Page 49 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
He’s on his side, crumpled around himself, his arm bent at an unnatural angle. His eyes are pressed shut, his forehead wrinkled with the strain of it. His lip is split open and there’s blood smeared across his mouth, brilliant scarlet against his smoke-pale skin. I reach for him, and one of the security guards stops me.
“Don’t touch him,” he says. “Don’t move him. Nothing until EMS gets here.”
I let my hands hover over his shoulder, useless.I’m here, I want to say.I’m here and I’ve got you and I’m not leaving.
But I don’t know if it’s the consolation it would have been once, and I stay silent as Jazz’s shoes appear, then Felix’s beside them.
“Oh my god,” Jazz says. And then Felix: “What thefuckjust happened?”
I’ve heard him upset before—furious with us afterRocky Mountain Live, exasperated with us during love training, halfway hysterical with laughter, doubled over in the break room at XLR8. But I’ve never heard his voice like this. Shredded.
Jazz crouches next to me, finding my eyes in the dark. Somewhere in the background—in a whole other world—security has dispersed the crowd.
“Help is coming,” she says, and between us, Miller lets out a breathless moan. His chest is rising and falling fast, like he’s panicking. She reaches to put a hand on his arm, then stops herself. “You’re going to be okay. It’s okay. Okay?”
“Okay,” Miller says, biting out each syllable. I’m so relieved to hear his voice, my hands start shaking. I press them to the concrete to keep them still.
“Ro.” Felix drops to his knees to look at me. “Talk to him, all right? Distract him until they get here.”
It’s been years since we’ve been this way—Miller in pain, me the one who makes him feel better. Knowing what Miller needs used to come to me like breathing, our roots so tangled I could feel his hurt as my own. But I’m paralyzed now—by the years and the space we’ve let grow between us. I don’t know if I’m what he needs anymore, and I’m terrified that what he needs is the opposite of me. The absence of me.
But then Miller’s eyes open, search for mine in the dark, and I know. It hits me with full-body, breathtaking pain that I’ve never stopped thinking of him as mine. That this is my Miller, broken on the sidewalk. That we belonged to each other once, and that I want that back with a ferocity so sharp it brings tears to my eyes.
“Ro, it’s okay.” Felix reaches out to squeeze my shoulder. The security guards are standing now; it’s just the four of us down here. “Speak up, honey.”
“Miller,” I whisper. His eyes flutter closed and I bite my lip, hard enough to draw blood. This is all my fault.Ro Devereux isn’t god.What the hell have I done?
“Miller,” I say, louder this time. “Do you remember when we were seven, and your dad took us to the stock show in Denver?” He nods, barely, just enough that I keep going. “There was that fuzzy cow, the Highland, and its hair was so ridiculous and longand they’d just bathed it so it was all curly and you said if I was a cow, I’d be that one?”
Oh my god, I think, watching him bite his lip. His white teeth in the dark, clamping down to hold in his agony.This is the stupidest story of all time.
“Or when you found that arrowhead on the Harrison Gorge trail,” I try again. “And we took it to the Museum of Nature and Science and they brought us to the basement, where they had all those artifacts that were too boring to display but too precious to toss, and they told us it wasn’t real but they gave you that field explorer badge anyway?”
I’m talking faster as I go, babbling, desperate to land on a memory that makes this all okay. My knees ache against the cold concrete.
“Do you remember the first time my mom sent me money?” Miller’s eyes open, hold mine for just a moment before closing again. “And we burned it in the woods even though you hated fire, you didn’t even like birthday candles, but you spent all morning building that tepee fire and we roasted the money on a stick like a marshmallow? And you said it was the world’s most expensive s’more?”
His breath is slowing, and I don’t know if it’s because he’s calming down or because I’m losing him.
“Do you remember when we made pie for the eighth grade bake sale, but we forgot the bottom dough and just decorated the edges and when Mrs. Morales scooped it out in the cafeteria it got all over her hideous pink dress? Or do you remember that frog wefound at the lake, and we named him Peanuts and we took turns keeping him in our rooms but—”
“Ro, they’re here.”
The EMTs move in around me before I’m ready. Miller is nodding in and out. I don’t know if he hears me; I don’t know if he’s okay.
“Miller,” I say, as they slide their hands under his body.
“Miller,” as they strap him to the stretcher.
“Miller.Do you remember?”
“Yeah, Ro.” His voice is so quiet, I almost miss it. The stretcher rises, lifting him up. “I remember everything.”
I scramble to my feet, following as they wheel him toward the street.Me too,I want to scream.I remember everything.The waiting ambulance’s lights throw alternating red and yellow flashes across his face, his bleeding lip.
“Somebody coming with him?” one of the paramedics asks. He looks from me to Jazz to Felix. “We’ve got room for one.”
Felix reaches forward, pushes me in the middle of my back. “She’ll go.” When I look at him I think of the night Vera died, how he stood over Miller and me in that hospital hallway like a sentry. Like someone who wanted to keep us safe. “We’ll follow right behind you.”
