"Versed, two milligrams, IV push," Dr. Boggs calls out. I'm already holding Tyler down with one hand, checking his airway with the other. "And someone get that kid out of the waiting room before he passes out."
The friend. He's standing in the hallway, pressed against the wall, shaking almost as hard as Tyler.
He's maybe seventeen too. Just a kid.
A kid who watched his buddy drop and had the presence of mind to throw him in a car and drive, and that decision is probably going to save Tyler's life, and that kid has no idea he's a hero right now because all he can see is the blood on his friend's chin from where he bit through his own lip.
Dr. Boggs appears next to me. Steady as always, those mid-fifties hands already working. "Fentanyl?"
"Has to be. Same presentation as the others—seizure, hyperthermia, tachycardia. His temp is already at 104."
"Get cooling blankets. If the Versed doesn't break the seizure in two minutes, we're going to have to intubate."
The Versed works. Barely.
Tyler's body goes from full convulsion to a tremor to something that looks like sleep but isn't—it's the heavy, drugged stillness of a brain that just got yanked back from the edge by chemicals fighting chemicals.
His heart rate drops from 160 to 120 to something I can live with, and I stand there with my hands on his chest feeling it slow down beat by beat, and I breathe for what feels like the first time in ten minutes.
He's going to make it. Probably.
If his kidneys didn't take too much damage, if his brain wasn't oxygen-deprived for too long, if the fever didn't cook anything that can't be uncooked.
A lot of ifs for a seventeen-year-old who was at a party three hours ago.
I chart everything.
Vitals, meds, timeline.
My handwriting is steady because my handwriting is always steady, even when the rest of me is shaking so hard I have to lock my knees to stay upright.
Then I walk to the break room, close the door, sit down on the cracked vinyl couch, and put my head between my knees.
I don't cry. I don't scream.
I just sit there and shake the way I only let myself shake when no one can see—hands trembling, jaw tight, the adrenaline bleeding out of my system in waves that feel like nausea.
Tyler. Seventeen. House party.
Could have been Wrenleigh's classmate.
Could have been someone Sadie Jo knows in a year or two, because that's how fast it moves—from high school hallways to hospital gurneys in the space of one bad decision and one contaminated bag.
I give myself three minutes.
That's the rule—three minutes to fall apart, then you put yourself back together and you go back out there because the ER doesn't wait for you to process your feelings.
The ER doesn't care.
The ER has sixteen more patients and a waiting room full of people who need you to be steady whether you are or not.
I wash my face, drink a cup of coffee that tastes like fuel, and go back to work.
"I swear to God, if they put another cast on me, I'm filing a lawsuit." She's swinging through the main corridor on her crutches, heading toward orthopedics with the furious energy of a girl who's been trapped in plaster for six weeks and has reached her absolute limit. "I looked it up. I can sue for emotional distress. The cast is emotionally distressing me."
"You can't sue the hospital for putting a cast on a broken leg, Wrenleigh." Coin's voice. Low, steady, the verbal equivalent of aman who's had this conversation nine times today and will have it nine more.
"Watch me."
