She missed just being near the ocean, hearing all the different ways waves could crash upon the shore, all their rhythms. What she wouldn’t give to feel an ocean breeze on sun-kissed skin, to watch the orange shimmer of the setting sun dance on the surface of a calm day while she tried to suss out the currents and riptides. Her feet buried in the sand while her parents sipped on cold beers, drips of condensation gathering sand each time they lifted the bottles up to their lips. She allowed herself to include Amira in this little fantasy, reading a book at her side. She could picture Diego on a lounge chair next to her, eyes hidden behind sunglasses, taking everything in, his shirt off and swim shorts hiked high up his thighs, soaking in the tapered evening sun.
She missed him, too, and wondered what he was doing at that moment, wondered what his past week had been like. Marisa typically admired her older brother’s ability to ignore his phone for days at a time, but right now she wished he was better at returning texts, at having phone conversations that felt real instead of just brimming with the need to hang up. What was the world out there saying? The real world, not the one Marisa could see on her phone. Were things changing? Did anyone actually care?
As she was thinking and stretching her right calf out like Amira had taught her, two things happened spontaneously. The first: the bell rang. It was the first morning bell, one maddeningly used not to tell kids to get to their first class, but a sort of warning bell—The Snooze, they all called it—which indicated another trilling bell would ring in another thirty minutes, this one, yes, meant to push them toward their classes. Though for the past week, neither bell had been very effective, succeeding less in directing the kids around the building and more in annoying them.
The second: Dov Nudel, part of the Jordi Marcos–led group organizing a breakout, who’d all this time been climbing a rope the group had managed to tie to the rafters by lassoing it from the second floor in the middle of the night, fell two stories to the ground, directly onto Marisa’s leg.
2
7:35AM
Marisa’s leg jutted out at a strange, worrying angle. She got the sense that she should be screaming.
Footsteps pounded on the floor and skittered to a halt. She felt people gather around, and heard them speak, though none of their words sank in. Nor did she turn to look at them. She was transfixed by the angle her leg had taken, the fact that it wasn’t bleeding. “How is it not bleeding?” she asked no one in particular.
Then the pain came.
First in her shoulder, strangely, nowhere near the break. It was where Dov made contact first, his elbows up instinctively, prepared to fall. Then her entire left side, where he’d started to flatten her, easing his own fall. Finally, the sharp, bright agony from her leg, a searing flash unlike anything she’d felt before.
She wanted to scream, but didn’t, choosing instead to breathe. Nearby, Dov brushed himself off, chuckling, pretty sore. Though his plan was to fall, or at least make it look like he had fallen, it hurt a little more than he’d been expecting.
Then he realized he was supposed to fake an injury to force Marisa to open the doors, and here he was brushing himself off. Right. He realized he’d accidentally fallen on her. The rope had swung from his clumsy climbing and his clumsier jump. He turned to see if she was okay, and caught sight of her leg.
This was definitely not how things should have gone. He screamed.
* * *
All around school, people heard Dov’s screams. Lolo in the basement, Eli on the roof, Joy in the gym, Malik in the green room, of course, but also the kids arriving to school just then, and all the parents in their cars, waiting for the line to inch forward toward the front gate so they could let their kids out. They turned down the volume on their radios, asking, “What was that?” To kids too sleepy to respond, or who were wearing earphones to block attempts at morning conversation.
Out on the soccer field, Lindsay and the others who’d stayed behind poked their heads out of their tents (makeshift ones, or those brought in by parents, after hours of trying to convince their children