Page 10

She opened her eyes to a white room. Pale linen curtains billowed against the open windows, and a bird sang on the tree outside. Cool sheets slipped over her thighs as she sat up.

Emily sat at the end of her bed, smiling at her. Too-wide teeth and pale blue eyes.

She reached out a shimmering hand, stretching her fingertips for Jodi’s arm.

“I’ll protect you.”

Her fingertips landed on her skin like a kiss.

And passed through her.

Jodi woke in a white room. A curtain to the right, pale blue and unmoving.

The chirp of her heart monitor on her left, and Zack sitting in the chair.

“Hey.” He sat forward, smiling. “You’re fine. You just passed out.”

She furrowed her brow and sat up to look down at her thigh, and bright pain burst into her brain. She hissed through her teeth.

“They had to wait to pull it out at the hospital. Said it was on the femoral artery, so they needed blood before they could take it out.”

She nodded and lay back, feeling winded. “Julian?”

“Two broken ribs. Dislocated shoulder.”

Taking a deep breath, Jodi pinched her eyes closed. “Water polo?”

“It’ll take six weeks,” he said.

Her lips pressed together. She didn’t know why she was fucking crying about Julian Hollister not getting to play water polo.

“Lucy and Paige?” She opened her eyes and blinked back the tears.

“Paige’s ankle is getting looked at now. Probably just a sprain, but they’re making sure. Lucy has a concussion. She said her head hit the truck bed in the crash. Nicked her temple open.”

Zack’s hand was still on her arm, just above the IV She focused on the warmth of him. “Did you see it?”

His thumb rubbed her wrist, and her skin broke out in goosebumps. She hoped he didn’t notice.

“I heard the screaming, and I turned from the concession stand just in time to see the crash.”

“Was anyone else hurt? The other people in the cars?”

Zack shook his head, and Jodi looked at him in disbelief. “Remember how Julian parked?” Zack said.

She winced. “Like a dick?”

“A few other cars got debris damage and had their bumpers scraped, but because he was so far up, his truck was the only thing hit.”

Jodi stared at him. “That’s insane.”

He nodded. “They’re calling it a freak accident. My dad’s already looking into what kind of lawsuit can be filed against the drive-in.”

Frowning, Jodi shifted in the bed. She didn’t like the idea of the drive-in getting sued because they were too poor to pay for upgrades. Jodi herself had contributed to the less-than-great profits by hiding in a trunk once or twice. But she supposed if the drive-in was negligent, then maybe hospital bills should be covered or something.

The idea of hospital bills and who would be paying them forced Jodi to jerk upright. “My dad.”

“He knows. He’s in Utah. The best option was to keep driving, because there wasn’t going to be a flight out of Salt Lake until tomorrow morning.”

She winced—at the pain in her thigh and the thought of another money conversation with her dad. He’d already been so frustrated about the lawyer’s retainer, barely talking to her when he was home, and when he was, he made comments about them not being able to go out to eat or pay to play golf together. Jodi closed her eyes and rubbed her face with her free hand.

“But he called your aunt. She’s on her way.”

“Oh.”

Rosa and Jodi got along, but Rosa thought her sister, Jodi’s mom, had made a huge mistake by marrying her dad, and she made that known whenever she could.

“Julian’s kinda in shock, by the way.”

She snapped her gaze to him. “Shock?”

“Yeah. I heard him asking the nurses how you wouldn’t have felt the glass, why you would have been so mobile.” Zack laughed. “I think he’s really impressed. He may owe you a life debt or something.”

Jodi scrunched her nose. “Hardly. He could have just laid there for a few hours until the Jaws of Life came.”

Zack swallowed and looked down. “Uh… Well, Paige was the last one loaded in an ambulance. She said that right after Julian’s ambulance left, a few more beams snapped. The screen collapsed, like, more .” He looked up at her. “If he’d still been under there, he might be dead.”

Jodi stared up at the ceiling. “Tell him to buy me a gift card and be done with it.”

Zack laughed. He sat back in his chair, pulling his hand away, and her arm felt colder.

“Is it weird?” he said. “That we were supposed to stay away from each other, and then the one time we all get together, we almost die?”

Jodi chuckled. “I mean, you’re not wrong.” She grinned and turned her head to him.

He was staring off, in serious contemplation.

“It was a freak accident,” she repeated.

He jerked his head and ran a hand through his hair. “Or karma.”

She blinked. Before she could ask him when he began to believe in that, the click of heels on linoleum announced Aunt Rosa’s presence. She threw back the curtains, gasped about how pale Jodi was, and started the discharge process while Zack waved goodbye.

Rosa Rodriguez was an intimidating creature. She wore heels, rain or shine, and with her black curls and pristine eyebrows, she often drew every eye in the room at thirty-nine. Every year on her birthday, Jodi received makeup and perfume bottles that made Paige scream in envy.

“That drive-in is so dangerous. I remember how rickety those screens were when I was going to them.”

Jodi sat in the front seat of Rosa’s car, her bloody clothes in a bag on the floor and hospital sweatpants from the gift shop on her lower half. The stitches on her thigh would leave a scar, nasty and crooked, six inches long.

Rosa was ranting, and Jodi caught “your father” and settled back in her seat.

“Have you heard from him?” she asked.

“He texted from Reno,” Rosa said, answer short, just like her temper when it came to Jodi’s dad.

She watched Howe and Fair Oaks pass and realized Rosa was taking her to her grandma’s house. Of course. Why would she get to just go home alone? Jodi breathed deep as they navigated through the construction on the J Street bridge.

“Can’t believe he just lets you out with your boyfriend when he’s not in town,” Rosa grumbled.

“I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“You were in a truck with two boys on a Friday night,” she said matter-of-factly.

“They’re friends.”

She clucked her tongue and said, “For now.”

Jodi rolled her eyes. Rosa had never had trouble turning friends into boyfriends. When Jodi was twelve, she sat eagerly at Rosa’s knee and listened to her tell stories about Jodi’s mother and her, how they’d gone out to clubs at fifteen and been invited backstage to rock concerts. Jodi had been looking forward to it. But instead of her aunt’s breasts, she got her thighs. Instead of her mother’s hips, she got her father’s stomach.

Her grandma’s house was a sweet two-bedroom in River Park, a buried little neighborhood on the other side of the college campus. Rosa parked in the driveway and led her up to the house.

“Grandma is sleeping,” she said, opening the front door quietly.

“No, I’m not.”

Her grandma was sitting in the chair in front of the television, watching infomercials.

“Hi, Grandma.” Jodi went to press a kiss to her forehead, but her grandma stopped her with a hand.

“Let me see it,” she said, gesturing to her leg.

Jodi rolled down her sweatpants to her knees, forgoing modesty, but winced at the sight of the stitches. Her grandma hissed and whispered something in Spanish that might have been a prayer. Jodi pulled up her pants and reached out to help her grandma out of the chair, but she swatted her hand away. She was only sixty-five, and she refused to be treated like an old lady.

Grandma Anna Maria was the only grandmother she’d known, but she was enough grandparent for all of them. She was the kind who snuck you cookies, who made crass jokes, who slipped twenties into your hand with a wink. Her husband had died a year after Jodi’s mother had passed, and Jodi was old enough now to see why Rosa would willingly live with her mother throughout her twenties and thirties. When she was younger she didn’t get why Rosa didn’t get married and move out—she had plenty of boyfriends. Jodi had never had a sibling, but she’d come to realize that losing a sister and father within a year would probably make her afraid, too.

They let Jodi rest in Rosa’s bed until morning, but she couldn’t wind down. She kept seeing Pennywise stretch off the screen and into the sky as the screen collapsed. The sound of Julian screaming in her ear. The streetlamp flickering.

Was Zack right? Were they being punished for hanging out again? Jodi pushed the stupid idea to the side and curled into Rosa’s pillow. Zack hadn’t mentioned any news crews, but she could assume that the freak accident at the Sacramento drive-in would be newsworthy.

She hoped “the Thrashers” wouldn’t be highlighted again, so soon after their last headlines. But the next day she woke up to the headline EMILY MILLS’S BULLIES INJURED AT DRIVE-IN . An entire profile on Julian, his water polo stats, his involvement in the Emily Mills case, and his current condition took up half a page.

Julian wasn’t at school on Monday, which was for the best. He was the most banged up out of all of them. Jodi and Paige’s limps were already attracting an insane amount of attention, and the stitches at Lucy’s hairline were even more gossip-worthy.

During art class, Oliver begged Jodi to tell the story, promising not to put anything on Tumblr or TikTok she didn’t want. Nikita was riveted.

“How badly is Julian Hollister hurt?” Oliver asked, shaping his clay.

“Off the record?” Jodi said, and he pouted but nodded. “I don’t think he’s playing water polo this season.”

Oliver shrugged. “He was scouted last year. He might be fine.”

But when she looked over to Julian’s seat in anatomy later that afternoon, she wondered if he saw it that way.

She took notes for him in anatomy for the rest of the week. According to Paige, he’d tried to come to school on Wednesday, but at lunch someone had accidentally knocked into him. It jarred his ribs so badly that he had to go home, popping Vicodin like candy on the way out.

Jodi couldn’t ride her bike or else the stitches would open, but she hopped on the bus after school on Friday and headed to his house in the tree-lined Fab Forties, the “king-size Snickers on Halloween” blocks. As she walked up to the driveway, she scoffed when she saw a brand-new black truck in front of Julian’s house.

The Hollister house was Sacramento-famous—an English Tudor-style mansion with a pool and manicured gardens that stretched back to the next block over. It was the house Ronald Reagan lived in while he was governor of California. Despite it being the largest and nicest house between the group of them, they never had parties or hangouts at Julian’s. It was rare that he invited anybody over but Zack. Jodi thought maybe his parents warned him about keeping the house “historically preserved.”

Ray Hollister was a housing developer who’d met a daytime soap star in Hollywood, left his first wife, married the actress, and then had Julian. Jodi didn’t see him or his wife, Nina, often, so when Ray opened the front door and said, “Josie! Nice to see you!” she didn’t bother correcting him. Ray Hollister wasn’t someone who was often corrected.

He gestured for her to find Julian in his room upstairs, and Jodi traced the path she had only taken once or twice before. She twisted up the stairs and headed for the room at the end of the hall, passing the loving family photos and framed catalog ads that Julian had done for GapKids and American Eagle. She knocked on his door and heard “What” in response. The sound of video game guns and explosives rippled under the door.

“It’s Jodi,” she said, feeling awkward about walking into his room if he was expecting his mom or something.

There was a pause, and the video games quieted. “Jodi who.”

She rolled her eyes and opened the door.

He was sitting up in bed, shirt off (pants on, thankfully), running a hand through his hair and lifting his brows at her. His room was cleaner than she’d expected—no clothes on the floor, bed made and sheets tucked, no empty plates or glasses on surfaces.

She narrowed her gaze on him. “Are you… tidy?”

“What are you doing here?” he asked, ignoring her question.

She reached into her backpack and grabbed the stack of photocopies. “Anatomy notes from this week. Lucy gave me her English notes from the past few days, and I asked Becca Gardner for her precalc notes. There was a quiz today that you missed.”

She extended the stack to him. When he just stared at her, she eventually dropped them on his bed.

“Do you want a trophy?” he said drily.

She opened her mouth to snap back, but the very careful way her eyes had been avoiding his skin failed, and she saw his chest for the first time. His left side from his armpit to his waist was purple. The shoulder above was just as dark.

She bit back her comment. “Are you coming back on Monday?”

He looked away from her and unpaused his game. “That’s what they say.”

Jodi’s chest felt empty. She’d thought maybe they had something to say to each other. The sound of his screaming against her throat, or the way he’d told her to just go. The slam of her chin on the truck bed as his body covered her.

But she guessed she’d been wrong.

“’Kay. See you Monday.” She grabbed her backpack, wincing as she leaned on her right leg by accident. She was considering calling an Uber to take her home so she didn’t have to walk to the bus.

“Where’s the cut?”

Turning back, she found him watching her. She patted her right thigh.

“Where?”

“Um…” Placing her thumb on her jeans to the top of the stitch, she stretched her pinky to where the bottom was six inches lower. “Here-ish.”

He stared at her leg so hard, she felt heat rise up in her cheeks.

“Will it scar?”

She nodded. “Yeah, they say so.”

He tore his eyes from her leg and turned back to his game, his jaw set tight.

Jodi stood in his doorway, feeling untethered. Maybe he blamed her. She’d frozen as that screen came down. He could have saved his shoulder, ribs, and water polo career if she’d just flattened like the rest of them.

She left his room, shutting the door behind her, and hobbled down his stairs. It wasn’t until she was on the bus that she realized she’d started bleeding through her jeans on the walk to the bus stop.