“So, whaddya think?” Riley asked.
“What’s in it?” Angeline half screamed.
“No, it might bias you, I need to know—”
“Riley! Leo’s turning blue! What’s in this? It’s not . . . it can’t be beets?”
“Yes! It’s beet. For color.”
“He’s allergic to beets!”
“He’s what? I’ve never heard of someone being allergic to beets. Peanuts, I’d have warned about, but beets . . .”
Angeline yelled for Riley to call an ambulance to the lighthouse. She carefully guided Leo onto his side. He wheezed, and his skin devolved into a sickly shade.
“EpiPen?” Angeline asked fruitlessly. She could see his pockets, which weren’t deep enough for the large syringe. She started to leave to run to his house, but he grabbed her hand. She swallowed past the golf ball in her throat. “I’m here.”
And she waited, Leo in her lap, sirens in the distance, the lighthouse high above her, feeling the fear Leo must have felt when he imagined going to the top.
* * *
The paramedics allowed her to ride in the back instead of the front after a brief exchange in which they assured her that Leo was fine and she assured them that that was wonderful but she wasn’t letting him out of her sight.
“Doing okay?” she asked him.
Leo’s eyes were closed, but he nodded gently. Under the blanket, strapped to the stretcher, he seemed smaller than he was, only adding to Angeline’s guilt that her wanting to be bigger than she was had led them here.
The medics had given Leo an injection and hooked him up to an IV on-site, but he still needed to go to the hospital. She’d asked Riley to call Leo’s mom. Leo might have been the one turning blue, but Angeline could barely speak. Even parting her lips to wet them with her tongue now threatened a torrent of tears.
Leo.
He was fine. She knew he was going to be fine. But she clung to his hand like it was a life preserver and she’d been thrown overboard. Easy to do since that was exactly how she’d been feeling since the day they broke up.
That night, in Maxine’s screening room, she’d held his hand like this, almost as tightly.
A horror movie had been about to begin. She hated horror movies, same as Cat. Her dad loved them. Cat couldn’t even watch the opening credits, but Angeline and her mom would sit beside her dad, clutching each other’s arm and leaping off the couch at every jump scare, no matter how predictable.
Angeline could never sleep after. Her mom would pull out pints of ice cream and sit on the floor with Angeline. That was how Angeline had learned her mom had wanted to be a photographer but had given it up in favor of a career with a more consistent salary so her dad could keep playing his music. That was when she’d first seen pictures of a young Grams and Gramps dancing in an Irish pub in Southie. That was when she’d told her mom she wanted more. “More what?” her mom had asked. Angeline hadn’t known then. She just knew whatever more was, she had to have it.
The night of Maxine’s party, sealed off in the windowless screening room, she’d held Leo’s hand because she loved him more than she hated scary movies. And she’d thought, maybe her mom wouldn’t mind some ice cream when she got home.
But the instant that projector had shut off and the image of Leo’s face filled the enormous screen, playing the capture of her live-stream, Angeline knew she’d rather watch a thousand horror movies than see what was to come.
Clicks and likes and a road to fame had superseded everything for so long. When Evelyn had liked her video featuring Leo, Angeline planning another wasn’t a decision so much as an effect.
Cause = twenty thousand thumbs-ups.
Effect = Angeline sweeping right and wrong under the rug.
She thought he’d be okay with it.
Well, not okay, but that he’d understand.
That he’d forgive her.
That he’d get past it.
That it’d be worth it.
In the back of the ambulance, Angeline brought his hand to her lips and kissed his skin. She drew back at the cold. Then, she gave up her fight against the tears and wrapped both of her hands around his.
* * *
“Did you tell Riley we loved it?” Leo asked after the nurse had left.
“No, of course not.” Angeline rose from the chair at the end of the hospital bed, a pair of angel wings in her hands. The curtain quartering off his ER stall hung mostly closed, but she tugged it the rest of the way.
“Too bad, pretty sure it’s killer.”
Angeline watched his dimple carve into his cheek and let out a small bubble of laughter for his sake. “You’re ridiculous. And what happened to agreeing to carry your EpiPen after that night at your mom’s fundraiser last year?”
“Relax, I smelled that Santa-swirl cabbage-beet slaw from across the room. Food allergies give you a heightened sense of smell.”
“Apparently not.” She gestured to his current situation, skin pale, head woozy from the drugs, shirt replaced with a washed-out hospital gown. The hives around his lips had retreated, but the image of his hand reaching for his throat would never leave her. Angeline tried to breathe normally, but each intake plunged a thorn in her chest.
“Hey.” He tried to sit up higher.
“Don’t.” She moved to him instead, resting carefully on the edge of his bed.
“I won’t break.” He tilted his head toward his shoulder. “Again.”
“This isn’t funny, Leo.”
“It wasn’t. It is now. Beets in a mixed drink? Who would have thought?”
Angeline felt her eyes burn, like more tears might come.
“Ang, it’s okay. This has happened before, you know that. Tomorrow, I’ll be tired, but I’ll be back to myself in no time. You’ll see.”
“Will I? Because tomorrow we’re back to Battle of the Exes, aren’t we?”
“No, we’re not.”
“Battling? Or exes?”
He closed his eyes. “Angeline, I . . .”
She shifted off the bed. “Sure, I get it.”
“No, wait . . . just give me—”
Metal scraped metal, and the curtain tore back.
“Leo!” Eliza Torres, a short woman with dark hair in a sophisticated but not trendy bob and eyes that demanded one’s attention, strode to the bed, edging Angeline out of the way.