“Holy shit balls, dude.”
Brooke’s voice is loud in the cardiac center common room, like it could knock over furniture. Josephine looks up from her laptop, Nadine from a game of solitaire. Layla jumps, almost knocking over her bottle of nail polish. I’m on my feet in a second, highly aware that my friend from the outside is too alive, too vibrant for them. Already the room seems small with Brooke in it, her ponytail thick and healthy, her legs strong and sure underneath her.
“Hey.” I grab her by the elbow and steer her down the hall toward my room.
“I mean, your face,” Brooke keeps going. “Dog turds on a stick. I thought I was ready for it, but . . .”
“Thanks a lot,” I tell her.
“Can I touch your stitches?” she asks as I close my door behind her. “I’ll wash my hands first.”
“Sure,” I tell her. “As long as you brought it.”
Brooke flops onto my bed, her face suddenly serious. “Yeah, we’ve gotta talk about that.”
I cross my arms. “What? It didn’t work?”
Mom and Dad still have me on a no-phone diet, and they’re stricter than even the nurses with our individual nutrition plans. But Brooke’s old cell was the same model as mine, and she should’ve been able to power it up, call an activation line, punch in my number and passcode and voilà—my phone is restored to me without parental assistance or permission.
“It worked fine,” Brooke says, reaching into her pocket to pull it out.
“So what do we need to talk about?”
She switches it back and forth in her hands before answering me, her teeth clamping on her bottom lip. “I read your texts.”
I sit down on Amanda’s rolling chair, hard enough to send it back into the wall. “You did what?”
“I thought it might be smart, after everything that happened,” she says. “I didn’t know if there might be anything on here that would . . . upset you.”
“You didn’t pause to consider that maybe you reading my texts might be equally upsetting?”
“Sasha . . .” Brooke lets my name out in a sigh, like she’s giving something up. “I saw. When you went out the window. Lilly and I both, we . . . we saw you reading a text and then you—”
“And then I jumped out the window,” I interrupt. “I remember. I also remember that you called me a bitch.”
Brooke picks at the case on the phone, an older one of hers that she had made. Me, Brooke, and Lilly at band camp sophomore year, arms around one another, sweaty tank tops stuck to our skin in patches.
“I’m sorry about that,” she finally says. “But you know what? You kind of are a bitch, dude. But I don’t care, because you’re also smart and funny, and kind of a musical genius. So whatever. If you’re a little bit of a bitch too, then fine, I’ll take you that way. Because honestly the person you’re the biggest bitch to is yourself, Sasha Stone.
“You’ve always pushed yourself to your limits and never cut yourself any slack. I think you demand perfection out of yourself and everyone around you, and sometimes we fail you, and sometimes you fail yourself. And I think you hate that more than anything.”
We sit quietly together for a minute, the clock ticking off our breaths. Mine are coming in short bursts, analyzing the portrait of the person Brooke just painted for me. This is how I look to her. This is what a bitch is. Maybe being one isn’t such a bad thing after all.
Brooke powers on the phone, finally looking up at me.
“So you and Isaac Harver, huh?”
I feel a tick in my chest, the upbeat of a tempo change. “Did he text me?”
“Um, like a hundred times,” she says, thumbing through my messages.
“And you read them?” I feel a flush rising, embarrassment beating out anger.
“Yep,” Brooke says. “The newer ones aren’t all that interesting. But some of the old ones . . . I mean, wow. Who needs YouTube?”
“All right, enough,” I say, making a swipe for the phone. Brooke is quicker, pulling it out of reach.
“I’ll give this to you, but only if you promise me it’s not going to get you hurt again. You’re still my friend, and I got enough on my conscience as it is.”
I lick my lips, eyes on the phone. “I promise.”
“Okay.” She hands it to me, and I jam it into my waistband, the plastic case absorbing my body heat in seconds.
“So your mom said you’re having some kind of surgery in a couple of days?”
“Yeah. It’s called an LVAD. You should google it, right up your alley. I’ll have a cord coming out of my belly. My friend Layla out in the lobby, she’s got one.”
Brooke’s eyes go to my door, all calculation. “Do you think she’ll let me see it?”
“We can ask,” I say, twisting the knob.
“Listen.” Brooke stops me. “There’s something I want to tell you before you hear it from anyone else, and I don’t know how you’re going to take it. So . . . I don’t know, should you be sitting down or something? Do I need a crash cart?”
“Brooke, I found out my heart could stop working at any moment and I’ll drop dead. Nothing you can say is more shocking than that.”
“Heath and Lilly are together,” she says, closing her eyes and then screwing one back open slowly when she doesn’t hear a body hit the floor.
My hand grips more tightly on the door handle, and I wait for the shock, a wave of anger or jealousy, maybe the cold touch of wrath. But there is nothing, not even a jolt of surprise that spikes my blood pressure. Shanna rests, unperturbed, beating a steady rate that seems completely nonplussed by this turn of events.
“How’d it happen?” I ask.
“They were both pretty torn up about you, and everything. I guess they were comforting each other and got a little too enthusiastic or something, I don’t know. I wasn’t thrilled about it when she told me, but if it means anything to you, I think they’re both happy.”
“No,” I say, opening the door. “That doesn’t mean anything to me at all.”