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“Felicity?” he asks.

But I can’t talk, can’t remember this boy’s name or where I am. His arms go around me, and suddenly he’s thrown me over his shoulder and I’m being carried through the hall, the flash of his calf tattoo the only thing I can see. He’s barreling his way through the crowd, forcing his way to the front of the bathroom line. People argue but fall silent when they turn and see this boy, his size quieting their objections.

The bathroom door opens, and there’s a girl in the mirror, light hair a tousled mess, blue eyes wide and questioning, the pupils tiny black dots in the center.

She’s scared.

She’s scared.

She’s gone.

“You with me?”

It’s a boy’s voice. Quiet. Calm.

“Felicity? You had a seizure.”

Shit. Yes, I did. And that’s . . . that’s Hugh Broward’s voice.

I sit up, and he’s at my side in a second, hands on my shoulders.

“Slow,” he says, and I nod in agreement, my face grimacing when I see the puke down my front.

“Oh God . . .”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Hugh says.

“It’s not okay,” I say, choking back a sob. “I puked all over myself.”

“Here.” He whips off his jersey, pulling it over his head. The white T-shirt underneath is glaringly bright under the bathroom lights, and I close my eyes against it.

“You all right?”

“Yeah,” I say, pushing my palms into my eyelids. Color bursts. Pinwheels spin. “Just . . .”

“Recovering, I get it,” Hugh says, hands me his jersey. “Grandma says the first few minutes after are pretty rough.”

That’s right, I remember now. Hugh lives with his grandmother. His parents got divorced in fifth grade. It was . . . messy—that’s how Mom had put it. Must have been, for both his parents to leave Amontillado behind and him to decide he’d rather live with an old lady who has seizures.

I wet a towel, wipe off the front of my shirt as best I can. There’s an angry banging on the door, three raps in a row, insistent.

“Get off already, Broward,” somebody shouts.

I scrub more furiously, only driving the stain deeper into my shirt and ruining Gretchen’s towel. Dismissing it as futile, I pull Hugh’s jersey on over it, yanking my hair free from the back.

“How’d you know?” I ask, leaning forward to check my teeth. “How’d you know I was going to seize?”

He shrugs, his massive shoulders moving up and down in the T-shirt, like a white cloud. “You just had that look about you, the way Grandma gets. I figured you wouldn’t want to go down in front of everybody.”

“No,” I say, rinsing and spitting. “No, I didn’t.”

The banging comes again, harder.

“You ready to go back into it?” Hugh asks, hand on the doorknob.

I check my reflection, adjust my hair. “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I think so.”

He twists the knob, but I stop him.