Tetra sat in the eye of a tornado while the winds whipped all around her. Time had stood still when she took that last step and fallen to her knees on the pavement. Her first concern had been for the bin of t-shirts she’d lost control of, but it seemed intact. Her second thought had been for the overwhelming pain shooting up her right leg from ankle to kneecap in alternating bolts of agony and tingling numbness.

She’d barely had time to process what had happened before Justin was standing over her like a dark angel, haloed by the lights on the deck behind him.

She should have put her boots back on. She should have been paying better attention. She should have remembered how to walk down stairs. It was only three steps? What was wrong with her? Exactly how stupid was she? At least as stupid as she looked, certainly, sprawled on the ground like an idiot who’d forgotten how to properly put one foot in front of the other.

Justin disappeared the minute she answered him. What must he think of her glaringly fantastic display of stupidity.

Oh god, what was she going to tell Dad?

Please don’t let him freak. Please don’t let him freak. But if I’m freaking out he’s definitely going to freak. Tetra, stop freaking out NOW.

She needed her phone. She needed her shoes. She needed to walk. She needed to be able to get up and go home and pretend that she wasn’t as stupid as she felt right now.

As soon as she tried to flex her foot she realized that none of those things would be happening in the near future.

Xander came to help her up—oh, why did Xander have to see her like this?—and the tornado continued to rail around her. Donny Z was there now, as well as the woman Tetra assumed was Lupe’s boss—Tetra would never forgive herself if this stupid thing that she’d done got Lupe in trouble—and everyone was talking over everyone else. She needed to tell her dad. The later it got, the more freaked out he would be to get her call.

And then Justin put ice on her ankle and it felt as blissful as it did horrible and she looked into his brilliant gray eyes and remembered to breathe. He told her everything was going to be okay…or maybe his eyes had just said that, but she would have sworn she heard it anyway.

And then she’d been tossed in the van and taken to the hospital and everything was out of her hands. She tried to relax and concentrate on not being in pain. Surely they were making a big deal about nothing. The doctor would give her an aspirin and tell her to elevate it and put more ice on it and that would be that.

Tetra prayed that the x-rays didn’t show anything.

She prayed harder that the hospital didn’t have a machine that measured stupidity.

Kara wheeled Tetra’s chair around the desk so that she could answer all the questions for the receptionist. Name, address—she’d finally remembered their new street address, but she might have gotten the zip code wrong—nature of emergency. The receptionist took Xander’s name as the party responsible for bringing her in. Beside that, without even asking, the woman checked the box that said “family.”

Tetra was so touched by that notation that she almost cried right then and there. Right now the members of 10mm Conspiracy were more than just idols or friends. They were her family. People who took you to the hospital and stayed with you were family. A checked box on an electronic form. Such a small thing. But in that brief moment, Tetra forgot about the pain.

The receptionist directed them to Billing next, just as a short man with thick black hair and a white coat popped his head through the swinging door. “Tetra Scott?”

They all looked to Xander.

“Take her in,” said Xander. “I’ll settle up with Billing and meet up with you after.”

Tetra braced herself as Kara took the handles of the wheelchair and guided her in. Liam held the door open for them. The short man looked at Liam, then Kara, then Tetra. He tapped and swiped on his tablet a few times.

“Are you allergic to any medication?” asked the doctor.

“No,” Tetra answered.

“Are you sure?” asked the doctor.

“No,” Tetra clarified. “I don’t get sick very often, and I’ve never been to an emergency room before. So there might be a medicine out there I’m allergic to, but if there is I haven’t taken it yet.”

The doctor seemed satisfied with that answer. He tapped the screen of his tablet a few more times. “Did this accident happen on the job?”

At sixteen, she supposed it was possible that she could have been working the night shift at a restaurant or movie theatre. It was more likely that the doctor was just asking the required questions in the order they popped up on his screen, so Tetra gave the answer that did not include the smart-ass retort she so badly wanted to say. “No.”

“Are you pregnant? Or do you plan to be pregnant in the near future?”

Tetra suppressed the giggle that threatened to escape and bit her tongue once more. “Nope.”

The doctor tapped the screen again. “And whom should we call when we need to pull the plug?”

This time, Tetra, Kara and Liam all burst out laughing.

The doctor managed to keep his stern expression, but he winked at Tetra.

“Malcolm Scott is my emergency contact. That’s my dad.” Tetra relayed her father’s cell number, hoping that the hospital wouldn’t call him before she had a chance to do so herself. “Just do me a favor and break the news to him gently.”

“We always do.” The doctor’s tone remained completely deadpan. “Now, let’s get you to x-ray.”

Kara and Liam helped transfer Tetra onto the gurney that would deliver her to x-ray and promised they would be waiting for her when she returned.

“This is so surreal,” Tetra said to the large man whose sole job seemed to be the pushing of gurneys. “I mean, I’ve watched hospital shows on TV hundreds of times…in a way it feels like I’m inside the television.”

“You should say something technical,” said her transport.

Tetra smiled and opened her mouth, willing some of the polysyllabic medical jargon to trip off her tongue as easily as it did the actors in those shows. But all she could think of in the moment was, “STAT!”

The man chuckled.

“Granted,” said Tetra, “That was maybe more Gilmore Girls than Grey’s Anatomy.”

“Still qualifies as something that’s said in a hospital,” said the man. “Works for me.”

Getting the x-ray was an incredibly painful process. Tetra would have thought that by the twenty-first century, hospitals would be able to photograph a patient’s bones without requiring them to contort into a bunch of excruciating positions.

When the man wheeled her back into the hallway outside emergency reception, Kara and Liam were indeed waiting for her, as promised. Tetra noticed that Kara held a cloth napkin in her hand—the one that Justin had filled with ice for her. It didn’t occur to her until now that Justin hadn’t accompanied them into the hospital.

“Where are Xander and Justin?” Tetra asked casually.

“Xander wandered off to find a soda,” said Kara. “Justin stayed outside with the van.”

“I imagine he doesn’t like hospitals,” said Liam. “After all he’s been through with his mom.”

Tetra didn’t have time to ask what Liam meant because Xander rounded the corner with a canned drink in his hand. “You have to walk about ten miles to find a vending machine in this place,” he said to all of them. And then to Tetra specifically, “Are you thirsty or hungry? Can I get you anything? Anything at all.”

Even if she had been hungry or thirsty—which she wasn’t—she wasn’t about to make Xander retrace ten miles worth of steps to fetch her something. “I’d love some more ice,” she said instead. “Mostly, I’d really just like to get out of here.”

“What are we waiting on now?” Xander asked as he sidled up beside the gurney. Tetra scooted over so he could sit down beside her.

“X-ray results,” said Kara.

“Just cut it off,” said Xander.

Tetra laughed at that, and then noticed Liam. “Did you just take our picture?”

Liam smiled. “Proof that you have the ability to smile under the greatest adversity,” he said.

“And a photographic record of what you looked like before you lost a leg,” Xander teased.

Tetra punched him in the arm playfully. “If I end up in a cast”—god, she hoped she didn’t end up in a cast—“you are all going to sign it for me. That’s non negotiable. But they’re not going to chop my foot off.”

“In a few months, you might wish we had,” said the black-haired doctor. “For now, here are some pain meds.”

Tetra took them obligingly. With any luck they would kick in quickly, or knock her out, or both.

“So what’s the prognosis, doc?” asked Liam.

“I can’t find any evidence of a break,” he said, “but that doesn’t always mean there isn’t one. From the bruising and swelling I’d guess you still might have a hairline fracture that’s beyond my ability to detect.”

“You mean all doctors aren’t born with superpowers?” asked Xander.

“Some are,” said the doctor. “They all get the day shift.”

“I like this guy,” said Xander.

The doctor resumed talking to Tetra. “I don’t want to put you in a full cast, but I think you need more than just a wrap, so I’m going to give you a ‘half-cast.’ We’ll put cast material along the bottom of your foot and up the back of your leg, and when that hardens, we’ll wrap it all into place. Okay?”

Tetra didn’t see that she had much of a choice. “Okay.”

Getting the half-cast was even more terrible than the x-ray. The doctor wrapped up her entire lower leg from the knee down. At one point, Tetra thought she might pass out from the pain. Kara took her hand.

“We could still ask him to cut it off,” Xander whispered in her ear. “It’s not too late.”

The doctor got her situated with crutches while Xander signed the discharge papers. Then he ordered them to remain in the lobby while he fetched the van and brought it around.

“Do you still have that bag with my stuff?” Tetra asked Kara. “I really should call my dad.”

“Of course.” Kara fished the phone out and handed it to Tetra.

Tetra took a deep breath before dialing her father. He was either going to freak out, or he wasn’t. It was all out of her hands now. The toughest part was going to be explaining it all.

“Hello?” Dad said in a not-to-sleepy voice. Good. She hadn’t woken him. “Tetra, honey? What’s up?”

“There was a problem getting the ransom money,” she said, smiling at the odd looks Kara and Liam were now giving her.

There was a pause, and then Dad said, all serious, “What did you do?”

Tetra took another deep breath. “I crashed a private concert and sprained my ankle really badly, but the band took me to the ER and I’m spending the night with Donny Z. so I won’t be alone tonight. The doctor doesn’t think it’s broken, but he says we should have an orthopedic doctor look at it, but we can worry about all that when you get home. It looks way worse than it is. The important thing is that I’m fine, and I’m totally being taken care of. Oh, and I made a new friend!”

There was another long pause. “Tetra, I realize you and I have a special relationship,” said her father, “but I can’t actually tell if you’re kidding or not right now.”

The whole situation did sound like the sort of imaginative nonsense she and her father joked about all the time. “I promise it’s for real, Dad. Cross my heart. I’ve got a cast and crutches and everything. But you shouldn’t freak out because I’m fine.”

“And the part about Donny Z.?”

“I’ll introduce you tomorrow. His daughter lives here. I think you’ll really like him.”

“So is he the new friend you made, or is it someone else?”

“Someone else.” Tetra smiled into the phone. “You did tell me to have an adventure and get into some trouble. Technically I’m only following orders.”

Dad chuckled, a sound that was the exact opposite of freaking out, and Tetra was exceptionally glad to hear it. “Only you, kiddo. Only you.”