The Last Best Kiss

by Claire Lazebnik

  We race out the door and back down the stairs. It’s a good thing we rushed: they’re already lifting a stretcher with Lily on it into the back of the ambulance. She’s encased in one of those neck-immobilizing braces. The others are all grouped a few feet away, clutching one another and watching. Hilary sees me and grabs my arm. “They’ll only take two of us in the ambulance—one in back and one in front. What should we do, Anna?”

  “You should ride in the back with Lily—oh, did you reach your father?”

  She nods. “He’s meeting us there.”

  “Finn should ride in front.” I figure he’ll want to get there as soon as possible. “The rest of us will get a cab. Eric, go ask the front desk to call for a cab to get here as soon as possible.” He races off obediently. “Do you guys know which hospital?”

  They all shake their heads, but fortunately the EMT guy overhears me and gives me the hospital name, and then he helps Hilary up into the back, settling her into a seat at Lily’s side. She stares at me imploringly as he closes the door. I have no idea what it is she wants me to do. Make it all go away, I guess.

  Finn goes to the front of the ambulance and gets in as the driver takes his own place, and they’re off in a second, sirens blaring.

  “What did they say?” I ask the others. “Is she going to be okay?”

  Lucy says, “They didn’t tell us anything. Just put that thing around her neck and an oxygen mask on her and an IV. But they didn’t say anything.” She digs her fingers into my forearm. “What if she’s not okay, Anna?” There’s no answer to that question. I just shake my head. Lucy shakes my wrist hard. “What happened? Why did you guys let her dive?”

  “We didn’t. Finn tried to stop her. She wouldn’t listen to him.”

  “What if she broke her neck?” Phoebe asks in a tiny voice. “What if she’s crippled for life? I read an article once—”

  I cut her off quickly. I don’t want to hear about some girl who was paralyzed for life. “Her head was bleeding, so it’s probably not her neck.”

  “It could be both,” says Eric, who has returned in time to contribute that helpful possibility. “Our cab will be here in five minutes.”

  I tell the others that if they need wallets or phones or to change their clothing they should take care of that before the cab comes, and everyone races back inside except for me and Oscar.

  We look at each other.

  “This is so unbelievably awful,” he says. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Oscar sound so serious and so sad. “I keep seeing that moment over and over again—Finn shouting at her to stop and her diving . . . And then . . . her arm rising up in the water . . .” He stops.

  “She’ll be okay,” I say. “She has to be okay.” And for the first time—now that it’s all quiet and I don’t have to figure out what to do next anymore—I burst into tears.

  Oscar holds out his arms, and I move into them. He hugs me close. “If she is okay, it’s thanks to you,” he says. “You were the only one of us who was thinking clearly. I didn’t know you were so good in a crisis.”

  “Me neither,” I whimper into his neck. “I wish I still didn’t.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  eighteen

  By the time our cab leaves us at the ER entrance, Lily’s already been taken into a treatment room, and Finn is sitting alone in the small, deserted waiting room. He jumps up from a metal chair as soon as he sees us.

  “Her dad got here a few minutes ago,” he says. In the fluorescent light, his face is pale and slightly green. “They only let family members go back.”

  “You okay?” I ask.

  “Not really. You?”

  “Not really.”

  We all find seats. I sit down next to Oscar and then Finn takes the chair on my other side. He keeps glancing at me. Like he’s waiting for something. Forgiveness? Consolation? Punishment?

  It doesn’t matter. I can’t give him anything right now. I’m exhausted.

  No one feels like talking. We pull out our cell phones and stare at them.

  “Everyone’s asleep back home,” Phoebe says, after a little while. “No one’s answering my texts.”

  “It’s almost two,” Lucy says with a huge yawn. “Of course they’re asleep.”

  “Why do things like this always happen late at night?” Eric asks.

  “Probably because people are drunk or stoned late at night,” Phoebe says.

  Eventually Hilary and her father emerge from the back area. We jump up and rush at them, all of us asking if she’s okay.

  Mr. Diamond puts up his hands, holding us off, shushing us. “They don’t know yet. She’s definitely had a concussion. The good news is her spine’s okay. But they’re doing a CT scan now to make sure there isn’t any bleeding around her brain.”

  “That’s what that actress died of,” Hilary adds in a wavering voice. “The Parent Trap mom. She hit her head, and they thought she was okay, and then she died.” She starts crying. I expect her dad to take her in his arms, but he doesn’t. He crosses them instead.

  “I’m really disappointed in all of you,” he says. “No—horrified by you. What you did tonight verged on criminal.” His angry glare turns toward the sobbing daughter at his side. “Especially you. That you could just stand there and let her do something so dangerous—”

  “It’s not Hilary’s fault. It’s mine.” Finn steps forward. He pauses, and I can see the muscles in his throat working, but when he speaks, his voice is clear. “I was closest to her. I saw where she was heading. I should have tackled her or something. But I didn’t. Hilary was too far to do anything about it. I wasn’t.”

  “Remind me who you are again,” says the twins’ father, giving him one of those up-and-down looks that make you want to run and hide.

  Finn holds his ground and says his full name.

  Mr. Diamond nods slowly. “Well, Finn, if that’s true—if you stood there without doing a thing while my daughter dove into a shallow pool—then you may be criminally liable for failure to act. And even if I decide not to press charges, just know that for the rest of your life, you’ll have to live with the fact that my daughter’s life was put at risk by your negligence.”

  Finn doesn’t argue. He just hangs his head and takes it. Maybe he thinks he deserves the abuse.

  But I don’t. I step toward Mr. Diamond, my chest pounding with anger. “Stop blaming everyone! I’m sorry Lily’s hurt—we all are—we love her—but it’s her own fault.” I realize I’ve balled my hands into fists at my sides. “If you’re upset that she’s hurt, be upset that she’s hurt—don’t start attacking the people who care about her.”

  He looks at me like I’ve just crawled out from under a rock and he doesn’t want me to get on his shoe. “I’m simply being honest. You all let her down.”

  “No,” I say. “She let us down. She should have listened to Finn when he told her to stop.”

  There’s so much anger in his face, I’m afraid of him, and it’s hard for me to keep my chin up.

  Lucy’s all about defusing tense situations, so she speaks up now. “What about the blood on her head?” she asks him. “How bad is the wound?”

  He slowly swivels away from me and toward her, passing his hand wearily over his forehead. “It’s not too bad,” he says. “It’s a long but shallow cut. She’ll need a few stitches. They’re not sure what she hit down there—maybe just the pool floor, but there’s a chance there was something metal like a rung, so she needs a tetanus shot to be safe—but the actual cut isn’t the problem. It’s the possibility of internal bleeding from the trauma. It’s not good that she’s still unconscious.”

  “What can we do?” Lucy asks.

  “Nothing. Go back to the hotel and get some sleep.” He turns to Hilary. “You too.”

  She shakes her head vehemently. “I’m staying. I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway.
And if she wakes up, I want to be here.” Then she gasps a little and says, “When. When she wakes up.”

  “Couldn’t we all wait here?” Lucy asks. “We’d rather.”

  “The last thing Lily needs right now is people crowding in on her. Hilary will let you all know how she’s doing. Do you need money for a cab back?” He’s already reaching for his wallet when a small figure comes flying in from the street entrance, calling out to us.

  “Where is she? Is she okay? Where’s my baby?” It’s the twins’ mother.

  No dangling silver bracelets and necklaces tonight—she’s wearing yoga pants and a hooded jacket over a tank top. No makeup either, and under the artfully cut black hair, her face looks haggard.

  Hilary runs to her, and her mother manages to crush her to her chest despite the fact that Hilary is a few inches taller.

  “They’re doing a scan now,” her husband says. “They’ll come get us as soon as she’s done.”

  She glares at her husband above Hilary’s bent head. “I can’t believe I let you take them here. I blame myself. I know better than to trust you to be responsible.”

  He flushes a dark red under his baseball cap. “I wasn’t even there.”

  She practically spits her response. “Of course you weren’t.”

  “The girls are seventeen! And they were together. Was I supposed to push them around in a stroller?”

  “All I know,” says Yuri Lee, “is that my daughter left town with her father, and now I’m visiting her in the emergency room, where we still don’t know the extent of the damage. That’s all I know.”

  He stares at her a moment, then turns and walks to the far side of the waiting room and throws himself in a chair.

  Lucy touches my arm. “We should go,” she murmurs, and I nod.

  Lucy, Phoebe, and I all slip over to Hilary and give her quick hugs. Poor Hil—her face is swollen, her eyes are red, and terror radiates off her in waves. I wish I could do more than just hug her and tell her I love her, but that’s all any of us can do.

  We leave the waiting room and stand in front of the hospital entrance. Oscar’s the only one who remembers the cab company’s name, so he calls and they promise to send out a car. It’s dark and cold, and we all huddle together—as much for comfort as warmth.

  “I can’t believe it’s still the same night,” says Phoebe. She’s pressed against Eric’s side, his arm slung around her neck like a scarf. “It feels like days have gone by since the sun went down.”

  “Weeks,” Oscar says.

  I’m standing near Finn, who’s still very quiet. I nudge his arm gently with mine, and he flashes me a wan smile.

  It’s funny: I’ve felt so far away from him this year, and just a few hours ago, I thought maybe we weren’t even friends, but now it feels right to slip my hand into his and give his fingers a comforting squeeze. “It wasn’t your fault at all,” I say. “Her father was wrong. He wasn’t there. He didn’t see what happened.”

  He curls his fingers around mine. “I just want her to be okay.”

  “Me too.”

  An ambulance comes roaring up and pulls into the driveway that ends at the ER entrance. From where we’re standing on the curb, I can’t see the person they take out on the stretcher, but I can hear one EMT’s grim comment to the other: “Second teenager of the night. That music festival’s going to be the gift that keeps on giving.” They disappear into the hospital.

  I wonder who’s on the stretcher. Please don’t let it be anyone we know. Please let whoever it is be okay. Please let Lily be okay. Please please please.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  nineteen

  Back at the hotel, we leave the connecting doors open. Phoebe and Eric curl up together in a double bed in the boys’ room, and Oscar, Lucy, and I all squish together in one bed in the girls’ room. Finn ends up by himself in the bed next to ours. I feel bad he’s alone, but it would be too weird for me to crawl in next to him. Instead I lie on my side and surreptitiously watch him as he stares up at the ceiling in the dim light. The sun is just starting to come up.

  I guess I doze a little, because bright daylight is leaking around the edges of the curtains when I open my eyes again, and I can easily see that Finn is sitting up in bed, reading a text. “Who is it?” I ask, propping myself up on an elbow. “What is it? Is it news?”

  “It’s Hilary. Good news. Really good news. Lily’s conscious.”

  “Oh my god.” I sit up, and that wakes Lucy, who’s next to me.

  “What’s going on?” she says groggily. Oscar pops up next to her, instantly alert. “How’s Lily?”

  I tell them. “What else does Hilary say?” I ask Finn, who’s thumbing a response into the phone.

  “Not a lot. Lily’s still pretty confused, but at least she knew who they were. She doesn’t remember anything about last night.”

  “But she’s okay?” Lucy says.

  “The scan was clean, and she’s conscious—”

  “Thank god.”

  “—but they still have to keep her there a while longer just to be safe, make sure they haven’t missed anything.”

  “Still,” I say. “It’s good.”

  He lets his head sag back against the pillow and closes his eyes. It occurs to me that he probably didn’t sleep at all. “Yeah” is all he says.

  We all snuggle back down into the beds.

  Lucy whispers to me, “I want to go home.”

  “Me too,” I say. “Unless the twins need us here.”

  “Right,” she says sleepily. “Unless they need us here.”

  We all get a chance to talk to Hilary on the phone later that morning. She says that Lily’s still very shaky and incoherent; her short-term memory is all wonky, and she can’t say more than a few words at a time. She’s very emotional and keeps bursting into tears. But she’s okay. That’s what Hilary keeps repeating over and over to each of us: “She’s okay.”

  “They said she’s had a severe concussion, and that takes time to recover from,” Hilary tells me when I’m on with her. “So they want her to stay in the hospital for another forty-eight hours. But Anna, she’s going to be all right! The nurse started telling us stories of patients they’ve seen who broke their necks in shallow swimming pools. . . . I wish she hadn’t. I feel queasy just thinking about it. And grateful that nothing like that happened to Lucy.” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “Except now that it looks like she’s going to be fine, I sort of want to kill her. You get that, right?”

  “Totally,” I say. “I sort of want to kill her too. Let’s both kill her once she’s all better.”

  When it’s Lucy’s turn to talk to Hilary, she tells her that we’re over the music festival. “We just want to see you guys and go home.”

  In the end we just go home without seeing them. Hilary’s parents don’t want us to come by the hospital and they tell Hilary to tell us that Lily needs absolute quiet.

  Her father sends the van to pick us up.

  Finn takes the seat next to me. He doesn’t talk much at first, just sticks in his earbuds as the van drives away from the hotel and listens to music with his eyes closed. Lucy and Oscar are together in front of us, Phoebe and Eric behind us.

  Too many empty seats.

  We’re pretty subdued. No one talks much. Mostly we doze.

  At one point Finn checks a text and nudges my arm, then angles the phone toward me so I can see. It’s a photo from Hilary of Lily sitting up in bed smiling, which makes it pretty much the most wonderful photo I’ve ever seen. I look at Finn and see the relief in his face. And something else too. Something that makes him look away from me before I can figure out what it is. Confusion maybe? He turns back to the window and curls up with his phone again.

  I sit for a few minutes, which turns into dozing for a few minutes, which turns into groggy waking up for a few minutes, and t
hen I decide I should do something more useful with this time. I reach down and pull out the sketch pad from the bag at my feet.

  “Hey,” Finn says, taking out his earbuds. “What happened with those sketches you were doing on the drive down? The ones of all of us. How did those come out? Can I see them?”

  I quickly leaf through the pages, checking to see if my drawings are better than I remembered. But they’re not.

  I close the pad. “No—they suck. I don’t like any of them.”

  “I doubt they suck.”

  “Thanks. I don’t feel very talented at the moment.” I touch the sketch pad. “None of these feel right to me. Sometimes when I work on something, it just feels right in a way I can’t explain. Even if it’s only partially done or I know there’s stuff I have to fix . . . I just get a feeling that it’s working. It feels satisfying. And none of these give me that feeling. They just sit on the page. They don’t have any soul.”

  “You said you needed to do a portrait? Why’s that?”

  “I can put together a portfolio for my applications without one, but it’s better to show some range.” I keep folding and unfolding a tiny triangle at the corner of the sketch-pad cover. “I guess my choice is to include a technically decent but emotionally soulless portrait or to not include it and hope they appreciate what I can do without worrying about what I can’t.”

  “What does your gut say?”

  “My gut?” I think for a moment. “I guess my gut says to not submit anything I’m not really proud of. But Oresco’s been through the application process a lot more times than my gut.”

  “You want to hear my completely ignorant and therefore entirely discountable opinion?” Finn asks.

  “Always,” I say, and mean it.