. The highway, the hill, the icy turn, all nearly an hour from her house. She had even driven along the route once, swerved a little, chipped the paint on the Mercedes, for practice. But because she had chosen to crash her car so far away, no one is there to meet her when the ambulance pulls into St. Bartholomew’s. No one is there to hold her hand as the doctors wheel her to surgery.
There’s only me.
I can only watch.
Stay alive.
I watch the doctors arrive. I watch the flashing scalpels, the eyebrows that curve downward. I watch the hands, the white latex splashed with red.
I watch, and I remember the time Liz fractured her shin in kindergarten playing soccer, already too in love with the sport and already too vain for shin guards, and how we went to Children’s Hospital instead of this one. That surgery room had a border of giraffes jumping rope, and Liz had held my hand until the anesthesia pulled her away.
But there are no giraffes jumping rope here, and Liz’s hand is broken. This isn’t like that surgery, or any of the other ones—the one at St. Nicks’ when Liz tore her ACL during a powder puff game, or the one at the dentist’s when she’d had her wisdom teeth removed. During those, the doctors had been relaxed. There had been iPod docks in the corners, playing Beethoven or U2 or Maroon 5, and the doctors had seemed . . . well, human.
These surgeons are all hands and knives, cutting and peeling Liz apart, sewing and sewing her back together as though they can trap her soul and lock it away under her skin. I wonder how much of her will be left when they finish.
Stay alive.