“I’m only here because Johnson made it sound like it would come up in my performance review if I didn’t show up,” Calvin admitted. “He’s always making us go to happy hour.”
“You don’t want to?” I asked, surprised. “I mean…”
“I’ve got a girlfriend,” Calvin said, blushing. “A pretty serious one.”
After that, I didn’t feel so bad about leaving. It helped to know that there was someone else who felt out of place, who didn’t want to be there. Calvin said he’d walk me home, and I said he didn’t have to, and he said he’d feel better about it, that you never knew after dark, and I had to suppress a smile, wondering what he’d think if he knew exactly how much trouble I’d actually gotten into in the last year.
“I’m going to head home,” I said loudly, gathering up my things.
No response from the patio, which had been quiet for a while. But Jess staggered to her feet, almost tripping over Justin.
“No, don’t go, Amber,” she said, her words slurring. “It won’t be-it won’t be-”
I saw it coming, saw her teetering in slow motion, trying to get her balance, before she took a faltering step in her clunky flip-flops, twisted her ankle and went down.
She crashed onto the coffee table, and from the sounds of things breaking, I was sure that the glass top had shattered, but when I raced across the room, I saw that the noise had been made by the glasses and bottles that had accumulated there over the course of the night. Most had fallen to the carpeted floor, spilling their contents, but Jess had broken a couple of glasses, and as I helped her up from the mess, I saw blood dripping down her arm.
“Amber,” she said, her lips bunched in a confused pout. “I think I cut myself.”
That was when I noticed a two-inch piece of glass embedded in her wrist. And the blood wasn’t just flowing from the wound-it was pumping out in rhythmic spurts.
“Holy shit,” Justin said, backing away from the mess on the floor.
“That looks bad,” Calvin said. “Why don’t you take her into the bathroom, Amber, and we can clean up out here. Give me a sec, I’ll be right there.”
Jess leaned against me, staring at her arm in detached amazement. The bottom of her shirt was already soaked in blood. I heard Calvin and Gojo arguing on the patio, but I closed the bathroom door behind us.
In the light, it looked even worse. I helped Jess sit down on the edge of the tub, but she slid onto the tiled floor, leaning into the corner where the tub met the wall, her eyelids drifting down. I knew she was drunk, but was she already weak from losing so much blood? It looked like at least a cup had leaked from her wrist, and I suspected that if I pulled the shard out, the blood would flow even faster.
I felt my knees buckle, and my vision clouded. The murmur of the ancient voices swirled and crescendoed in my mind, blocking out everything else. My fingers twitched and my heartbeat slowed to a steady, echoing rhythm.
Calvin pushed open the bathroom door. “Jesus-you okay, Amber? You’re not going to, like, faint or something, are you?”
“No, I…,” I managed to choke out, my throat dry, my hands shaking from the effort of trying not to touch Jess.
I couldn’t do it. Not here. I couldn’t let them know, couldn’t let them see. I’d worked so hard to fit in since we’d come to Milwaukee. I was starting school in two short months, and I just wanted to be a normal girl in a normal high school with normal friends and normal habits.
And the thing I longed to do was not normal at all.
3
I HEARD CALVIN draw his breath in sharply. “She needs an ambulance. Fast. Stay with her.”
And he was gone.
I lowered myself to the floor next to Jess, holding on to the towel bar for support, but the desire to touch her grew so intense I had to jam my hands under my knees to stop myself.
“Amber,” Jess said, her voice soft and dreamy. “You have such pretty eyes. They’re like…”
Her voice faded as she looked down at her wrist. Her mouth made a sad little o and she slumped against the wall. “I think I’m going to sleep now,” she said.
The blood flow hadn’t slowed. The puddle under her was growing at an alarming rate. Outside I could hear Calvin yelling, and Gojo, too-something about his carpet-and I knew.
If I didn’t do something quickly, Jess was going to die.
And just like that, I threw away all my plans, my dreams, my wishes. I wasn’t going to be normal. I wasn’t going to fit in. I wasn’t going to have friends like other girls, or sleepovers, or homecoming dances, or cheerleading tryouts. I looked like a different girl from the one I used to be, with my expensive wardrobe and makeup and haircut, but on the inside, I was exactly the same: a freak.
If I waited too long, I would make things infinitely worse. I had made that mistake once before and sworn I would never make it again.
I couldn’t let her die. I put my hands on Jess’s wrist and carefully removed the glass shard, trying to ignore the blood that spurted out. She made a soft mewling sound, but I barely heard her as my fingers slipped on the slick warm blood and the words swirled faster, and my eyes drifted shut and the energy coiled and gathered and reversed its flow, out through my arms, through my fingertips and into Jess, as I whispered the ancient chant-
– and I felt her respond to my touch, the ragged torn skin skimming over, the blood flow slowing, the veins and tendons knitting back together. I continued to whisper until I felt her heartbeat, strong and steady, under my touch, and then I opened my eyes just as the bathroom door burst open.
“Johnson’s called a… Jesus, Amber, what-”
I followed his gaze and saw what he was seeing: my legs, shorts, hands and forearms were covered in Jess’s blood. Next to me, she yawned and ran a bloody hand through her hair, leaving red smears on her cheek and forehead.
“I thought I was going to lose it there for a minute,” she said conversationally. “I just can’t hold my liquor-oh.”
It was as though she was noticing the blood for the first time.
I reached for a hand towel.
“I, um, actually don’t think it’s that bad,” I mumbled as I began to mop up the blood and Jess lifted her arm to stare at her wrist. I kept mopping, rinsing the towel in the sink and wringing it out over and over, as Jess and Calvin searched for the wound and found only a thin pink line, and I tried to destroy the evidence of what I’d done.
We were in trouble, as it turned out, but not the kind I’d worried about. Charlotte was out the door after one quick look in the bathroom. She seemed happy to leave us to deal with the problem, so I guessed that was my answer to whether she was a true friend. I was trying to sober Jess up and Gojo was swearing and cleaning up the living room and kitchen, Calvin and Justin helping him without a word, when the EMTs arrived.
I was sure they didn’t believe Gojo’s story-that he’d heard the sound of breaking glass on the pool deck when he’d been out for an evening walk, and that he’d only brought us back to his place to offer first aid. But the EMTs were so puzzled over the wound-or rather, the lack of a wound-on Jess’s wrist that they didn’t spend much time interrogating Gojo.
As they examined Jess, looking for the source of the blood that covered our clothes and created a trail on the carpet, I felt a faint swell of pride. I had taken care of Jess when no one else could; I had made her well. But I had also risked the new life that Prairie and I had so carefully constructed, and broken my secret promise to myself never to use the gift again.
Prairie and Jess’s parents arrived within moments of each other as the EMTs were preparing Jess for the trip to the hospital. Jess’s parents weren’t as concerned about their daughter’s condition as they were about her reputation. Or rather, their reputation. Her father was a developer who hoped to run for office, and her mother was thin and overdressed and looked like she could freeze you with her stare.