Page 92

“Okay.” Amanda nods. “I’ll see what I can do.”

She stands up, looking out the window as a gust sends some of the piled snow on the roof eddying off into a spiral.

“Just do me a favor over the next few days.”

“What’s that?”

“Be good, Sasha Stone.”

There’s a song in my head, a few bars from freshman band camp that won’t stop cycling. It spins and spins, like I did on the field for that show, each step followed by a quarter turn and the desperate need to haul in some air. But breathing is for people who aren’t on the outside fringe of a pinwheel, so I stuck it out, red-faced, determined that the field commander was not going to lay into me in front of everyone.

I know I’ve faded off into something like sleep when I realize the girl in front of me is Layla, and a glance to my left on the next quarter turn reveals Brandy, her prosthetic foot left behind in a divot on the thirty-yard line. My clarinet is humming in my mouth, sending a vibration through my entire face that tickles. I smack at it, waking myself up and knocking my phone to the floor.

I snatch it up to find a missed call from Brandy. Not a text. Weird.

I dial her back.

“Thank God,” she says. “I thought I was going to have to fight my way past Angela to get to you.”

I glance at the clock. It’s ten at night, but I can hear voices in the background.

“What’s going on?”

“Everything, just . . . wow. You have no idea.”

“Exactly,” I confirm. “So tell me.”

“So there was a really bad accident. Like, really bad. Car full of college girls went off the bridge next to campus and into the river. There were six of them packed into a Mini Cooper and they sank like a stone.”

“Perfect,” I say.

And it is. Drowning is an organ recipient’s equivalent of a wet dream, no pun intended. There’s no organ damage and on a night like tonight, the freezing water lowers body temperature enough that it’s already operating like a refrigerator before the lunchbox coolers full of ice even show up tableside. But it also means that the drowning victim has a higher chance of being revived, their systems going into a shock that protects them. For a little while.

“Are they all dead?” I ask.

“I think maybe,” Brandy says, her voice down to a whisper now, the voices in the background fading. “They already prepped Jo. She took off in her wheelchair about half an hour ago. Her and one of the littles, too.”

“Where are you?”

“I snuck out to the common room to listen in after all the shit hit the fan. So, here’s the thing. . . .”

“What, Brandy? Just spit it out.”

“One of the girls that went in the water is O neg.”

My LVAD keeps going, but I’m not sure the rest of me does, a small caesura where nothing happens inside of me, except a bright flare of hope. I grab my pager from the nightstand, but it stares back with a dead face.

“Nothing on my pager,” I tell Brandy.

“That’s ’cause she’s not dead yet,” she says. “She’s nonresponsive but not brain dead.”

“Right.” I try to sound like that’s a good thing, but there’s a body over in another building with waterlogged skin, full of a chilly heart, eyes, kidneys, lungs that aren’t doing her any good anymore.

“I wanted to let you know, so you can get ready.”

It’s a nice thought. Brandy knows I never packed a go bag, my own little superstition. Like if I didn’t prepare, it was more likely to happen for me, everyone else’s blood type working for them while they waited with supplies in hand, me with math not on my side and nothing ready to go.

But that’s not quite true. I do have something ready. Just not my bag.