My eyes landed on Harry. His lines were sharply drawn. He was beautiful. Staring back at me. I mouthed “I love you” because I could. Because it was true. Because vaguely I remembered him saying so to me the day before in my front yard, and even before that, at the beach, and standing on the rock, front heated by the fire, I got that he had not meant it in the same way we loved the others.
There was a trace of a smile on Harry’s lips and his glowing eyes were on mine until the second Conner stepped in front of him.
It was so unexpected that no one believed it was happening. One boy throwing himself at another. The boys slammed to the rock, one of them on his back and the other on top. The boy on top throwing fists. Conner delivering three or four punches before they started to roll. I let out a scream that was echoed by others. The edge of the rock was close. They thought they had more room. Harry was trying to regain a little ground.
But Conner and Harry flew from the rock. They fell, embracing. They were on their own, together, plummeting to Earth like the meteorite had tens of thousands of years ago.
The difference: Harry was flesh, blood, and spine when he hit.
Conner’s weight was on top of him.
Graham ran for the edge of the rock. He jumped. I scrambled down its side, found Graham shoving Conner’s body off Harry. One of them was crying, big, shuddering sobs. I thought it was Harry; he was the hurt one. His eyelids were half closed, crescents of irises and pupils stared up at space.
Conner cried, “No, no, no man. You okay? I had to do it. I was supposed to do it.”
“Har?” I leaned over him. “Harry?”
Nothing. His eyelids began to make a slow drop.
I stopped being a human girl. I was a crouched animal at Harry’s side, terror all I tasted. There was more shouting from the rock. Viv’s voice shot through the racket. “An ambulance is coming,” she yelled.
“Get your mom!” Graham screamed.
I must have turned to see Viv go, skirt tangling around her ankles as she ran, or else I’ve played the night over and over and I’ve invented memories so that I can see it from every angle.
Graham was on his phone, dialing 9-1-1.
“They’re coming,” I said up to him. But he stood over us. Conner’s outstretched arm reached for Harry. Graham was there, heaving him back, shoving him hard. “Don’t touch him,” he bellowed, knocking his glasses from his face, leaving them in the dirt.
Back on the phone, a precise, clinical voice that had panic slowly bleeding into it. “Tell me what I can do for him. No—listen—he’s fallen onto his back, twelve feet up. Tell me what to do. I know you’ve sent an ambulance, but what can I do now? Now. Tell me.”
I held one of Harry’s hands between mine. It was burning up but strangely limp, like the dove in the moment after I drove the pin through its heart. Harry’s lids had finished their drop. I leaned over, put my ear near his parted lips, and caught the barest whisper of breath. I moved my mouth to his ear.
“Harry, the ambulance is coming. Viv went to get Ina. Harry, please, just keep breathing.” My ear went to his mouth again. I waited. I held my breath. I can’t explain it except to say that it was the roar of the ocean trapped in a seashell coming from Harry. My ear pressed to his mouth, capturing the last sound he’d ever make. I kissed the corner of his lips.
I whispered to him, “Harrison Rocha, I have loved you since you showed up to save us from boredom and our bad tempers and the incomplete lives we had before you. Graham and Vivy and I love you, Harry.”
34
Modern medicine pulls off all kinds of miracles, and even after the paramedics had set his neck in a brace, shined lights in his undilating eyes, and administered three bursts from paddles on his chest without results, I held out hope. How could I not? He was Harry. We’d been sent on a course to find each other. We had invisible forces on our side. We were the Order of IV.
They loaded him in an ambulance as the police arrived. I took three running strides to chase it. Arms closed around me—a police officer—and I tried to throw them off. I was shoved between Graham and Viv. Ordered to stop fighting.
“If I’d stopped him,” Graham kept saying, rubbing hard at his forehead. “If I’d stopped them in time.”
The ambulance had taken too long to arrive. Fifteen minutes of waiting for it to spot Campbell and Jess, who went to flag it down at the mouth of the access road. Viv had returned from her house in that time; Ina wasn’t home but at work.
The police took their time processing the scene. Photographing. Shouting urgently when they found the dagger tipped in blood. The IV drawn on the rock. The truth serum they sniffed warily. The Mistress of Rebellion and Secrets on her throne of rocks.
The police drove us to the hospital in the back of a cruiser, and two officers came into the emergency room with us. Sat by the door, silently watching. In the waiting room, Graham sat doubled over, tears spotting the tops of his shoes, his glasses abandoned by the rock. Viv spoke urgently to the woman across the receiving desk. She raised her voice when answers weren’t given. She could really project—I think about that a lot, what a set of lungs she had, how she could make herself heard, how I was counting on spending my whole life hearing her talk and act and laugh and sing.
“He’s Harry,” I said. “He’s going to be okay. Isn’t he, Graham? Isn’t Harry going to be all right? They’ll fix him. Induce a coma. Stop a brain bleed. Give him medicine. Maybe he has internal bleeding?” I couldn’t say enough. If I kept listing off possibilities, hope hadn’t run out.
Harry was dead on arrival. Dead before the paramedics got to him. No way to save him. Broken neck. Severed spinal cord. Brain-dead instantly. More than his broken body, the thought of Harry’s mind being gone was unfathomable. How if a song had been playing, he wouldn’t have been able to say if it was his perfect one or not.
Harry’s parents arrived, bracing each other, quickly ushered back to Harry. Beyond the nurses’ station, in a white anonymous room they’d probably never forget. Simon was there too. Simon didn’t have a big brother any longer. When the officers watching us went to get coffee, Graham whispered to Viv and me what Harry set in motion.
“I was supposed to drag Conner off once he got a few good hits in. It was Harry’s idea. Let him split my lip or break a couple ribs, he said. Begged me. Pull him off once he’s done damage for the cops to see. He’d slipped the secret rite in Conner’s locker the day before.”
“Why?” I wanted to know.
“Harry’s dad,” Graham said. “It was Conner; Conner’s older brother, Bowden; and his brother’s friends, partying on the bleachers by the soccer field. His dad saw their faces. Took the beating. Didn’t tell anyone. I guess he didn’t want to get into it with Sebastian Welsh. Harry’s mom loves their house. Loves this town. Harry’s dad was groggy and medicated after one of the last surgeries, muttered something to Harry. Harry put it together.”
“Harry—”
“He did it so one of the fucks who hurt his father would be held accountable for something,” Graham said.