“How is she?” Julia asks.
The nurse turns and smiles at her, and Julia can see in her eyes that she’s considering a lie. But in the end, the nurse says, “Honey, she is an absolute mess. But she’s holding on.”
Julia can’t help it. She begins to cry. She rubs her eyes furiously because everyone is crying, and honestly, she’s sick of it. She sees why Liz hates it so much.
But she can’t stop.
The nurse gives her a sad smile and leaves, and Julia sits down in the chair that Liam vacated moments before. She touches one of Liz’s hands, and it’s so cold that a tremor runs through Julia. Liz always had cold hands. Bad circulation. Julia takes Liz’s fingers in hers, careful to avoid the needles and tubes, and tries to rub some warmth into them.
But Julia’s hands are cold too, as she stares at Liz’s quiet face. There were many days when Liz was strangely, inexplicably quiet, but not like this. There were many parties at which she had found Liz crying, but they had never really talked about why. Behind all of her wildness and anger and insanity, Liz was a girl of silence, and Julia always let her keep her secrets.
Now Julia wonders exactly how many secrets Liz had.
Julia didn’t drink at that first party.
She didn’t like the smell of beer, and she was already drunk on the fact that they were there at all. Kennie was curious, but not, at that point, enough to try it.
Liz, on the other hand, celebrated by forgetting everything she had ever learned in health class. She had three Solo cups of beer and was completely wasted.
Near one in the morning, when Kennie’s brother arrived to pick them up—having been paid fifty bucks to keep all of their parents ignorant of their whereabouts—Julia realized Liz was missing.
She found her upstairs, in bed with Zack Hayes, and he was trying to get Liz’s shirt off.
Liz was trying to say no, but she was too drunk to get the word out.
Zack leaped off the bed when Julia entered, and Julia, after getting over her initial shock, decided that the best thing to do was to get Liz out of there. She dragged Liz down the stairs to find Kennie pushed against the wall, wrapped around some senior whose hands were already at her shirt buttons. Julia grabbed her too, and she pulled them out into the night.
Something changed that night. Liz was different after that.
That night, Liz’s self-respect began to chip away, and then she had let it fall, piece by piece.
I think Julia is beginning to realize this. She remembers what the doctor told Monica yesterday, what Monica told her, what she told Kennie, and what Kennie told everyone else: that Liz will only pull through this if she’s determined to.
The nurse escorts her back to the waiting room. She had run into Liz’s room after hearing a crash, and she found Julia beside an overturned chair, shaking.
Julia doesn’t struggle. She’s held silent by the overwhelming fear that Liz Emerson, her best friend and the most obstinate person she knows, no longer wants to fight.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
The Maternity Ward
Kennie wanders around the hospital until she finds Jake seeking comfort with a young, pretty, overly sympathetic nurse. She hears a bit of what he’s saying as she walks closer, “something real” and “in love” and “lost without her.” She thinks about hitting him again, or maybe kicking him this time, but in the end, she doesn’t. She takes a picture of his brilliantly purpling eye, flips him off, and starts back to the waiting room.
Unfortunately, Kennie’s sense of direction is virtually nonexistent, and within a minute, she is hopelessly lost.
She sees an elevator and heads for it. She begins hitting buttons, figuring one of them will take her back to the emergency room. None of them do. She passes the pediatric ward, the cancer ward.
And then she finds herself at the maternity ward.
She steps out of the elevator. She hears the faint, thin wails of babies, and her hands go automatically to her stomach. The flatness makes her throat close, and all she wants is to sit and curl around herself, around the baby who is no longer inside her.
On the day of their junior homecoming, the humidity was at 100 percent.
Liz didn’t bother trying to curl her hair. Julia helped her stack it all atop her head while Kennie struggled with the iron and the hair spray, and when they were finally dressed and ready, they went to the beach to take pictures.
Jake was drunk when he showed up, and their pictures showed it. Liz told him not to drive and he told her to relax and then to fuck off, and by then she was pissed enough to let him go.