“Liz is strong,” the doctor says, as though he has any idea. “She’s young, and very fit. She’s able to pull through this. If she’s determined to, she will.”
He goes on to say that their first priority is to stabilize all the hemorrhaging and internal injuries, and they’ll do another operation in a few days, if. Neither of them notices the boy by the window. He is braced against the arm of his chair and straining to hear. He catches only the worst snatches, “extensive internal bleeding” and “a ruptured lung” and “no one knows” and “but” and “if.” The rest is drowned out by the sound of his heart throwing itself against his rib cage.
His name is Liam Oliver. He saw the crumpled, smoking Mercedes at the bottom of a hill on his way to Costco and called the police. Now he sits at the edge of the waiting room, his eyes on the window, her name still on his lips.
He is very much in love with Liz Emerson, and it seems that she will never know.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Pop Quiz
There’s something about Julia that makes heads turn.
Even in the emergency room. Even in sweatpants and a shirt that has a hole in the armpit. Even with her smeared eyeliner darkening the circles under her eyes. Even with the scene of the crash still impressed on the insides of her eyelids, so that she sees it every time she blinks.
Even now.
Don’t blink, she tells herself as she almost knocks over a table on her way to the nurse’s station. She doesn’t notice anything, not Dr. Henderson and Monica turning the corner for the ICU, not the classmate sitting by the window.
She had stared at it for so long. There had been so much traffic. Long, long lines of it, stretching past what remained of Liz’s car.
“Hello,” says Julia. Hesitantly—Julia is a hesitant person. She turns heads, but she hates being stared at. Once upon a time, she didn’t care. But that was a long time ago. “I . . . um. My friend Liz is . . . she was admitted earlier today, I think. Elizabeth Emerson?”
The nurse looks up. “Are you a family member?” she asks.
“No,” says Julia, and though she knows the battle is already lost, she can’t help but add, “She’s my best friend.”
It didn’t start out that way.
Halfway through seventh grade, Julia’s parents decided that they’d had enough of each other. Her mother got the house, all the furniture, a million dollars from her worthless cheating bastard of a husband with sinfully overpriced daughter-stealing lawyers, and her dad, of course, got Julia.
Seventh grade was a horrible year. Seventh grade was puberty. Seventh grade was when Life Learning Skills became about sex and drugs instead of exercise and nutrition. Seventh grade was a year of discovery, of self and survival, of becoming. Liz discovered bitchiness, decided selfishness was essential to survival, and became the person she would come to hate. But that was okay, because everyone else acted the same way.
Except Julia.
Julia was . . . different.
Julia didn’t wear Crocs. She didn’t wear the flowy capri things that everyone else did, she didn’t wear her skirts over jeans, she didn’t use sports wrap as headbands, she didn’t layer her tank tops. She didn’t even check her phone all that often. Julia wore brands that the rest of them wouldn’t even hear of for another five years. She didn’t watch the shows that everyone else watched and she didn’t listen to the music the rest of them listened to.
She was brave, and no one is allowed to be brave in middle school.
Liz hated her. She hated her because Julia didn’t need to dye her hair or wear makeup to be beautiful, because she just was. She hated her because Julia didn’t care, didn’t care what people thought, didn’t care when they stared—not back then. She hated her because Julia was different, and that was enough. Liz hated her, so everyone else did too.
Julia was strange. Julia asked for it. Julia brought it upon herself.
The final straw was this: before Julia had gotten pulled into a higher math class, she was the only one in pre-algebra to ever do her homework. When their teacher one day decided, without warning or precedence, to collect their homework, and Julia was the only one who turned it in, he gave them a pop quiz.
And since she didn’t know any of the answers, Liz took a piece of notebook paper and passed it around the class so that each person could write down one thing they thought of Julia.
They said things like “You’re not even that pretty” and “Go back to where you came from.” Some drew pictures and some drew diagrams, arrows linking words like weird and stuck-up and annoying. When the piece of paper made its way back to Liz, she folded it up and slid it across the table to Julia.