Page 46 of Fade into You

“You’re not fine,” I tell her, but she just laughs again.

I lock her arm with mine and I’m holding a decent amount of her weight as we make small strides across the center of the rink. Dade and Kayla slow down and look, but they’re both laughing. Neither of them stops.

“You guys, a little help!” I yell after them. Even Dawn comes over and tries to take Jessa’s other arm.

Jessa shoos Dawn away, insisting loudly, “I. Am. Oh. Kay.” But she holds on to me even tighter while Dawn clears a path for us to make our way off the rink and helps me get Jessa to a bench on the sidelines. I catch the reflection of a tear sliding down her cheek. I reach out to dab it with my sleeve but she flinches.

Dade and Kayla are back around again, both of them still grinning and happy. This time Dade shouts, “Nice face-plant!”

“Shut up, both of you!” I yell back, but I doubt they hear me.

Jessa flips him off again and forces a smile, even though I can tell she’s hurting.

“Why are you friends with him?” I blurt out.

“What do you mean? I’m friends with him because he’s…my friend.” She shrugs. “He’s just messing around, Bird. I can take a joke, you know.”

“Well, I don’t think it’s funny. You’re sitting here bleeding.”

“I don’t care,” she insists. “Besides. Why are you friends withher?”

I look over at Kayla and I honestly cannot think of a single reason why I’m friends with her in this moment. “Me and Kayla, we… we go way back. We’ve been with each other through a lot. She wasn’t always like this. The way she’s been lately. This isn’t her. But Dade…” I glance over my shoulder, make sure they’re really gone. “It just doesn’t seem like he’s nice to you. Like, ever.”

“That’s justDade. He treats me like I’m another dude friend. It’s just—you wouldn’t get it.” She shakes her head sadly and adds, “You know, he’s actually a lot nicer to me when it’s only the two of us.”

“Yeah, I really hope so.” I look around to see if I can flag Dawn again, wish she would’ve stuck around a minute so I could ask her for some Band-Aids or an ice pack or something. “Listen, just sit here. I’ll be right back.”

“Oh, all right,” I hear her say as I hurry off, as fast as I can on the thin carpeting.

I cut the long line at the snack bar to ask for an ice pack, and thankfully, they have a first aid kit, which they allow me to plunder for iodine packets and bandages. I’m back by the time the couple skate is ending, and people start flooding back onto the rink.

“Okay, you are seriously overreacting,” she says, trying tolaugh once again as I open one of the packets and dab the disinfecting wipe against her knee.

“Will you stop laughing about this?”

“Okay, fine, just give me the Band-Aid. You shouldn’t be touching other people’s blood, you know.”

“It’s really okay. I’m being careful. I have a lot of practice bandaging skinned knees.”

She watches me closely for a moment while I gently smooth the first bandage into place over her skin. When I glance up and meet her gaze, she clears her throat and grins. “Get a lot of those when you were training for the Olympics, Michelle Kwan?”

I scoff. “Somehow, I can’t imagine you sitting around listening to punk rock while watching Olympic figure skating.”

She shrugs again. “My sister was into it, actually. It calmed her down when she was—” She stops short and has a momentary caught-in-headlights look, as if she just said something she wasn’t supposed to. “I just watched it with her to make her happy.”

“Well,” I begin, as I layer down the last Band-Aid on her knee. “I have three younger siblings who are way clumsier than you, so…”

“Lots of Band-Aids?” she finishes.

“Two of them are toddlers, though,” I add, just to see her laugh again.

“Why are you so good at skating anyway?” she asks, as I sit down next to her.

“My dad was a really good skater. He taught me and my older brother. We used to come here constantly when I was little. He could do everything that figure skaters do—jumpsand spins, and he could dance and, just, everything.”

“Is your dad—sorry, no. Never mind.”

“What?”