her cracked and dry lips together as I step behind the curtain into her little cubicle, her eyes never leaving me.
“I don’t have long. Your mom said I could come back to say hi.”
Gul crosses her arms, careful not to knock the IV embedded in the back of her hand. “What do you want?” The words grate over my ears as they claw their way out of her throat. Her eyes skim past me to where Ricardo is standing just inside the curtain that separates this cubicle from the main floor of the ER.
Somewhere nearby, a machine begins beeping loudly, followed by a hospital worker calling out a code over the intercom system.
I tune out the noise and sit boldly down on the edge of Gul’s bed. “I’m sorry about tonight. I can assure you that I took every precaution to make sure this wouldn’t happen.”
Gul’s dark eyes are wide and luminous when I meet them. The accusation there is unmistakable.
I glance over my shoulder at Ricardo, who nods. “I found something I need to show you.”
Gul shifts under the scratchy blue hospital blanket. She takes a slow sip from the large tan plastic tumbler on the rolling stand beside her bed, as if the water burns as it slides down her throat. “Okay.”
I tell her everything. My suspicions about her involvement in Professor Rook’s death. The vial of peanuts in my bag. The gut instinct that’s screaming at me that someone at my party tried to kill Gul to get her out of the picture.
By the time I’m done, Gul’s dark eyes are shining. She brushes her mussed hair behind her ears with trembling hands. “I swear I didn’t kill Professor Rook, or hire anyone to kill him. There wasn’t anything going on between us, and I definitely didn’t buy anything from him. If my father found out…” She shivers, whether from the cool air in the room or apprehension, I can’t tell.
Pulling the extra blanket up from the foot of the bed, I tuck it around her waist. “Look. I don’t want to push, but you’ve got to tell me why you were outside that night. What were you doing out there if you weren’t waiting for the professor?”
The girl in the bed looks so small as she chews on her lip, eyelashes fluttering as she cuts a gaze toward me. She focuses on her fingers as they wring the blanket in her lap. “I was on the phone with my mom, okay?” It’s a whispered admission.
My head cocks to one side. I don’t understand why it’s such a big deal, but by the heaving of her chest, I can tell it cost Gul to admit it to me. “Help me understand.”
She sighs. “I don’t like calling my mom from the dorm, okay? Because if I do, she’ll see how it is at school for me.”
“I’m still not following.”
“I don’t have any friends!” Gul’s voice breaks on her last word, and her eyes well.
I stare at her in shock. Speechless.
“There. Are you happy now? You can gloat over poor little me with no friends, while you have many.”
Finding my voice, I speak. “You sit at a table full of people every day. You’ve got a posse that follows you wherever you go. You have friends.”
Gul shakes her head, dropping the blanket from between hooked fingers. “I have minions. It’s not the same thing. You can bet that any one of them would spread a rumor about me without even blinking, if I ever so much as do something even remotely worth gossiping about. So I don’t.” She hesitates, and I get the sense that she wants to keep talking, so I remain quiet. Still.
After a few beats of silence, it’s apparent to me that whether she wants to or not, she’s not going to confide anything else to me. Instead, she plucks her phone off the tiny stand beside her bed and looks at it.
Disappointment curves around my throat at her silence, a not unwelcome surprise.
“Okay… What about the night Professor Rook was killed. You made the call to 911, but I can’t help but wonder if you saw more than you told the operator. Did you?”
Gul gasps. “Look.” Holding her phone out to me, she shows me a message.
Keep your mouth shut, or next time it’ll be fatal.
“What?” I screech. “Who is this from?”
I try to stop the shaking of my hands as I take the phone from her and examine the message. It’s anonymous, just like