She found Ryan at the far side of the backyard, slumped against a boxwood hedge that was swallowing him in its branches. “This is not the way to prove to me I’m not your sidekick, dude,” she said, peering down at him in irritation. She smelled, and then saw, the puddle of barf a few feet away. “Ryan,” she said. God, was this what he was like at every party he ever went to, and she just never knew because she wasn’t usually there? “Seriously? Again?”
Ryan didn’t answer for a moment, his eyes mostly closed. Sprawled on the grass like this he looked even bigger and taller than normal, like some kind of fallen giant from a fairy tale. He blinked at her, not quite focusing. Trying again. “It’s you,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s me.” She looked at him more closely, squatting down so they were eye level. Gabby frowned. She’d seen Ryan drunk before. This... did not seem like that. His gaze was still oddly unseeing; his face was weirdly, waxily pale.
“Ryan,” she said again. “Hey, dude, listen to me, how much did you drink?”
“I didn’t,” he mumbled.
“Ryan, this is not the time to be a dick—”
“Ididn’t,” he insisted, and this time he sounded irritated. “Or I did, okay, but only one beer.” He listed to the side a little bit. “Got hit.”
“You gothit?” Gabby’s heart skipped like one of her mom’s scratched old CDs. “When?”
“At the game,” he said vaguely, and closed his eyes again.
“Oh, shit, yeah, he did,” put in Hockey Bro, who Gabby realized abruptly was still standing behind her. “I hadn’t even thought of that. He got his fucking clock cleaned this afternoon, it’s true.”
“And nobody thought that maybe he should go to thedoctor?” Gabby screeched. “Ryan,” she said, grabbing his arm and shaking; Ryan made a quiet groaning sound, but didn’t open his eyes.“Ryan.”Shit, she was scared now. She wanted her parents. She wanted literally any adult.
She turned to Hockey Bro, who was still hulking behind her with his hands in the pocket of his hoodie, useless as a dead tree. “I’m calling 911,” she said. “You have five minutes to get everybody out of here if you don’t want the cops to come too.”
“Damn,” Hockey Bro said. For a second she thought he was going to argue with her, but in the end he looked over her shoulder at Ryan and nodded. “Yeah, fair. Okay.”
The paramedics showed up in a ghoulish carnival of lights and sirens, terse and efficient and wholly unimpressed. “It’s not alcohol poisoning,” Gabby tried to explain to them, trotting along beside them as they wheeled Ryan on a stretcher across the bumpy cobblestone driveway; it felt very important that they know this, that they realize he wasn’t just some dumb drunk kid. “He’s a hockey player, he got hit.”
“Who are you?” asked one of the EMTs distractedly.
She took a deep breath, then hopped up into the back of the ambulance before anyone could stop her. “I’m his best friend,” she said.
GABBY
Gabby sat in a padded vinyl chair in the bright, chilly hospital corridor, watching CNN on mute above the nurses’ station and nervously clicking her phone on and off. She’d been in this same hospital just the previous summer, when Kristina fell off her bike trying to do wheelies and broke her wrist in three places, although that time her mom had been here too, calmly reassuring them all that everything was going to be fine. Tonight, Gabby was on her own. It occurred to her to wonder if this was what growing up meant, to continuously find yourself in situations that you didn’t feel remotely prepared to handle.
The paramedics had whisked Ryan away when they’d arrived, and Gabby glanced down the empty corridor now, searching for any sign of life and finding none except for a bored-looking intern sipping coffee and flipping through a chart. She rubbed her arms against the goose bumps that had sprung up there, wrinkling her nose at the smell of Lysol and pee.
“Gabby?”
Gabby looked up sharply. Ryan’s mom, Luann, was coming fast down the hallway, dark hair waving like a flag in her wake. Other than their trip to Albany last fall, she didn’t know Ryan’s mom very well; she hadn’t spent a ton of time at Ryan’s house, but the few times Gabby had gone over there after school Luann was always working, clipping a terrier’s toenails or scrubbing a golden retriever in the big industrial sink. Once they’d helped her recapture a nervous Pekingese who’d escaped from the grooming table in the basement and run upstairs. Gabby had thought it was a lot funnier than Ryan had.
Tonight Luann looked nicer than normal, a pinkish lipstick slicked over her mouth and skinny-heeled boots instead of her usual beat-up Crocs. Gabby thought of what Ryan had said about her having a boyfriend, wondered if possibly she’d been out on a date. “Where is he?” Luann asked, breathless.
“They took him for a CAT scan,” Gabby explained, feeling like she was reciting lines from one of the grisly medical dramas Celia watched incessantly. “I guess he got hit prettyhard at his game today.”
“Shit.Shit.” Luann tugged at the ends of her hair in a vaguely alarming fashion. Then she shook her head. “Okay,” she said. “Wait here, all right? I’ll find out where he is.”
Luann went over to the admitting desk and spoke in urgent tones to the nurse there, returning a minute later looking marginally calmer. Gabby was expecting her to take charge like her own mom would have, maybe even to send her home, but instead she held her hand out for Gabby’s like a little kid afraid to go to the bathroom by herself. “Come on, Gabby,” she said. “They said you can go back with me.”
Ryan was lying in bed in a hospital gown, plastic ID bracelet looped around his wrist and the skin around his eyes turned bruised and bluish. For a second he didn’t seem like anybody Gabby actually knew. “Hey, lovey,” Luann said, her voice breaking a bit as she dropped her purse on the chair and hurried across the room to the bedside. “Hey, love.”
“I’m fine,” Ryan said. “I promise. Oh god, Mom, don’t cry.”
“I’m not,” Luann said, although she definitely was, her expression wet and wobbly. Gabby thought again of her own mom, of how calm and unflappable she’d been when Kristina was hurt. It was unnerving, the idea of needing to comfort a parent. It upset the natural order of things.
Gabby hung back in the doorway as Luann fussed, adjusting Ryan’s pillows and peppering him with questions. She straightened up, sniffling, just as the doctor came in, atall black woman with her hair pulled into a knot on top of her head. “Ryan McCullough,” she said, looking down at the scans in front of her, “this is a heck of a concussion you’ve got here.”
“I’ve got a heck of a hard head,” Ryan said, smiling winningly.
