Page 27 of The Someday Daughter
“Some,” I say. “Only seniors are eligible, because you have to be eighteen. I did it for about six months and was on call two days a week, so it wasn’t as in-depth as I’d have liked, but—”
“But probably a good thing,” Sadie says, “that a campus full of teenagers didn’t require frequent emergency care.”
“True,” I say. There were drunk moments at parties, girls on my dorm hall too scared of being expelled to call 911 knocking on my door instead. Two o’clock in the morning, turning someone sideways on the tiled floor of our communal bathroom so they wouldn’t choke. A broken wrist in winter, straight-faced Alex Rao with tears in their eyes as they held their arm out toward me. But there was only one time I’d felt out of my depth—kneeling on the turf at a football game with Ty Ashton’s head stabilized between my trembling hands. The unfocused way he was looking up at me and the slur of non-words he was trying to speak. How I imagined his brain through the thin bone under my fingers, precious and damaged. I sat with him until the ambulance arrived, and when they finally carried him off the field and our mountain-ringed football stadium erupted into cheers, I darted across campus and threw up behind a purple smoke bush next to the library.
But that was my secret, that moment. Like the Sex Summit—a flicker of weakness I could hold close and keep quiet. When I got back to my dorm that night Ethan was waiting for me, studying as Fallon played video games across the room.
“How was the game?” he’d asked, looking up as I came through the door.
“Concussion,” I said, and Ethan’s eyes widened.
“What grade?”
At least three, I knew. Ty had been unconscious when I got to him. I shook my head. “I don’t—”
“Who?” Fallon asked, sitting up in bed. “Are they okay?”
I looked back and forth between them, both their faces openwith wanting—tell me everything. But for very different reasons, and when I slumped onto my bed next to Ethan, he was already googlingEMS concussion protocol. Not to learn about it, because we’d studied it together to earn our places as student EMTs. He was looking it up to confirm what I’d done. He was checking my work.
I’ve been back from the hospital for fifteen minutes when a knock rackets against my hotel room door.
“Audrey!” Mick shouts from the hallway, tapping his knuckles jauntily against the wood. “We’re going to the park!”
I glance at my bed: I have two Penn textbooks spread across it, my laptop open to Ethan’s most recent lecture notes. An email half-drafted, thanking Dr. Kowalski for her time today. I’m not going to get caught eating ice cream by some slimy photographer again when I should be working.
I pull the door open, find all three of them standing there watching me expectantly. Four if you count Puddles, who’s tucked under Silas’s arm with her tongue poked between her lips.
“Hi,” Silas says, smiling easily at me. He’s wearing his hair loose and wild, all tumbling waves. I think of that photo, the way I was looking at him, and lift a hand self-consciously to my neck.
“Hi,” I say, at none of them in particular. “I’m, um. Working.”
Cleo rolls her eyes straight up at the ceiling. She’s wearing a leopard-print minidress and black platform boots, hardlyparkattire last time I checked. “I told you this was futile,” she says, reaching for both boys’ wrists. “Let’s go.”
“Futile?” Mick repeats, raising his eyebrows at me. “Audrey, you gonna let her describe you that way?”
Silas grins at me over both their heads. “Can we try something?”
I narrow my eyes. “Depends what it is.”
“Bring your work to the park,” he says. “Get out of this hotel room. It’s nice outside.”
“It’s ninety-two degrees and ninety-five percent humidity.”
“Meteorologist Audrey St. Vrain,” Mick says, walking backward as Cleo drags him away, “reporting live for NBC 7. The news is next.”
I feel myself flush, and Silas huffs a laugh that makes Puddles’s tail wag.
“Just come,” he says, softer. Cleo and Mick are halfway to the elevator. “We won’t disturb your studying at all. We’ll be so quiet.”
Puddles chooses that exact moment to let out a loud, wet burp. Silas covers her mouth with one big hand, eyes never leaving mine.
“Did you see the picture?”
I nearly look around to check who asked such a forward question, and then I realize that it was me.
“What picture?” Silas asks, at the same moment Cleo shouts for us from the elevator, one neon-manicured hand waving through its open doors. Silas looks back at me, taking a step in Cleo’s direction. “Show me at the park?”
So that’s how I wind up on a grassy slope along the Colorado River, trying to read a biology textbook with a hotel towel spread beneath me. We’re in the shade of a big oak tree, but still—I’m hot as hell. Mick is in the river, shorts and T-shirt and all, his dark head bobbing in and out of the water. Cleo sits next to him on the bank, black boots parked beside her with her socks rolled up inside them. Her feet are in the water, and I watch Mick grab them andpretend to drag her in—she screams, and Puddles lunges out of Silas’s lap toward them.
