Hope and Other Punch Lines(55)

I try to grab hold of something solid as I fight for consciousness, and Noah takes my hands.

“It’s okay,” he says, squeezing tightly. His voice is faux calm, betrayed by an unmistakable undercurrent of panic. “They’re coming. Put your head between your legs. I promise you’re going to be okay. Breathe. Abbi, please breathe. Breathe.”

I lean forward. The air only comes in tiny squeezed-through doses, like air is something solid and hard and impassable. I can’t get nearly enough. I have no idea how long I’ve been sitting here. I picture my inhaler in my bag, which feels hundreds of miles away. All that empty space between us.

“Breathe,” Noah says again. “I’m here. Breathe.”

“What’s happening?” Livi asks. “Did Abbi eat red paint?”

That’s the last thing I hear before everything goes dark.





Abbi’s blood is on my shirt and on my shoes and I have no memory of how it got there. I call Jack from the emergency room, my hand shaking so hard I have trouble pressing the buttons.

“On my way,” Jack says.

“They won’t tell me anything. They took her behind the swinging doors and told me to wait. How am I supposed to wait?”

I pace up and down in a loop, step over the bleary-eyed and the sick. A little kid with a shiner vrooms a Matchbox car up the back of his seat while his mom tries to wrangle an ice pack onto his face. I ignore the nurse who keeps pointing at the No Cell Phones sign. This place feels postapocalyptic: already on alert and resigned to defeat.

I can feel the adrenaline rush through my veins, and feel enraged at the useless energy. I want to help her, goddammit.

“Abbi’s going to be fine,” Jack says. Nonsense words. A sentence that has as much value as when people find out my dad is dead and say, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. As if their knowing has any bearing on the matter.

“There was blood everywhere. I mean, I thought she was going to die right on the field. I’ve never seen anything like it.” I don’t tell Jack that I said a prayer under my breath, that it felt like I needed to mark the divide between when Abbi was okay and when she wasn’t. That when she passed out, I thought, This is it. This is how it looks when people die.

“She’s going to be fine,” he says again.

“She was blue. In the ambulance.”

“Noah,” Jack says. “Take a breath.”

“I thought she was going to die. Seriously. I mean, she still might. She could be dead back there, for all I know.” I hear the hysteria in my voice, the crack on the word dead. In the ambulance, she opened her eyes and looked at me, and I held her hand and said over and over: You’re going to be fine. I wonder if she thought the same thing I did when Jack said them: that the words were as hollow as lies.

“My ETA is T-minus three minutes,” he says. “Sit down. Relax. I’m almost there.”

“I’m going to strangle Zach with my bare hands. Break both of his arms. He’s never going to do one of those stupid headstands again.”

“I promise we can tag-team body-slam him WWE-style later. But right now, you need to sit down.”

“She said she just wanted to be friends.” Like my shaking hands, it seems I can’t control the words coming out of my mouth. I ignore the pressure mounting behind my eyes.

“Abbi said that?”

“No. Your mother. Of course Abbi! I’m such a fuckup. My dad was a hero, and what do I do when faced with my first real life-and-death situation? I panic.” I lean against a wall and bend my body in half. Head to knee. A prayer that is not a prayer but an apology.

“I don’t know. Sounds like you did everything right.”

“I almost threw up in the ambulance. No one knows that. Don’t ever repeat that.”

“Ambulances are nauseating. Lots of twists and turns. And sometimes you sit backward,” Jack says. “Did you sit backward?”

“Thank God I didn’t puke.”

“Dude, you got this hero thing all wrong. Who cares about whether you puke? It’s about getting in the ambulance anyway despite knowing that you might blow chunks on the girl you are secretly in love with,” he says. “That takes courage.”

“Are you running right now?”

“Yup. I can drop little wisdom bombs and run at the same time. I’m a hero too.”

“Tell me she’s not going to die. She can’t die, right?” I ask.

“She can’t. She won’t. Not going to happen,” Jack says.

“How can you know that? People die all the time.”

“Not Baby Hope.”

“That’s a bullshit answer,” I say, and the mom of the kid with the Matchbox car gives me a dirty look. I mouth Sorry.

“Okay, how about this. There’s no way that in less than twenty-four hours you could make out with a cool girl, find out your dad, who you thought was alive all these years, is definitely, a hundred percent dead and like this major hero, and then have your almost-first girlfriend die, who also happens to be, like, this national icon. That would be too ridiculous, even for you, Noah.”

“That actually helps,” I say.

“Good. I’m walking in now,” Jack says, and then before I can even say thank you, he envelops me in a tackle hug. I quietly start to cry.