“Give me that!” I reached out and grabbed the phone from the man.
“He’s a diabetic and his blood glucose meter says twenty-seven,” I mumbled into the phone.
How did you get orange juice down someone’s throat who was passed out?
“Okay, that’s too low,” a women’s voice, strong and steady, came over the line. “I have an ambulance on the way. Does he have a shot in his bag called Glucagon? It’s usually in a red plastic case. Diabetics carry them for times like these, when they go too low. It could revive him and keep him from going into a coma.”
Coma. Revive. She fucking said revive!
My hands shook even harder and the man seemed to see that I was promptly about to lose my shit, so he took the phone from me and put it on speaker. Bending down, I checked the big part of his backpack. Other than the empty gun case and his insulin pen, nothing was in there.
Fuck.
“Ethan!” I screamed, completely losing my shit.
He wasn’t moving.
With shaking hands, I peeled open the front of his backpack and there was a plastic red case.
Relief poured through me as I picked it up and read the package.Glucagon.Prying it open, I grabbed the needle and inserted it into the jar of liquid that came with it. There was a powder and it needed to mix together.
The dude was relaying everything I did to the 911 lady.
“Stick him in the thigh with it, honey. Don’t be afraid to hurt him. It needs to go in deep.”
Holding the needle in the air, Ethan unconscious on the ground, something knocked me right in the gut and struck even more fear into my bones.
I was falling in love with him.
With a fearful cry, I shoved the shot into his leg and plunged the contents of the syringe into his bloodstream.
Two days ago, I’d taken blood from a classmate without so much as a rise in my heartbeat. Everything was different when it was someone you cared about.
“I did it!” I shouted, crawling down on to my elbows to stroke Ethan’s forehead.
“Okay, honey, great job. The paramedics are on their way. You did really good.”
A whimper lodged in my throat. He wasn’t waking up. “Is he going to be okay?”
Silence.
“I’m sure he’ll be fine, honey.”
That wasn’t an answer. That wasn’t said with confidence. That was something you said to someone in panic so that they didn’t spiral out.
Breathe. Just breathe.
I didn’t realize my fingers were on his pulse, making sure his heart was still beating, until the EMTs showed up and pried them off.
“Are you family?” they asked me.
Ethan and Angela were literally the only people in the world who cared about me. Who would realize if I went missing or care if I died? If that wasn’t fucking family, I didn’t know what was.
“Yes,” I croaked.
Ethan and I might not have shared even a kiss yet, but somehow he’d taken me in like a stray puppy and we were family. I knew in that moment that if things never got intimate between us and we decided to keep things platonic, that we would always be friends. He would always pick up when I called.
The next hour was a blur. I was in shock. I rode in the ambulance, and the men said that me giving him the glucagon shot might have saved his life. After we’d arrived at the hospital, the doctors grilled me on his insulin. How much did he take, how often, was it short acting or long? I didn’t know anything and it made me feel so helpless. They’d hung an IV bag of straight glucose in the ambulance and Ethan had regained consciousness just as they were wheeling him into intensive care. Away from me.
