LITMIR.BIZ

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half second, she smiled, obviously pain-free, and I started to think it was over.

      “He’s gone,” Lydia said softly.

      Then the panic truly hit me.

      What I’d felt before had only been a preview. This was the main event. The real deal. Like at the mall.

      Anguish exploded inside me, a shock to my entire system. My lungs ached. My throat burned. Tears poured from my eyes. The scream bounced around in my head so fast and hard I couldn’t think.

      I couldn’t hold it in. The keening started up again, more urgent than ever, and my jaws—already sore from being clenched—were no match for the renewed pressure.

      “Give it to me …” Lydia said, and I opened my eyes to see her staring at me earnestly. She looked a little better. A little stronger. Not quite so pale. But if she took any more of my pain, she’d backslide. Fast and hard.

      Unfortunately, I was beyond the ability to focus by then. I didn’t know whether or not to give her what she wanted, much less how to do it. I could only ride the scream jolting through me like a bolt of electricity and hope it stayed contained.

      But it wouldn’t. The keening grew stronger. It thickened, until I thought I’d choke on it. My teeth vibrated beneath the relentless power of it, and I chattered like I was cold. I couldn’t hold it back.

      Yet I couldn’t afford to let it go.

      “There’s too much. It’s too slow,” Lydia moaned. She was tense, like every little movement hurt. Her hands shook again, and her face had become one continuous grimace. “I’m sorry. I have to take it.”

      What? What does that mean? Her pain was obvious, and she wanted more? I pulled my hand away, but she snatched it back just as my mouth flew open. I couldn’t fight it anymore.

      The scream exploded from my throat with an agonizing burst of pain, like I was vomiting nails. Yet there was no sound.

      An instant after the scream began—before the sound had a chance to be heard—it was sucked back inside me by a vicious pull from deep in my gut. My mouth snapped shut. Those nails shredded my throat again on the way down. It whipped around inside me, my unheard screech, being steadily pulled out of me and into …

       Lydia.

      She began to convulse, but I couldn’t pry her fingers from my hand. Her eyes rolled up so high only the lower arc of her green irises showed, yet still she clung to me, pulling the last of the scream from me and into her. Pulling my pain with it.

      Gone was the agony of my bruised lungs, my raw throat and my pounding head. Gone was that awful grief, that despair so encompassing I couldn’t think about anything else. Gone was the gray fog; it faded all around us while I tried to free my hand.

      Then, suddenly, it was over. Her fingers fell away from mine. Her eyes closed. She fell over backward—still convulsing—before I could catch her. She hit her head on the footboard, and when I fumbled for a pillow to put under her, I realized her nose was bleeding. Dripping steadily on the blanket.

      “Help!” I shouted, the first sound I’d made since the whole thing started, several endless minutes earlier. “Somebody help me!” My voice sounded funny. Slurred. Why was it so hard to talk? Why did I feel so weird? Like everything was moving in slow motion? Like my brain was packed with cotton.

      Footsteps pounded down the hall toward me, then the door flew open. “What happened?” Nurse Nancy demanded, two taller female aides peering over her shoulder.

      “She …” I blinked, trying to focus in a thick cloud of confusion. “She took too much …” Too much of what? The answer was right there, but it was so blurry … I could see it, but couldn’t quite bring it into focus.

      “What?” Nurse Nancy knelt over the girl on my bed—Lisa? Leah?—and pulled back her eyelids. “Get her out of here!” she yelled at one of the aids, gesturing toward me with one hand. “And bring a stretcher. She’s seizing.”

      A woman in bright blue scrubs led me into the hall by one arm. “Go sit in the common room,” she said, then jogged past me.

      I wandered down the hall slowly, one hand on the cold, rough wall for balance. Trying to stay above water as wave after wave of confusion crashed over me. I sank into the first empty chair I found and buried my face in my hands. I couldn’t think. Couldn’t quite remember …

      People were talking all around me, whispering phrases I couldn’t make sense of. Names I didn’t quite recognize. So I latched on to the first familiar thing I saw: a jigsaw puzzle spread out on a table by the window. That was my puzzle. I’d been working it before something bad happened. Before …

      Cold hands. Dark fog. Screaming. Bleeding.

      I’d placed three puzzle pieces when two aides rolled a stretcher past the nurses’ station and out the main door of the unit. “Another one?” the security guard asked, as he held the door open.

      “This one’s still breathing,” the aide in purple said.

      This one? But the harder I tried to remember, the blurrier the images got.

      I’d only placed two more pieces when someone called my name. I looked up from my puzzle to see another aide—her name was Judy; I remembered that—standing next to my uncle. Who stood next to my suitcase.

      “Kaylee?” Uncle Brendon frowned at me in concern. “Ready to go home?”

      Yes. That much was clear. But my relief came with a bitter aftertaste of guilt and sadness. Something bad had happened. Something to do with the girl on my bed. But I couldn’t remember what.

      I followed Uncle Brendon through the main door—the one you had to be buzzed through—then stopped. Two men leaned over a stretcher in front of the elevator, where a girl with dark hair lay motionless. One man was steadily squeezing a bag attached to a mask over her face. A smear of blood stained her cheek. Her eyes were closed, but in my fractured memory, they were bright green.

      “Do you know her?” Uncle Brendon asked. “What happened to her?”

      I shuddered as the answer surfaced from the haze in my head. Maybe someday I would know what it meant, but in that moment, I only knew that it was true.

      “She took too much.”

       1

      “COME ON!” EMMA whispered from my right, her words floating from her mouth in a thin white cloud. She glared at the battered steel panel in front of us, as if her own impatience would make the door open. “She forgot, Kaylee. I should have known she would.” More white puffs drifted from Emma’s perfectly painted mouth as she bounced to stay warm, her curves barely contained in the low-cut shimmery red blouse she’d “borrowed” from one of her sisters.

      Yes, I was a little envious; I had few curves and no sister from whom to borrow hot clothes. But I did have the time, and one glance at my cell phone told me it was still four minutes to nine. “She’ll be here.” I smoothed the front of my own shirt and slid my phone into my pocket as Emma knocked for the third time. “We’re early. Just give her a minute.”

      My own puff of breath had yet to fade when metal creaked and the door swung slowly toward us, leaking rhythmic flashes of smoky light and a low thumping beat into the cold, dark alley. Traci Marshall—Emma’s youngest older sister—stood with one palm flat against the door, holding it open. She wore a snug, low-cut black tee, readily displaying the family resemblance, as if the long blond hair wasn’t enough.

      “‘Bout time!” Emma snapped, stepping forward to brush past her sister. But Traci slapped her free hand against the door frame, blocking our entrance.

      She returned my smile briefly, then frowned at her sister. “Nice to see you too. Tell me the rules.”

      Emma

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