Amanda is not happy with me. I can tell because her eyebrows are tightly knit, which is a poor choice on her part because it’s obvious she overplucked one of them when they’re together like that. The afternoon sun isn’t doing her any favors either, making her squint from the glare off the snow outside.
“Your dad said he thinks it’s better to keep distance between you and your mother right now,” Amanda says.
“Better for her,” I say. It’s not a question.
“And he said he’ll make the drive once the roads are cleared.”
“Are they still that bad?”
Amanda mistakes my interest for a sincere need to see him. “The plows were out all last night and into the morning,” she says. “I’m sure he’ll get here as soon as he can.”
I’m not sure about that at all, but I let it slide for now.
Amanda has drawn her feet up onto the chair, her knees at her chin. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Was this . . .”
She shakes her head quickly, as if to discourage herself from asking the question. Asking if it was Shanna or me who did this, pouring breakfast and bile and salt water into another girl. But asking that would mean I’m not better, that her miraculous microwave box of healing didn’t work.
“Karen wants to have your mental condition reevaluated ASAP.” Amanda pronounces the acronym phonetically. I wish everyone would start doing that with the American Heart Association. It would make all our conversations so much more spontaneous.
“I don’t know if I can really argue against that, at this point,” Amanda goes on.
“I was sick. I puked,” I say.
“Yeah, I know. But given your past history with Nadine I don’t know if I can make it fly.” She sighs and rolls one foot, her ankle cracking. “What do you want?”
I want to stay where there’s a knife under my mattress and a bottle of Oxy rolled in my sock. I want someone with an O neg heart to die. I want to fill out my jeans again and get plastic surgery on my face. I want Heath standing next to me in our senior prom photo because we fit. I want to see my bedroom again and close the window I should have never gone out of in the first place. I want my life back. I want future Sasha Stone to be a real thing, a real girl, an end goal I can invest in.
“I want to stay here, if I can.”
“Okay.” Amanda nods. “I’ll see what I can do.”
She stands up, looking out the window as a gust sends some of the piled snow on the roof eddying off into a spiral.
“Just do me a favor over the next few days.”
“What’s that?”
“Be good, Sasha Stone.”
There’s a song in my head, a few bars from freshman band camp that won’t stop cycling. It spins and spins, like I did on the field for that show, each step followed by a quarter turn and the desperate need to haul in some air. But breathing is for people who aren’t on the outside fringe of a pinwheel, so I stuck it out, red-faced, determined that the field commander was not going to lay into me in front of everyone.
I know I’ve faded off into something like sleep when I realize the girl in front of me is Layla, and a glance to my left on the next quarter turn reveals Brandy, her prosthetic foot left behind in a divot on the thirty-yard line. My clarinet is humming in my mouth, sending a vibration through my entire face that tickles. I smack at it, waking myself up and knocking my phone to the floor.
I snatch it up to find a missed call from Brandy. Not a text. Weird.
I dial her back.
“Thank God,” she says. “I thought I was going to have to fight my way past Angela to get to you.”
I glance at the clock. It’s ten at night, but I can hear voices in the background.
“What’s going on?”
“Everything, just . . . wow. You have no idea.”
“Exactly,” I confirm. “So tell me.”
“So there was a really bad accident. Like, really bad. Car full of college girls went off the bridge next to campus and into the river. There were six of them packed into a Mini Cooper and they sank like a stone.”
“Perfect,” I say.
And it is. Drowning is an organ recipient’s equivalent of a wet dream, no pun intended. There’s no organ damage and on a night like tonight, the freezing water lowers body temperature enough that it’s already operating like a refrigerator before the lunchbox coolers full of ice even show up tableside. But it also means that the drowning victim has a higher chance of being revived, their systems going into a shock that protects them. For a little while.
“Are they all dead?” I ask.
“I think maybe,” Brandy says, her voice down to a whisper now, the voices in the background fading. “They already prepped Jo. She took off in her wheelchair about half an hour ago. Her and one of the littles, too.”
“Where are you?”
“I snuck out to the common room to listen in after all the shit hit the fan. So, here’s the thing. . . .”
“What, Brandy? Just spit it out.”
“One of the girls that went in the water is O neg.”
My LVAD keeps going, but I’m not sure the rest of me does, a small caesura where nothing happens inside of me, except a bright flare of hope. I grab my pager from the nightstand, but it stares back with a dead face.
“Nothing on my pager,” I tell Brandy.
“That’s ’cause she’s not dead yet,” she says. “She’s nonresponsive but not brain dead.”
“Right.” I try to sound like that’s a good thing, but there’s a body over in another building with waterlogged skin, full of a chilly heart, eyes, kidneys, lungs that aren’t doing her any good anymore.
“I wanted to let you know, so you can get ready.”
It’s a nice thought. Brandy knows I never packed a go bag, my own little superstition. Like if I didn’t prepare, it was more likely to happen for me, everyone else’s blood type working for them while they waited with supplies in hand, me with math not on my side and nothing ready to go.
But that’s not quite true. I do have something ready. Just not my bag.
“You going to call your parents?” Brandy asks.
“I’ll probably hold off,” I tell her. “No point in getting hopes up.”
“True,” she says. “Well, hey, listen. I . . . good luck, okay?”
“Yeah, you too,” I say, but I don’t know if she hears me because I’ve already pulled the phone away, already started dialing a number, already have my heart in my throat when he answers.
“Isaac,” I say. “I need you here. Now.”