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WHAT WE KNOW,OLIVE COULDtell you, is not what we think we know.
One year, she had run a psychological study in which she told her collegiate subjects that scientists had discovered a chemical that had antiaging benefits. When told that the scientists didn’t really know how that worked yet, the students reported not understanding how the antiaging effects occurred. But when told that scientists had figured out the methodology, the students reported an understanding of the process—even without being given the details.
It was almost as if knowledge was contagious. People constantly claimed to “know” something when they didn’t have the facts and tools to uphold their claims.
Maybe for this reason, she’d thought that at this moment, she would be reliving the high-water marks of her life, the memories of love and joy and justice. She thought she would see her first kiss with a girl made of moonlight in a lake at summer camp; or her last kiss with Peg, when each put a bookmark in her reading material and curled toward the other like parentheses before they turned out the light.
Olive thought, and therein lay the mistake.
When it came down to it, at the end, you did not think. You felt.
What did she feel?
That you will never cease to underestimate yourself.
That love is fleeting.
That life is a miracle.
That the reason she had come to this clinic, on this day, at this hour, wasthis.
Acting purely on instinct, Olive LeMay threw herself in front of the bullet.
Two p.m.
THE SUNLIGHT WAS OVERWHELMING.
Izzy watched it glint off the silver bars of the wheelchair. She was temporarily blinded and then forced herself to put one foot in front of the other, to push the wheels over the threshold of the clinic door.
It wasn’t just the sunlight, though—it was cameras and shouted questions as someone emerged from the belly of the beast. Izzy froze, unsure of where to go and what to do.
She was supposed to wheel Bex outside, and then walk back through those doors. But it would be so easy to save herself.
She could lean forward, low and dynamic, and run. She could bring Bex to the ambulance and leap inside and really, what could the shooter do?
Her vision cleared as a man stepped forward. In silhouette he was tall and broad-shouldered, and for just a moment she thought:Parker.But Izzy was not the one being rescued now, and anyway, in her fairy tale, she was still afraid that any moment the prince might realize she was just a poor villager, posing as a princess.
The hostage negotiator held out a hand and beckoned her forward.
She felt like she was suspended between what could be, and what was. Just like always.
It was that way for all people who grew up poor, she imagined. Izzy had vivid memories of her birthday being celebrated two weeks after the fact, because that’s when they could afford a box of cake mix. Of always adding water to the milk to stretch it. Of being giddy when the food stamps came in and you could go to the grocery store; and being ashamed when you had to actually use them to pay.
When Izzy was in first grade, her family couldn’t afford school supplies, so she pretended that she had forgotten them at home. Then one day, when she opened her little flip-top desk, there was a brand-new box of Crayola crayons. They were still pointy at the top and smelled like wax and had asharpeneron the back. Izzy had no idea if it was her teacher who’d given them to her, and she never found out. But she did realize, then, that her family was different from other families. Most kids didn’t go to Sam’s Club for lunch when you weren’t even a member, because you could make the rounds for free samples. Ketchup sandwiches, with packets stolen from McDonald’s, weren’t normal. Her mother rummaged through her brothers’ backpacks and threw out the flyers for the Scholastic Book Club, for field trips, for dances, for anything that was an additional expense. When they ate dinner, Izzy would pretend to be full because she knew her mother wouldn’t have any food if she didn’t leave some behind on her plate.
As she worked through high school, she was determined to have a different life. She couldn’t afford an SAT prep course, so she asked another student for the syllabus, and then got books through interlibrary loans and taught herself. She applied for more than a hundred scholarships that she found online using the library’s free Internet. She didn’t get them all. But she got enough for a free education.
She went to nursing school on student loans and she scrimped and saved.
And then she met Parker—who had taken her on her first vacation.
Who couldn’t believe that she’d never gone to a doctor growing up—only the school nurse, who didn’t require insurance.
Who had found her adding water to the shampoo so it lasted longer.
Who had proposed, in spite of all this.
