I ordered the ginger ale, and deserved every ounce of scorn the waitress aimed at me. “Don’t be so sure,” I said.
“You are so full of shit,” he said, scrolling through my messages. “That wasn’t even five minutes, and you look like death. Your pants are covered in vomit, by the way.”
I glanced down but couldn’t see more than the vague outlines of my legs.
He busied himself with his phone while I sipped my ginger ale, but it wasn’t long before the alarm sounded on my glucose monitor. I couldn’t win. I knew my blood sugar was next to nothing, and I needed to force down some real food.
“I need to get out of here,” I groaned, my head dropping against the chair.
“You think?” he asked, and hauled me up by the collar but I didn’t have much strength to stand. “Son, you are scaring the shit out of me right now.”
“No, no,” I said, my tongue too heavy to form the words correctly. “I’m fuckinggreat.”
I puked a couple more times while we waited at the valet stand. I was bent over the bushes with Riley’s hand gripping my shoulder when I realized he was talking.
“I think you owe me, dude,” he said.
I turned my head to tell him I didn’t owe him a goddamn thing, but I ended up spewing all over his shoes.
“Seriously, Nick, I need your help and I don’t care what kind of doctor you are. I’m throwing him in the car and taking him to your ER.”
“No,” I groaned. “I just want to go home.”
“You have lost the right to make decisions for yourself,” Riley yelled, then he lowered his voice. “I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone about you fucking my sister after Matt and Lauren’s wedding, and you promised me a favor in return. I’m callin’ it in, my friend.”
I begged him to take me home and let me sleep it off, Riley went straight to the hospital. I was too disoriented to care when the nurses stabbed me with syringes and tore off my clothes, effectively ruining a two thousand dollar Burberry suit and my favorite Eton dress shirt.
I didn’t remember much after that. There was more, maybe a lot more, but it lurked in an inaccessible part of my mind.
When I woke up, Nick and Riley were seated beside my bed.
My mouth tasted like pennies, and was desert dry. “Where am I?” They glanced at each other, and Riley shook his head. He looked exhausted, and more than a little furious. “What happened?”
Nick shuffled forward on a rolling stool, and crossed his legs. “You’re at Mass General.” He pointed to the logo on his scrubs. “And right now, we’re not buddies.”
It hurt to open my eyes, and squinting was the best I could manage. “What?”
“It means you need to shut up and listen,” Riley hissed.
“Sam, you had a blood-alcohol level of point two when you were brought in. That by itself is pretty impressive. You were in extreme hypoglycemia. You seized before we could get your sugar under control. The fact you’re not in a coma right now is . . . unexplainably positive.”
Maybe that was why absolutely every muscle in my body ached.
“You know the rules of this game. You work out hard, you crash. You don’t eat, you crash. You don’t sleep, you crash. You hit the bar, you crash. You can’t do all that and expect your body to keep going.” He tapped his pen against the tablet balanced on his thigh. “You and your brothers? Y’all handle stress the exact same ways. You run your bodies into the ground and have the balls to be pissed off when you realize you’re just as human as everyone else.”
“That’s not what happened,” I said. There was more I wanted to say, but my throat was burning. It would have been easier to speak if I’d been chewing glass.
“I’m keeping you for observation, and the endocrinology team is coming in for rounds at seven, but listen to this. You need to get your ass in line.”
“Don’t tell anyone else about this. Don’t call Shannon,” I said to Riley as Nick rolled away.
“Dude,” Riley sighed. “How is me tellingShannonyour biggest concern right now? I watched you have a fuckingseizure.Do you have any idea what that’s like? I can’t sit here while you destroy yourself anymore.”
“That’s not—”
“No,Sam. No.” Riley pushed out of his chair, pacing along the length of the thin curtain separating us from other patients. “You basically took a razor blade into the bathtub tonight, and you damn near succeeded.”
“I didn’t want to die,” I rasped.
