who hadn’t grown faint took baby steps forward, then baby steps backward, not sure which would help. It would’ve given the impression, to someone watching from afar, that the crowd was dancing, like they had on lock-in night. Even the teachers who’d gathered around, who’d moved their way to the very front of the crowd with a sense of responsibility, recognized how helpless they were in the face of this.
The students were looking at them as if they should know what to do, but the teachers still worried themselves sicker by looking up symptoms on the internet, still avoided the doctor for fear of a diagnosis or paperwork, still texted that one friend of a friend who’d gone to med school asking for advice. The teachers knew to drink plenty of fluids during an illness and to wash their hands after using the bathroom, and that about summed up their sweeping knowledge of how to fix the wrongs that could befall a human body. Marisa’s leg? That fucking thing? No way. They didn’t have a clue what to do.
* * *
Amira and Celeste, who had heard the screams from the gym, now arrived to the growing crowd and felt their stomachs drop, as if they could tell exactly what had happened. Like they had on lock-in night, they worked their way to the front of the crowd, ambulance-chasing behind Nurse Hae, both of them hoping desperately she would stop moving before she got to the doors, that whatever had gone wrong had not gone wrong to Marisa.
Then they froze.
Amira resisted the urge to run at Marisa, to try to figure out how she could gently guide her body into feeling better.
Celeste assured herself Nurse Hae knew what to do; she would have the tools and medicines with which to do it in the modest pharmacy that made up her office. Sure, she knew everyone who went in there, whether it was for a headache, an upset stomach, menstrual cramps, a sprained ankle or any other ailment, was always offered just a cup of chamomile tea. Sometimes, if they were lucky, the tea came with a single sienna-colored 20mg ibuprofen wrapped up in a paper napkin.
But Celeste hoped for Marisa’s sake, for the oceans’, that the nurse was just withholding the good stuff, advised by the school’s insurance providers to downplay all ailments.
* * *
Nurse Hae’s porcelain face appeared in front of Marisa. She hoped maybe something in Nurse Hae’s expression would reassure her. That it looked and felt worse than it really was. That this wasn’t going to interfere with her plans, this wasn’t a pain that would go on forever, a life-changing pain, but merely an inconvenience, an unfortunate speed bump that would make winning the fight all the sweeter.
However, Nurse Hae shook her head, as if knowing exactly what Marisa was hoping to hear. Comfort wasn’t coming.
* * *
The word spread, jumping from one person to another like a wildfire jumping empty lanes of a freeway by heat alone. Marisa needed urgent medical attention. Her leg was broken in at least one place, possibly more. The pain couldn’t be managed by anything the nurse had, and even if some morphine were passed through the window (Nurse Hae was already working on heavy-duty painkillers), there was a chance she needed surgery. No: she absolutely needed surgery or the leg would never heal. That was a fact. But there might also be other damage, a concussion, cracked ribs, internal bleeding, even. Dov had landed on her from two stories up.
Everyone gleaned the information first without immediately considering what it meant for her, the decision she would have to make. Their freedom had always been in her hands. But nothing had made her decision to keep them in hard. Because of this, after all this time, their freedom seemed to be something hypothetical and nebulous, something as hard to grasp on to as the idea of saving the world.
Now, though, it seemed clear. For her own good, she would open the doors. They were going to be free.
* * *
While Dov screamed about nothing and Marisa breathed tenuously through her pain, Peejay was beating himself up, thinking: Get up. Thinking: Hamish would want you to get up. Over and over, his body not listening to the words, the rest of his brain not even listening to the words, just repeating them.
Days of this. He wasn’t even sure how long he’d been lying there exactly. He hadn’t kept count. It felt like