"You're number seventeen," Doug said.
"Oh." I fell to my knees in the sand beside him. "I need another nap."
"I need another beer," Gabriel called. Boys cheered their agreement.
"I need another cast," Doug said. "And some crutches. My dad's going to kill me."
I put my hand on his stomach again. I was still mad at him. Seeing his life pass before my eyes hadn't changed that. But I felt better with my hand on his stomach. "I'll take you to the emergency room."
"I'll call my brother to take me," he said.
"I want to take you," I insisted.
"I'll get your dad's car all wet."
"Serves him right. That's what you get when you go out of town and give your daughter the keys to the Benz. Everyone knows seventeen-year-olds are irresponsible." I sat up and yelled down the line, "We could have died out there. The whole high school swim team plus one running back, gone. And you know what the people on the beach would have said? `It all happened so fast.'"
Lila piped up, "It is amazing how quickly we can be stupid."
Mike snorted laughter, and Keke cackled, "Lila, I love you."
"Y wouldn't say stuff like that to each other in public if you could see yourselves," said a football player walking over. "Did you all take your pants off?
ou The swim team really knows how to throw a party."
Keke laughed. "Y have no idea."
"THE LOVEBIRDS ARE BACK!" SAID A doctor in a long white coat over pink scrubs. She brushed my damp bangs aside. "How's the head?"
I glanced down at Doug filling out forms. He sat in a wheelchair with a blanket around his shoulders. We both looked like we'd half drowned in the ocean. It was a wonder the doctor recognized us. We must have made quite an impression last week. Of course, then we'd been soaked with rain, so we probably looked similar now.
Doug tried to say something to the doctor but coughed instead. All the way from the beach, he hadn't said a word. Now he coughed, and coughed, and finally hacked out, "Zoey still doesn't remember much about that night. Is that normal?"
"Oh, sure," the doctor said. "When I was in junior high, I was break dancing on roller skates one afternoon and you can imagine how that ended. I fell and hit my head. At least, that's what my friends told me later. They also told me I'd been shopping for new leg warmers earlier in the day. All I remember is sitting up in the middle of the roller-skating rink, screaming, `Where are my leg warmers? These aren't my leg warmers!'"
Doug and I looked at each other. Doug raised one eyebrow.
"My memory of that afternoon never did come back," she said. "But twelve years later I graduated from medical school, so I must be okay."
"Y could have told me that before!" I wailed at her. "It would have made me feel a lot less crazy."
"I did tell you that before." She grabbed a file from the counter and disappeared through a door into an examining room.
Doug scrawled something across his last form, set a soaked insurance card on top of it, and handed it all to the nurse. I wheeled him back through the double doors into the empty white waiting room that was way too familiar to me. I positioned him by a seat where I wouldn't be staring at those doors again, and I sat down next to him.
"I guess you don't want to hear why," he said softly.
With my eyes on the gray specks in the white tile floor, I said, "I'm here, aren't I?"
Doug talked in a monotone, staring at the blank white wall opposite us. "That Monday night after I saw you here, I was so worried about you. I was afraid to call you because I didn't want to get my brother in trouble with your dad. I looked for you at the beach party. The next day I expected to hear this big hullabaloo at school. I thought the whole swim team would support you. I never heard a peep. But football and swimming dress out at the same time. I go in the locker room and there's Brandon Moore bragging about how he tapped your ass."
He held up his hands to shield his face like he thought I might slap him. When he saw I only glared at him, he slowly put his hands down.
"Brandon's words, not mine. Y have a reputation for not putting out, so I knew something was wrong with you. I knew exactly what you'd done. I know
ou that feeling. Y have to do something. Y have to change something radically, because you can't stay like you are for another second, or you're going to
ou ou explode."
He was talking about running away to Seattle. I felt for his hand inside the blanket. It was ice cold.
He sighed. "But Zoey, the problem is that when you feel that way, your brain has already shut down. So whatever you do next to change your situation, it's bound to be stupid." He shook his head. "I tried all week to get you to call me. I tried to talk to you at the football game and screwed that up. And then, at the party, Brandon started talking smack about you again--"
"And you are so much better than him," I said, "because the first words out of your mouth were, `I'll bet you I can seduce Zoey Commander in the next two hours.'"
He turned to me for the first time, green eyes pleading. "I was trying to get you away from him, but I honestly could not have predicted we would do it. Still, if you were going to do it with somebody, I wanted it to be with me, because you could trust me." He laughed bitterly. "If it hadn't been for the wreck and everything that came after, that wouldn't sound the least bit ironic. I guess you don't want to hear that I've had a crush on you since seventh grade." He brought our hands out from under the blanket. His hand had been so cold and so still, I'd forgotten I was holding it. Now he placed my hand palm-up on his thigh and traced his finger to the tip of my perfectly polished pointer finger. "Or that I thought about you when I went to juvie. That I probably never had a chance with you long-term anyway, but now I'd sealed the deal." He traced his finger to the heel of my hand. "Those are explanations, but not excuses. Juvie is fond of that distinction." He traced his finger to the tip of my thumb. "Or that I couldn't stand to watch anything bad happen to you, because it was like it was happening to me too. Is that love?" His hand clasped my hand again and squeezed.
I swallowed. "It could be."
He kissed my hand. "Anyway, we shouldn't have done it. I shouldn't have let it go that far when I knew how vulnerable you were and I wasn't being completely honest with you. I realize that now, and I'm sorry." He squeezed my hand once more and let it go.
Suddenly the idea that this was the end of Doug and me seemed horribly wrong. No matter what path we'd followed to get here, now we sat side by side in the ER. Again. I whispered, "We shouldn't have done it so soon."