“It’ll make you look rugged,” Mel says.
“Because I woke up this morning,” I say, “and the one thing I realized I lacked was ruggedness.”
“Your lucky day then,” says Call Me Steve.
“It is,” Mel says, and her face gets that angry look it always does when she’s about to cry. “He could’ve been killed.”
Dr Steve reads the vibe and starts to make his excuses. “Wait,” Mel says. She tears a strip of paper off my admissions chart and writes down her phone number. She gives it to Steve. “It’s all right. I’m nineteen. I should already be in college. You’re good.”
Steve just laughs, but he takes the number. “Go now, please,” she says. “I’d like to yell at my brother for almost dying.”
When we’re alone, she doesn’t yell. She just stands in front of me, gently gently gently not quite touching the wounds on my face. She is crying now, but her face is so fierce, I know she’d take my head off if I mentioned it.
“Mikey,” she finally says.
“I know,” I say.
She tries to gently hug me, too, but even that’s too much. “Ribs!” I say, groaning. She just sits down next to me on the gurney.
It turns out that both the slight fascists and the pot farmers who live on our road are equally nice in a car accident. My phone disappeared somewhere under the dashboard and Henna was still pinned in, so I don’t know who called 911. Before the ambulances and the fire truck even arrived, though, people were running out of their houses with towels – the first of them stopping for a moment in wonder to watch the last of the deer flood disappear – then they were pressing those towels against my face. A couple of other people tried to get Henna’s door open to get her out in case the car caught fire. She screamed every time her arm moved, and she wouldn’t let go of my hand, not even when Mr and Mrs Silvennoinen were retrieved from their house – we were like six doors away when the deer hit us. They were fantastically calm, so much so that it was only when I saw them that I realized how much pain I was in.
Someone called my house, too. My mom was picking Meredith up from Jazz & Tap, so Mel – not even bothering with our father – came roaring down the road in her own car. Me and Henna got taken away by ambulance, Mel and the Silvennoinens followed, and Henna went straight into surgery to put her arm back together.
The last thing she said before the paramedics knocked her out was, “Mike.”
“I called Jared,” Mel says now. “He’s going to come by at midnight. The Field.”
“Good,” I say. “Thanks.”
Her hand is next to mine on the gurney and she laces our fingers together, squeezing hard. You see how lucky I am? Knowing that people love me? So lucky. So stupidly lucky.
We hear our mom’s voice before we see her. Mel lets go of my hand. My mom turns the curtained corner where we sit in the emergency room, and the first sight of her face is so worried, so terrified, that suddenly I’m six years old again and have just fallen off my bike and want her to make it better.
This lasts a full four seconds until she tries to hug me.
“Ribs!” I pretty much shriek.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” she says, pulling back. I have to flinch again when she tries to touch my face.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry.”
“Can’t you see the bandages?” Mel asks. “And the blood?”