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Another minute passed. My cell buzzed—Rachel, of course—but I didn’t want to look at it, to be dragged back to the party. I wanted to go go go. And yet I felt unequal to the night, as if I were close to passing out. I just didn’t want to let go of him again. My senses were looping like a hamster on a wheel.
A cab turned the corner, its roof light signaling that it was free. Kai whooped.
“Now, there’s a lucky break. Never thought we’d get one of these so quick tonight.” He opened the driver’s-side back door. “In, in!”
I ran over to meet him just as my cell phone buzzed again. And again and then again. Texts from Rachel, of course. Now my ringer started. She was panicked that I was leaving Areacode without her.
The cabbie cracked his window. “Are you in or are you out?” he shouted at me. “Make up your mind!”
Kai was in the cab. My hand was stuck on the door handle. It had happened so fast. I shouldn’t just leave the others like this. Should I? The building’s fire-exit door slammed open. I jumped, turning.
“Goddammit, Ember!” Rachel was sprinting toward me, her zombie bandages streaming, with Jake in a loose gallop behind her. “What the hell?”
“I’m fine,” I called.
“You can’t do this to people!” She was at me in the next bound. “You can’t do this to me!”
“I’m with Kai, we’re just…” I looked back to watch the cab squealing off, the driver cursing. Kai hadn’t gotten out. He’d left without me. No no no. My eyes teared and felt immediately icy.
“Have you totally lost your mind?” Rachel’s veins were standing out in her neck. “Just to up and leave us?”
I nodded, shy and shamed, and rubbed my hands together, trying to extract warmth. The cab’s red taillights were in full retreat. Now pinpoints, now gone. As quickly as Kai had appeared, he’d left me. “I’m…I’m…”
“You’re nuts. Let’s get you back inside.”
I let her put her arm around me and turn me, though I cast another look over my shoulder. Would he double back, maybe? It seemed like a feeble hope. He’d really needed to go home.
We returned to the building, me stumbling between the other two like a culprit. But I was grateful for the heated stairwell as we entered.
Above the fire-escape doors, the words jumped at me. NO REENTRY ON THIS FLOOR. It was like a warning of something not yet clear.
“I feel sick,” I said. Aware my voice was dry and toneless, as if I didn’t care what had happened, as if the crisis were nothing to me as my mind sank blank and black and quiet. I was shutting down—burying my mixed-up emotions rather than dealing with them. Dr. P even had a five-dollar phrase for it, “habitual inurement,” which I’d forgotten till now. Basically it meant that my brain couldn’t pick what it felt like, so it desensitized itself and picked nothing.
“You might be bombed,” Jake mentioned. “There’s a rumor they spiked one punch bowl but not the other. Like a cocktail version of Russian roulette.”
“And you most definitely got the wrong Kool-Aid,” said Rachel. “Why else would you be shouting about waffles? Are you hungry? That message you left me was insane! You were seriously leaving the party with a stranger? What’d you call him again? Cal? Where’s he from?”
“Kai,” I said.
“I don’t know any Kai,” muttered Jake.
“He’s not a stranger,” I answered flatly. “And no, I’m not hungry.” But Kai was gone, and my muscles were so cramped that it was hard to move. Pain was a burden in my body. I dropped to the bottom step, leaning so that my cheek pressed against the wall. Rachel took a seat beside me.
Jake offered a plastic bottle of water, nearly full. “Drink,” he commanded.
Which I did, in long, messy gulps.
“Who was he, then?” Rachel asked.
“Just this guy I met,” I managed, wiping my mouth.
“Do you realize how screwed up that sounds to me?” Rachel shook her head. “That you would have just taken off with some random dude who you hadn’t even bothered to introduce me to, who you’d only just met tonight?”
“Actually, I have met him before. Let’s talk about this later, ’kay?” I pushed back the damp tendrils of my hair.
“You’re acting really strange.”
“I’m feeling really strange.”
“Hey, Ember.” Jake knelt before me. His face doubled in my vision. “Your pupils look pretty dilated. I drove here, by the way. I’m parked about four blocks down. If you two wait, I’ll bring the car around.”
“That’d be awesome.” Rachel’s hand covered mine. “Oh, Embie,” she said with a sigh once Jake had gone. “You just can’t do that to me. If you’d left and all I’d had to go by was that crazy voice mail, I’d have had no way of knowing where you were heading or who with—or anything!”
“I’m sorry.” I tried to access the right tone so that Rachel would know that I was. Mostly I felt so incredibly tired. “I don’t know what got into me.” Kai. Kai had gotten to me. Again. I did such incredibly stupid things when I saw him. All common sense—pffft!—out the window.
“If that was grain alcohol you were drinking,” said Rachel, “then I’m just going to blame the rest of your bad judgment on accidental drunkenness. When’s the last time you even had a drink? It must be close to a year ago, right?”
“Mmm-hmm.” I rested my head on her shoulder. I wanted to cry now, to break down in a flood of tears like a baby. My emotions were in whizzing orbit. I’d obviously gotten the spiked drink. There was no other reason I was feeling shaken. And Smarty was also right that I hadn’t had any alcohol since before the accident—my tolerance was probably zero.
“We’re going to get you all tucked in bed with tea and toast—sound good?”
“Sounds good.”
“Good. I just texted Jake to hurry.” Rachel rested her fingertips on my knee. A dragonfly’s weight. As if I were made of something less able, less capable than a regular person. Tonight, that was probably true.
14
An Easy Spin
The doorbell rang while I was on Facebook late that next morning, rubbing Bengay into my aching muscles and browsing Maisie Gantz’s profile. One album had a picture of Anthony Travolo in it. I’d zoomed it to pixels, but I still couldn’t tell what he looked like. He was wearing a baseball cap pulled low, and was standing in a long-view group shot of maybe a dozen kids with paintbrushes who were all posed in front of a wall, celebrating a city mural that looked familiar.
