Chapter 20

“Let’s say the patient presents with sudden numbness on the left side only.” Dr. Kowalski leans back on her heels, arms crossed. “What do you do first?”

Sadie and I are in the emergency department at Zilker Hospital, where her contact here in Austin—a pint-sized doctor named Maureen Kowalski—is giving me the third degree. Unlike the other visits, which have basically been lovefests for Sadie rounded out by offers of future rec letters for me, Dr. Kowalski doesn’t seem to really care who Sadie is. She seems to care much less who I am.

But the leveling of her gaze, the paces she’s putting me through, the double doors from the ambulance bay rushing open to wheel in someone who needs real help—this is the best thing I’ve been a part of all summer. This is where I make sense.

“The FAST assessment,” I tell Dr. Kowalski. “The patient’s having a stroke.”

She eyes me. “Maybe. Good place to start. What about periumbilical pain that migrates to the right lower quadrant, accompanied by vomiting?”

I hesitate. “Kidney stones?”

“Appendicitis,” she says curtly. “But good guess. Dr. Stone tells me you were a student EMT, so you were probably more likely to be dealing with a burst appendix than a kidney stone, at any rate, given the average patient’s age in your line of work.”

My line of work.Even after getting the question wrong, it sends a shiver of pride up my spine. Dr. Kowalski turns on her heel to lead us deeper into the ER, and Sadie falls into step beside me.

“Nicely done,” she says quietly. She apologized as we drove to the hospital this morning, finally acknowledging what she’d said in the car back in Santa Fe. It wasn’t my place, she said. She’s your mother, not mine. And I just nodded, zipped it away. I hate that Camilla touched this part of the summer, that even there—driving to meet a doctor I’m desperate to impress—we were talking about her. But I shouldn’t be surprised; Camilla is ruining everything. Including, if I’m not more careful, my relationship with Ethan.

“We’ll wrap up in the ICU,” Dr. Kowalski says now, leading us down a hallway tiled in scuffed laminate. “So you can get a feel for what it’ll be like at Hopkins Hospital in the fall. That shadowing position will really set you up—one of the best in the country.”

Don’t I know it. When I start to lose my grip on reality—when Camilla slips a vacuum-sealed face mask under my hotel room door or emails me interview questions for some press piece—I imagine myself there. All the tactile things about it: a laminated badge with my face on it, the sturdy sneakers I’ll buy, my chapped knuckles from so much handwashing.

“Tell me more about your EMT experience,” Dr. Kowalski says, casting a backward glance in my direction as we push through the doors into the ICU. “What was typical for you? Broken bones?”

“Some,” I say. “Only seniors are eligible, because you have to be eighteen. I did it for about six months and was on call two days a week, so it wasn’t as in-depth as I’d have liked, but—”

“But probably a good thing,” Sadie says, “that a campus full of teenagers didn’t require frequent emergency care.”

“True,” I say. There were drunk moments at parties, girls on my dorm hall too scared of being expelled to call 911 knocking on my door instead. Two o’clock in the morning, turning someone sideways on the tiled floor of our communal bathroom so they wouldn’t choke. A broken wrist in winter, straight-faced Alex Rao with tears in their eyes as they held their arm out toward me. But there was only one time I’d felt out of my depth—kneeling on the turf at a football game with Ty Ashton’s head stabilized between my trembling hands. The unfocused way he was looking up at me and the slur of non-words he was trying to speak. How I imagined his brain through the thin bone under my fingers, precious and damaged. I sat with him until the ambulance arrived, and when they finally carried him off the field and our mountain-ringed football stadium erupted into cheers, I darted across campus and threw up behind a purple smoke bush next to the library.

But that was my secret, that moment. Like the Sex Summit—a flicker of weakness I could hold close and keep quiet. When I got back to my dorm that night Ethan was waiting for me, studying as Fallon played video games across the room.

“How was the game?” he’d asked, looking up as I came through the door.

“Concussion,” I said, and Ethan’s eyes widened.

“What grade?”

At least three, I knew. Ty had been unconscious when I got to him. I shook my head. “I don’t—”

“Who?” Fallon asked, sitting up in bed. “Are they okay?”

I looked back and forth between them, both their faces open with wanting—tell me everything. But for very different reasons, and when I slumped onto my bed next to Ethan, he was already googling EMS concussion protocol. Not to learn about it, because we’d studied it together to earn our places as student EMTs. He was looking it up to confirm what I’d done. He was checking my work.

I’ve been back from the hospital for fifteen minutes when a knock rackets against my hotel room door.

“Audrey!” Mick shouts from the hallway, tapping his knuckles jauntily against the wood. “We’re going to the park!”

I glance at my bed: I have two Penn textbooks spread across it, my laptop open to Ethan’s most recent lecture notes. An email half-drafted, thanking Dr. Kowalski for her time today. I’m not going to get caught eating ice cream by some slimy photographer again when I should be working.

I pull the door open, find all three of them standing there watching me expectantly. Four if you count Puddles, who’s tucked under Silas’s arm with her tongue poked between her lips.

“Hi,” Silas says, smiling easily at me. He’s wearing his hair loose and wild, all tumbling waves. I think of that photo, the way I was looking at him, and lift a hand self-consciously to my neck.

“Hi,” I say, at none of them in particular. “I’m, um. Working.”

Cleo rolls her eyes straight up at the ceiling. She’s wearing a leopard-print minidress and black platform boots, hardly park attire last time I checked. “I told you this was futile,” she says, reaching for both boys’ wrists. “Let’s go.”

“Futile?” Mick repeats, raising his eyebrows at me. “Audrey, you gonna let her describe you that way?”

Silas grins at me over both their heads. “Can we try something?”

I narrow my eyes. “Depends what it is.”

“Bring your work to the park,” he says. “Get out of this hotel room. It’s nice outside.”

“It’s ninety-two degrees and ninety-five percent humidity.”

“Meteorologist Audrey St. Vrain,” Mick says, walking backward as Cleo drags him away, “reporting live for NBC 7. The news is next.”

I feel myself flush, and Silas huffs a laugh that makes Puddles’s tail wag.

“Just come,” he says, softer. Cleo and Mick are halfway to the elevator. “We won’t disturb your studying at all. We’ll be so quiet.”

Puddles chooses that exact moment to let out a loud, wet burp. Silas covers her mouth with one big hand, eyes never leaving mine.

“Did you see the picture?”

I nearly look around to check who asked such a forward question, and then I realize that it was me.

“What picture?” Silas asks, at the same moment Cleo shouts for us from the elevator, one neon-manicured hand waving through its open doors. Silas looks back at me, taking a step in Cleo’s direction. “Show me at the park?”

So that’s how I wind up on a grassy slope along the Colorado River, trying to read a biology textbook with a hotel towel spread beneath me. We’re in the shade of a big oak tree, but still—I’m hot as hell. Mick is in the river, shorts and T-shirt and all, his dark head bobbing in and out of the water. Cleo sits next to him on the bank, black boots parked beside her with her socks rolled up inside them. Her feet are in the water, and I watch Mick grab them and pretend to drag her in—she screams, and Puddles lunges out of Silas’s lap toward them.

“Whoa, girl,” he says, grabbing her two-handed around her rib cage. He’s been reading next to me, some mystery novel with a worn cover and a big crease in the spine. “No water for you.” He glances over at me. “She can’t swim.”

“Well,” I say, not looking up from my book, “I guess we have one thing in common.”

There’s a pause, and suddenly Silas is right next to me, craned over with his whole face in my space. “You can’t swim?”

I lean back, catching a whiff of him—salt sweat, the sunscreen I watched him rub into the back of his neck when we got here, something deeper and clean and good. I think of Fallon, reading to me from a paperback romance novel in our dorm room this spring: He smells of sandalwood, of early summer mornings and hope. The huge, characteristically Fallon snort she’d let out as she turned to me and said, That’s how you identify the love interest, Audrey. He smells like something insane. Human beings smell like BO or nothing. Fallon loves romances: the tropes, the comfortable predictability, all those sandalwood-smelling men. Ethan smells like pine trees, I’d told her, and she’d gagged.

“Camilla never taught me,” I say now, shifting on the towel to put more space between us. I don’t need to be close enough to Silas to smell him, preferably ever again. “She was too busy, and then I went away to school.”

He’s watching me, open-mouthed. He scrambles for a couple different words, lips moving until he finally manages to whisper, “Wow.”

“Cool,” I say. “Thanks for making me feel like a specimen.”

Silas laughs, adjusting Puddles in his lap. “Sorry. It’s just hard for me to picture growing up without this.” He spreads his hands in front of us. “Swimming in lakes and pools and smelling like chlorine all summer.”

I look over at him, try to imagine him small. “Did she teach you to swim?”

His brows twitch together. “Sadie?”

I shake my head. “Your mom.”

He hesitates, looking away from me, and I could strangle myself. What is wrong with me? “I’m sorry,” I say quickly. “I shouldn’t have—that was. It’s not my place.”

“No,” he says, smiling softly, “it’s okay. I’m just trying to remember—it was so long ago. It feels like something I’ve just always known how to do, if that makes sense.” He rakes a hand through his hair, leaving it messy. “But yeah, I’m sure she did—my dad was always working, so it must have been her.” We’re quiet for a minute, watching Mick splash Cleo on the riverbank. And then he says, “I’m impressed that you have the stomach for it, going to an ICU like that.”

We look at each other, textbook falling shut as I turn toward him. I’ll lose my place, but I leave it. “What?”

“Sadie told me you were going to the ER this morning. Or the ICU—I’ll be honest, I don’t know the difference.” He smiles. “But it’s pretty badass, either way. I can’t do hospitals after what happened.”

I blink at him, trying to decide where to start. I don’t think anyone has ever called me badass before. I didn’t know Sadie and Silas were talking so much about our plans this summer. But what comes out is— “Was she sick?”

“Yeah.” He runs a hand down Puddles’s back. “For a while, so we spent a lot of time in and out of places like that.” He looks up at me, draws a big breath. “Breast cancer. GG had it, too, but she’s all right now.”

My hand twitches on my lap, like I’m going to—what, reach for him? He glances at my fingers, like he saw it, too. “Silas,” I say, swallowing hard. “I’m so sorry. That’s terrible.”

“It was,” he says, one corner of his mouth lifting in a small way. “Thanks. It put me off hospitals as kind of a general rule, so I’m glad there are people like you. Still signing up to save the world.”

“I don’t know about saving the world,” I say quietly, nudging my palm into the corner of my textbook’s cover. “Hopefully a few people, though.”

“A few would be enough,” he says, and when I look at him it feels dangerous, like a great hole opening up. Something dark and unfamiliar to fall into. I blink, and Silas clears his throat, and over the sound of Cleo’s laughter I hear him say, “Was there a picture you wanted to show me?”

“Oh.” I reach for my bag, pulling out my phone and opening up the text thread with Ethan. I hold it out to Silas, that photo of us filling the screen.

I watch him study it, dark eyebrows knit together, one hand curved over the screen to shade it from the sun.

“This is what I’m talking about,” he says finally. I brace myself, Ethan’s words echoing in my head. It looks... suggestive. Silas holds the phone up so I can see it, pointing to me there. “Resting mathematician face.” His mouth cracks into a grin and I swipe the phone out of his hand, burying it in my bag.

“It’s not so bad,” he says, leaning over to nudge my shoulder. “Kind of cute, if you’re into that sort of thing.”

I rub my arm where it made contact with his, try to get this conversation back on the rails. “It’s invasive.”

“The photo?” Silas says. “Or me calling you cute?”

Shit. Shitshitshit. “I—” When I finally look at him he’s still smiling, but when he sees my face his lips flatten out, everything about his expression closing up.

“I’m sorry,” he says, leaning out of my space. “I didn’t mean to, um—”

And here’s the thing. Here’s the stupid, nonsensical thing. I don’t want him to be sorry. I don’t want him to feel bad. I don’t want that so much I almost don’t say what I say next—but I do. In the end, I do.

“It’s just, my boyfriend sent it to me.”

Silas’s eyes move over mine, back and forth just once before he looks out over the river. “Ah,” he says. One syllable, the smallest noise I’ve ever heard him make. “I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry—”

He turns back to me, smiling again. “At least they got a good photo of Puddles, right?” When he lifts her between us, bringing her nose to his, I see this for what it is. A pivot, the closing of a door.

And I don’t know what to say, either—how we’ve wound up here—so I just reach out and smooth one hand over the top of her head. Warm from the sun. Softer than I expected.

She turns toward me, panting in a way that makes it look like she’s smiling.

“They did,” I say quietly. “At least there’s that.”