“You need to check on Rose,” she told me.
I cocked my head. Rose? That didn’t make sense, what she was saying, but I turned to take a halting step toward the woods, back where I’d left her, where we’d cowered together in the shadows.
The first thing I noticed was Avery, which was also wrong. How had she gotten here? Last I’d seen her, she’d been standing behind Mr. Howe. Yet there she was, sprawled on the ground with her long legs splayed and twisting in the dirt. Mad thoughts ran through my head, like not letting Rose catch me looking at Avery’s legs, which was the stupidest thing because she wasn’t going to care about that now.
The gun fell from my hand to clatter on the ground. That was when I saw her, my Rose. She was a wounded bird, a fallen flower, a crumpled form, lying beside Avery. Avery tried desperately to help her, her face grim and focused. Only Rose wasn’t grim. She smiled at the sight of me, despite having been shot, and I watched in horror as the bright blossom of red seeping from her midsection, staining her shirt, grew. And grew.
A whimper escaped me.
“Oh, Ben,” she said, still smiling as I approached, dropping to my knees to be at her side. “Don’t faint.”
28.
GRACE UNDER FIRE wasn’t a phrase I would’ve ever used to describe Rose. Not until that night, that moment, when she lay in my arms, all gossamer softness and fragile courage. When she murmured soothing words to me, despite the blood and the bullet hole, and kept me from losing my shit and losing consciousness.
This was in stark contrast to the roles we’d played over the prior two years, when she’d been the unsettled one—flashes of brilliance among the storm clouds. But there could be no shine without the drab, the dependable, and that was where I’d always come in. Although I never saw our relationship in the crass way Avery had put it; I never once bemoaned that Rose was better than me.
In fact, I needed her to be.
Looking back, it is true that in the first few months we were together, I had a hard time conceiving of myself as being joined with Rose. Being joined with anyone, I guess. It wasn’t that I didn’t have friends or people in my life to make small talk with, but after the accident, that only went so far. In the ways that mattered and perhaps only I understood, I was separate, isolated: pitied for my injuries and loathed for my sins. Studying was the only thing within my power, and to that end, I set myself to staying up at night, memorizing facts, rewriting essays, and solving equations. I yearned to be measured and validated, to be deemed acceptable, in matters of grades and rubrics and honors. If nothing else.
But sophomore year, that all changed. That was the year Rose found me studying in the theater lobby. When she made me hers, which wasn’t freedom but felt far less lonely. And if freedom wasn’t free, at least Rose was. She was more than that, in the ways she pushed me to be better than whoever I was born to be. When I blurted out that I loved her after only knowing her for five short weeks, she didn’t say she loved me back. Instead she sat me down and made me watch some old movie she liked in which a couple argues over the definition of love. Unsurprisingly, in the end, it’s the girl who gets the final say on what love is: trust, admiration, and respect.
“Do you trust me?” Rose whispered in my ear when the movie was over.
I was ashamed—mortified, really—about what I’d told her, so I answered honestly, “I don’t trust myself.”
“You should.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m always wrong.”
Rose wrinkled her nose. “You’re not always wrong. You’re scared to be right. What did you tell Johnny Rheem when he asked if I was your girlfriend?”
I blushed. “I don’t remember.”
“You told him you didn’t know what I was.”
“Yeah.”
“Not knowing what I am to you doesn’t sound like trust.”
But I admire and respect you, I longed to say. That’s more than what I feel for anyone. To me, that’s love. It’s everything. It’s all I have to give you. But that wasn’t what she wanted to hear.
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
In return for my acquiescence, Rose offered one of her most winning smiles. The kind that set my body ablaze and reminded me that keeping her happy was the most important thing I could do. It also reminded me that, like studying, I could apply myself and learn what to do and what not to do until I excelled at her happiness. Until I was the very best at Rose tending.
“Don’t be sorry, Ben,” she told me, her eyes twinkling with victory. “Be better.”
—
Shock is a powerful tool, I guess. Like Rose’s grace, it ended up being the thing that kept us from breaking down as a group. That let us set our emotions aside momentarily and do the things we needed to. Like taking care of Rose’s wound—the Preacher’s bullet had gone in and out of her left side, seemingly missing any major organs—and while it looked awful, she wasn’t in immediate danger. She was awake and talking, and we were able to stop the bleeding with towels plucked from the clothesline that stretched between the trees. The exit wound was the nastier one, her flesh ripped apart by the force of an object it couldn’t contain.
Infection was probably the biggest concern, Clay said in a hushed voice, while he and I were crouched beside her, trying to figure out what we should do. I argued for leaving right then, for racing down to the staging area where the cars were parked and driving for help, but Clay convinced me that getting lost or injured in the dark wouldn’t do Rose any good. The steep access road, with its fallen trees and washed-out sections of trail, was sketchy enough in good light, and we had no maps or compasses. Nothing.
“Besides, Tomás could already be getting help,” Clay whispered. “Maybe he saw what was going on and knew what to do. That’s possible, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know,” I said because I had no clue where Tomás had gone in the first place. He hadn’t turned up and that didn’t feel like a hopeful thing. But I didn’t tell Clay that. I couldn’t.
We agreed to leave the instant the sun came up, a choice that left me sick and edgy. But it was late already. It wouldn’t be long before Rose would be in a hospital and under a doctor’s care. She nodded and smiled when we told her this. Then Clay and I lifted her, as gently as we could, to move her into a camping chair we’d set by the fire. We put blankets on her.
We did our best to keep her warm.