I stop, too, and watch her eyes widen. I hear her incredulously blurting, “When?” “How many?” “Where?”
When she ends the call, she stands motionless for a moment, looking frozen in place.
“What? ” I prod.
She blinks several times and finally meets my gaze.
“It’s Jamie,” she says.
“What about him?”
She blinks again, stares into space, and says:
“He tried to kill himself.”
Twenty-Five
“Oh, god!”
Lauren and I sweep Melanie into an embrace, her body shaking, as we enter the hospital waiting room.
We disentangle and Melanie opens her mouth to speak, but nothing comes out.
“Here,” Lauren says, taking her arm and guiding her to a chair. She lowers Melanie into the chair, then Lauren and I sit beside her.
“What happened?” Lauren says, her voice lowered even though no one else is in the room.
Melanie blinks back tears. “I … I … ”
Lauren grabs a tissue from the end table and hands it to her. Mel clutches it tightly.
“Take your time,” Lauren says.
We wait a couple of moments, then Melanie looks at us, one after the other.
“I went to his house during lunch,” she says. “His mom answered the door; she said he came home not feeling well and had been asleep ever since. She seemed … I dunno, a little worried, but not excessively. Still, we talked for a long time. We’d only met a couple of times before, just to say hi, so we must have spent over an hour just getting to know each other. She told me how depressed Jamie had been since Cara died, that they’d gotten really close while she and Blake were dating, and that it destroyed him not to be able to save her.”
Melanie dabs her tear-stained cheeks with the tissue.
“So, you know, we talked mostly about him, but his mom asked me a few questions about myself, and we just kind of chit-chatted awhile.”
“Yes?” I say.
“Then … it was weird, because both of us seemed to get a weird feeling at the same time … we decided his mom should poke her head in his bedroom and check on him … ”
My heart clutches. What the hell are we about to hear?
Melanie starts sobbing. Lauren holds her hand while I offer the tissue box.
“She called me from upstairs,” Melanie says, her voice jagged with sobs. “I ran up there, and his mom was trying to shake him awake. She couldn’t figure out why it was so hard to wake him up. He’s a really light sleeper.”
She wrings her hands in her lap.
“I went over and tried to help her. We were both calling his name, louder and louder.”
Lauren and I exchange anxious glances.
“Then his mom pulled the sheets off him, and that’s when we saw the bottle … ”
We lean in closer and narrow our eyes.
“He’d taken a bottle of pills, something his mom had been prescribed after her knee surgery,” Melanie says, shaking with more sobs. “She screamed, ‘Call 911! Call 911!’ So I called, and she just kept shaking him while we waited for the ambulance to get there, but we couldn’t wake him up, then they came, and … ”
She drops her head and shakes it, still weeping.
“What do the doctors say?” I ask, stroking her hair. “Is he gonna be okay?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know anything. His parents are with him. I just keep waiting for somebody to tell me what’s going on.”
While Lauren continues to console Melanie, I slip to the other side of the room and send Natalie a private Facebook message giving her my phone number and a message:
“I don’t have your phone number. Please call me immediately at 555-0127. URGENT.”
An hour passes with no more information than we had when Lauren and I first ran to the hospital. But a bigger crowd has gathered in the waiting room, including Aunt Meg and Melanie’s parents.
I’m willing myself to sit calmly, trying not to fidget other than pressing my parents’ rings against my chest. Natalie called me within ten minutes of getting my message and said I’d hear back from her shortly, but so far, nothing. Oh well. I’ve begged her to do me a favor, and if she’s doing it, it’s no doubt taking a while. She told me she wasn’t sure she’d be able to come through, but that she’d try. What more can I ask? Nothing to do now but wait.
Aunt Meg wanders over to my chair. “So tell me again how Blake and Jamie are connected … ?”
“Best friends,” I say, then realize how ridiculous that sounds. Jamie