One Was Lost(74)

I sip some water because my throat’s parched. It’s lukewarm through the plastic straw, so I must have slept awhile. I spot a note on my end table. Dad. Home for a nap because the nurses begged him. I begged too. He looked so tired. Still, he insisted on waiting until I fell asleep, and the note promises he’ll be back before I wake up.

“What are you doing here?” I ask the others. “I didn’t know they released you.”

“We weren’t admitted,” Emily says.

“I was deemed healthy, but they wanted to keep her longer,” Jude says, eyes narrowed just the tiniest amount.

“I’m fine,” Emily says, but the circles under her eyes tell me otherwise. “Just couldn’t sleep much.”

Her grandmother made her leave the hospital? Makes me wonder how on earth she’s here at zero-dark-thirty in the morning.

“She’s a deep sleeper,” Emily says, reading my mind. “I snuck out.”

“So you’re here to visit?” I don’t sound convinced.

Jude swallows hard. “Not exactly. We thought we should take them off together.”

I’m not sure what he means, but then Emily tucks her hair behind her ear, and I see the Damaged on her arm. My eyes flick down to the Darling on mine. It didn’t come off in the shower. I think I’d take a wire brush to my skin to see it gone, so I nod.

Her plastic basket includes bottles and cleaning supplies. One that looks like nail polish remover and another I think is bleach.

I frown, worry pricking at the back of my neck. “Is that safe to mix?”

“We’re not mixing them,” Jude says. “We looked up recipes. We’re going to try a few. Can you walk?”

I’m sure I can, and I know why they’re asking. Because Lucas is here too, so there’s one more of us to collect. I haven’t seen him since that moment in the forest, and every time I’ve wondered why, I’ve pushed the question back, locked it in a box at the far corner of my mind.

I already know the answer. I’m afraid of what I’ll see.

I went sixty-two days without looking at him after the first time we kissed, but that was then. And now is very different. When I see him, I’ll have to face what happened in the woods. Mr. Walker. Ms. Brighton. The thorns. He is wound into every memory of that terror, especially the awful end. Seeing him might be like reliving a nightmare.

“Come on,” Emily says. “I’ll walk with you.”

“I don’t…” I don’t know how to finish, so I shrug lamely and look at the floor. There’s a black scuff on the pale linoleum, like the letters on our arms. I think too many things in that second, flashes that jar me like punches. Bottled water on my parched tongue. Black flies buzzing in a cloud. Mr. Walker’s bloody fingers. Ms. Brighton falling onto her knife. How can anything good come of what happened out there?

The door to my hospital room snicks open. We tense with one collective breath, and then someone shuffles into the shadows. His height betrays him before he says a single word.

“Sera?”

My whole body goes warm as he crosses the room to my bed. If he’s surprised to see Jude and Emily, he doesn’t show it. No one speaks or explains. Lucas just looks at the box on Emily’s lap and helps me out of bed.

He laces his fingers with mine, and we sneak our way to an on-floor waiting area because we all know staying in my room is an invitation to get caught. It’s tomb-quiet at night and dark in the hallways, so it’s easy to go unnoticed.

No one says much when Jude unfolds the instructions and Emily starts pulling out stacks of cotton pads and swiping us down, one by one. The nail polish remover takes off about half the ink. The alcohol is pretty useless.

“Hell,” Lucas says, wrinkling his nose at the fumes. “Are we trying to get high or clean here?”

Emily just purses her lips and directs us all to the sink. We rinse off, and then she’s back at it with detergent and bleach, warning us not to mix the bleach with anything else. She sets in on Jude with a toothbrush, and he doesn’t look thrilled with her enthusiastic scrubbing.

“A little harder and they’ll think my very white dads are biological,” he teases, and Emily just laughs and eases her touch.

“You want to go first?” I ask Lucas.

He looks at me like we’re still on Sophie’s back deck. Like we’re still by the stream with his hands in my hair and my eyes spilling out secrets he’s dying to hear.

“Hey,” he says, eyes cashmere-gray and voice softer than that. His arm is in a sling, and he’s scraped and raw in too many places to count. He’s beautiful.

I smile. “Hey.”

He turns up his good wrist, and I scoop a little bit of the detergent mix onto his arm, see the scratches on his hand and his wrist, the bandage around his ankle where Ms. Brighton stabbed him inside the thorns. We’re both in hospital gowns, and we must have had the same nurse because we’ve both got an extra gown on as a robe, keeping our butts from waving in the breeze.

I graze his arm when I turn with the powdered bleach and detergent mix, and my eyes tear up. I could blame it on the bleach, but I won’t.

Lucas hisses when a little gets in his cut, and I flinch. “I’m sorry. Sorry.”

“It’s OK.” Then I’m tearing up, and his hand is on my arm, my face. “Hey. I’m all right. What you did—”