Clearly Trey doesn’t know what to say. He opens his mouth and closes it again, and lets his head fall back against the pillows. And then he says in this hilarious Clay Aiken voice, “Well. That was right nice of me.”
For a second, nobody moves, and then I snort, and everybody else sort of relaxes, and before I know it Sawyer has found more chairs and Ben is giving us updates on everybody. The girl who was shot in the abdomen, Tori, was the worst off. She made it through five hours of surgery and the doctors are cautiously hopeful. And the guy who was shot in the foot is doing okay, but the bullet shattered a bunch of bones and he won’t be walking anytime soon.
Back at UC, Ben says, classes are canceled and there are counselors helping students cope. There are also reporters everywhere. Because the police caught the two alleged shooters immediately, they didn’t close down the school, but a good portion of the quad is blocked off around the crime scene and a lot of students went back home. “And seriously, you guys are the unnamed heroes. You’re, like, becoming a legend,” he says to all of us, but he can’t stop looking at Trey, his true hero.
“Please don’t give anyone our names,” I find myself saying. “We don’t want a bunch of reporters in our faces. We just want to, you know, get through it and move on. Our parents are sort of freaking out. I’m sure you can imagine.” And then I add, “I’m only in tenth grade.”
“Me too,” Sawyer says. “Jules and I just want to disappear, if that’s cool with you.” He looks over at Trey and grins for the first time since everything happened. “Trey, on the other hand . . . he’s a senior and he could really use some attention.”
Trey pushes his morphine drip. “Indeed,” he says, adorably loopy.
Ben smiles and turns to me. “I’m not quite sure why you guys picked this weekend to check things out at UC, or how you managed to spring to action that fast, but you really did save a lot of lives. And if you don’t want your names out there, I can totally dig that. Just watch it when you’re wandering around here—there are some reporters in the lobby.”
“Here,” Trey says, fumbling for his cell phone on the bedside table. “You should call me.”
Ben turns and looks at him, a small smile still playing around his lips. “Oh, should I? What’s your number?”
Trey tells him, and Ben enters it into his cell phone, and then he takes Trey’s and enters his number. “Okay,” Ben says a little cautiously, “well, we’d love to have you come for a meeting. Are you seriously considering U of C? Even after what happened?”
“Oh yeah. I totally am. What’s your name again?”
Ben laughs and tells him.
I frown. Trey knows U of C is a private school. Mucho big bucks. But hey . . . there’s always the power of morphine to make you forget about the minor details of your life, like living above a restaurant that struggles monthly to pay its bills, and considering returning to the place where some lunatic outsider came in and fucking shot you because you’re gay.
When Ben and Vernon leave, Trey looks like he’s about to fall asleep. My parents will be along soon, I’m sure, so Sawyer and I go to the nurses’ station to try to find out the status of the others. We learn that the Tori is still in intensive care, so we’re not allowed to see her, and the guy with the injured foot is asleep. So we head out a side exit and take a walk on a sunny, windy spring Monday.
I push up the stretched-out sleeve of my hoodie and look at my pasty-white arm. I was so glad to have that cast—it was like a weapon. It did way more damage than I could have done with my fist alone.
Thinking about that makes me wonder briefly what kind of pain the shooters are in today. Trey will be proud that I kneed the guy in the meatballs. I shove my hands in my pockets and Sawyer and I walk in a somewhat awkward silence now that we’re alone. I feel like we’re in the middle of a fight, but we’re fighting about different things.
After a while he says, “What are you going to do about your parents now that this is all over?”
And I don’t know the answer, because something keeps buzzing around the back of my mind. I swat it aside. “I guess maybe try talking to them. I mean, it probably won’t work, but it’s actually something I haven’t tried before, so who knows. We’re just not really great at that.” I tilt my head to look at him. “The words never come out right, you know?” He nods and I ask, “What about you?”
“I don’t know.”
“I hate it that you’re getting hit, Sawyer.”
And normally I’d expect him to get a little defensive and say something like I don’t exactly like it either. But this time he doesn’t. This time he’s quiet for a long time. And then he says, “I’m leaving.”
Everything inside me stops working. “What?”
“It’s toxic living there. I’m moving out.”
I have no pulse. My words come out as weak wisps of air, and without warning the tears pour from my eyes. “But where are you going?”
He hears the blubbering child in my voice and he turns sharply to look at me. The hardness in his face melts and turns to surprise, then realization. “Oh, baby,” he murmurs, gathering me in his arms. “God, I’m sorry—I’m not leaving you, or Chicago, or school. Just my parents and grandfather. I’m moving out. Not sure where yet, but I have a few options.”