Static from the phone buzzes in my ear while I wait for the eruption—for him to tell me what I should and shouldn’t have done like Marcus.
I pull Mama in my lap, holding onto my breath and the buzzing static.
“Okay, baby,” he replies. “Bryson still there with you?”
His tone won’t change. It’s like I’m not even hyperventilating.
“Yes!”
“Okay,” he whispers. “Keep being good for Mom and let me talk to him. Can you do that for me?”
“Uh, huh. I—I can.”
“A’ight, well, give him the phone.”
“But I need you.”
“Youhaveme. Put me on speakerphone so you can still hear me. Okay?”
When I pull his calm voice from my ear and stab at the screen, the world seems warped.
I push the phone into Bryson’s blurry chest and keep being good for Mama, like Ace says. It’s the only thing in my life I’ve ever tried to do perfectly. I keep listening for his voice in the melee of Mama’s ragged breaths and Bryson hovering over my back.
“Bryson...” Ace calls out. “All bullshit aside, I need you to do me a solid, brodie.”
“O—okay.”
“I want you to listen to what I’m about to tell you and then hang up with me and call 911. You understand?”
“I—”
“You can do it. I know you can. Do you hear me?”
“Yeah—yeah. I hear you.”
“Donotlet Lourdes call 911. You do that.”
There’s rustling on his end of the phone, and I think I hear Coach Williams yelling in the background, but he sounds far away.
“When the ambulance gets there, call me. Call me and tell me what hospital they’re taking Mom to. They’re only gon' let Lourdes ride, so you gotta get that shit down before they leave with Mom because Lourdes... she’s... she’s...” He sighs. “Baby, I’m coming.”
CHAPTERTWENTY-SEVEN
Lourdes
The doctors in the emergency confuse me more than Dr. Evanston does. They speak in sprints with their sentences running together and they ask lots of questions but refuse to answer mine.
“She’s got some hyperpyrexia going on. How long has she been running a fever?”
None of them are old like Dr. Evanston. They look too young to be sporting their white coats, and they stare into my eyes like I’m doing a shitty job of taking care of Mama so I try to remember if I took her temperature between Shannon and Skip’s rants.
“I—I don’t know,” I stutter out. “I think my brother said she was hot a couple days ago?”
The white boy pauses and looks up at me, running his fingers through his short blonde hair. “Well, yeah, she’s on fire. So she’s been this hot for three days?”
“I don’t kno—”
“Sir! You can’t come in here!” a nurse yells, looking up from the needle she poked in Mama’s arm.
