“You guys,” he said. “Are you okay? What the actual fuck . . .”
Stevie looked up at him. His face blocked out the moon and the fireworks.
“I think my-y-y arm’s broken-n-n,” she said.
And then, mercifully, she passed out.
The next few hours were hazy. Someone from the campground had summoned a ranger, who found them on the beach. Stevie partially noted the conversation that went on, the questions about whether she could walk. She must have failed that test, because someone put her on a backboard and secured something around her neck. There was a strange journey through the woods, bumping along on a board held by two people who had appeared out of the ether. Then she was in an ambulance with Nate.
“The diary . . . ,” she said.
“Forget the diary,” he replied, shivering in his metallic blanket.
Everything hurt—a dull, allover ache that penetrated the depths of her bones. She kept trying to close her eyes, only to have a paramedic wake her and shine a light in them. Why wouldn’t anyone let her sleep? Maybe if she slept, she could read Sabrina’s diary in her dreams. . . .
The thing she was resting on suddenly popped up and she was wheeled into a bitterly cold and obscenely bright emergency room. She watched the ceiling tiles go by as she was wheeled along, watched the fluorescent lights, the signs over doorways. She was taken to a curtained compartment, where a nurse asked her questions like what her name was. People kept appearing, not looking urgent or alarmed, but refusing to let her be. They wanted to see her pupils, listen to her chest, move her arm . . .
That got a little scream.
She kept trying to close her eyes and recall Sabrina’s writing, hold the diary in her mind. But then she got something better. A face. That face, with the wide brown eyes and dark brown hair. Sabrina. She couldn’t quite see her, but she sensed her nearby, whispering something she couldn’t make out.
“Hold it right there, Stevie. You’re doing great.”
She opened her eyes to find that she was not speaking to Sabrina, but to a member of the hospital staff who was inserting her head into a massive machine. It was a brief stay, then she was removed.
God, this place was freezing. She shivered uncontrollably.
“I’ll have the nurse get you a blanket,” the person said.
Back out in the hall, a nurse came along with the promised blanket and tucked it around her.
“Is that too tight?” he said. “Do you want it loose?”
“Moose?”
“Loose.”
“I saw a moose once,” Stevie replied.
The nurse frowned, but she settled Stevie in and wheeled her to her next destination, which was the X-ray department. From there, she went to a small room where her left arm was put in a cast. Finally, her journey through the hospital complete, she was returned to the emergency room. For a few minutes, she was alone, then the curtain scraped back and Nate appeared, shuffling in in a voluminous pair of purple yoga pants and a Box Box fleece.
“Hey, stupid,” he said. “Let’s never do this again.”
He came closer, standing by the edge of her bed.
“You’re okay,” he said. “They think it’s mostly shock. They weren’t sure if you hit your head, so they’ve been watching you. You had a CAT scan. Do you remember?”
“Vaguely.”
“They think we were messing around and jumped off Point 23,” he said. “They think we’re two assholes. I didn’t explain that we jumped because someone shot at us. I thought about it—because someone shot at us. But we had broken into a house, so . . .”
Stevie nodded wearily.
“I told them to call Carson. Which is why I’m dressed like this. Since he owns the camp, he has access to all the parental consent forms our families had to sign and copies of our insurance information, stuff like that. And he’s irresponsible enough not to call our parents, so we might get out of this night in one piece.”
Stevie felt her eyes well up.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s fine,” he said, looking down. “Whoever follows you to a second location deserves what they get. We called Janelle. She was so determined to get here that I thought she was going to walk, but I convinced her to wait until morning. They’re probably going to admit you, to keep an eye on you. I can go home. David’s going to stay until they take you upstairs.”
“You know I love you, right?” she asked.
“You better.”
It looked like he was going to take her good hand and squeeze it, but then at the last moment, he tapped the back of it in an abbreviated gesture of affection.
David had not gotten a change of clothes. Nobody had thought of him. His shirt was still clammy and damp, and his hair was drier, but not dry. As a gesture, he had been given a sheet to wind around himself, which was odd and also somehow fitting.
She remembered the first time they had kissed—he was sitting on the floor of her room in Minerva House. He was leaning up against the wall in a pair of ancient Yale sweatpants he had taken from his dad. She was explaining the problems with witness testimony using office supplies as props. It had been, in many ways, the defining moment of their relationship before this one, with Stevie in a hospital bed after breaking into a house, and him wound in a sheet, wandering the emergency room.
This was them.
He came up to the side of her bed and leaned down, his elbows on the rail, looking at her. He shifted his gaze from left to right, and from the way he was looking, she knew there had to be something about her face that wasn’t great. She decided not to worry about it.
“What else do you want to do tonight?” he asked quietly. “Wanna steal a car?”
She was too tired to joke. She considered smiling, but whatever it was that was wrong with her face was too sore for that.
“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow night.”
She continued looking up at him, his head haloed by the greenish fluorescent lights.
“Nate didn’t want to say why you guys jumped off a cliff in the middle of the night,” he said. “I know you both well enough to guess there was probably a good reason. Or a reason.”
“You left,” she said, her voice hoarse. “You were gone, before. Your tent . . .”
“Flooded. Completely. I had to move site.”
“I texted . . .”
“My tent flooded,” he said again. “My phone was on the ground. It stopped working until it dried out.”
“I thought you just left,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to leave,” he replied.
The nurse snapped back the curtain and made her way behind David.
“Time to go upstairs,” she said, arranging and tucking the various wires and bits connected to Stevie’s bed.
“I’ll be back in the morning,” he said. “Call me if you need me. It works now.”
She was wheeled to the far side of an empty double room. Once the nurse settled her in, putting all the wires and rails and bits and pieces in place, Stevie was left to rest with the door to her room open. She tried to close her eyes, but there was a flicking light. It was a reflection of something in the hall, bouncing off the whiteboard by the door with her nurse’s name on it. There was a beeping sound that went with it, but it was out of sync.