Chapter 1 #2
I sensed Lacy stiffen slightly as Anton placed a kiss on her cheek and his arm curved around the small of her back. They were cute together, her polished persona parallel to his rugged Texan vibe, but her reluctant smile concerned me. Lacy was nervous about something.
“I saw you on the dance floor,” he called above the music. “Aren’t you supposed to be working this thing?”
Anton sounded so much like me that I sometimes teased Lacy about him being me in male form. No wonder they worked well together—although, right now, I couldn’t tell if he was annoyed or simply curious.
Lacy shrugged off his question. “My job is to make sure everyone has a good time. That includes me.”
“Just be careful, Lace,” Anton said. He tilted his head toward Brett Brinkley and frowned. “Especially around that guy. He looked like he was ready to lean into your neck and take a bite.”
“I know how to handle a man who bites,” Lacy said with a side eye, and Anton laughed, whatever tension I’d imagined between them broken momentarily.
But then a new song started, this one Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud,” and Brett came and stole Lacy away for a slow dance. Immediately, the crackle in the air was back, and Anton excused himself, stalking toward the bar.
I watched people pretending to have—or perhaps actually having—a good time while I debated whether or not I could break the promise I’d made to be social.
I checked my phone. Screw it. Twenty-four minutes to go, and I was calling it.
I was going home, putting on my sweatpants and an old T-shirt, and eating brownie batter until Charlie arrived to have his way with me.
I took one last swig from my cup of wine, but as I turned to go, Jemma Jenkins abruptly stopped singing and knocked over her microphone. I spun around to see her pointing at Brett in the middle of the ballroom. Lacy was right behind him, receding into the darkness at the edge of the dance floor.
The room went silent except for the sound of the speaker system trying to recalibrate itself for a handful of seconds that, to my ears at least, lasted an eternity.
A shadowed figure ran to the back and spoke to the sound guy, who fixed the problem.
Just as the feedback ended, the sound of coughing began.
Brett Brinkley was grabbing—no, clawing—at his throat as if an invisible string had been tied around his neck. He was emitting a new noise, a kind of gurgling that quickly became a violent spewing. He hunched forward and fell to the center of the dance floor, where the crowd had parted around him.
Suddenly, it was as if a spotlight had been pointed straight on his sprawling figure.
Behind the bar Joe Larson dropped the bottle he’d been holding, and glass broke across the diamond designs on the marble. He hurried toward Brett, propping him up enough to attempt the Heimlich maneuver, thrusting into his abdomen in steady pulses.
When that didn’t work, Joe dropped Brett on the ground and started yelling, “Is there a doctor? Does anyone know CPR?”
Out of the class of 2015, there wasn’t a single medical professional in the room—except me, but this wasn’t a horse with a hernia. Seconds passed, and no one else stepped forward. It had to be me.
“Call 911,” I told Lacy as I rushed to the center of the dance floor and fell to my knees. I sprang into action as Presley Lombardi came closer to the now-unconscious man’s side.
I quickly checked for a pulse, and once satisfied he was still alive, I opened Brett’s jaw and stuck my fingers inside, too focused on the job to be disgusted by the scent of alcohol and the wetness coating my hand.
I checked the airway to clear it, but from what I could tell, nothing was blocking his throat.
I put my left hand on top of my right in the center of his chest and squared my shoulders over his body.
As I began to press down to the disco beat of “Stayin’ Alive,” Brett’s chest popped, and even though I knew to possibly expect this, the sensation of breaking bones and cartilage in his rib cage wasn’t a pleasant one.
After thirty compressions, I tilted back his head, pinched his nose, and breathed deeply into his mouth. From this angle I could see tiny capillaries that had burst along his neck. He had red indentations from clawing at his own throat, and I swear that it looked like he’d been strangling himself.
I didn’t have time to consider the reasons because, for now, I could only focus on trying to save him.
I continued this way for four rounds, but my arms were already tiring.
“Can anyone help?” I called out.
Within seconds, a woman I recognized as having been one of the two camera operators was on the floor ready to switch off with me, dropping a fuzzy boom mic as she knelt down.
“I can do it,” she said, her hands shaking as she extended them.
“Get in place, and you can take over after this set. Got it?”
The camerawoman nodded and I counted off the compressions.
Time warped as we worked, glacially slow yet dizzyingly fast. My arms burned as she and I traded places, Brett’s ribs resisting beneath our hands while Lacy’s voice trembled into the phone. The sounds and sights blurred together, near and far all at once.
When the medics arrived, they moved us aside and worked with practiced efficiency—oxygen, defibrillator, preparation to intubate.
After several minutes the head medic checked his watch and bit his lip, finally shaking his head. Fifteen minutes had passed since Brett’s last breath. We’d failed.
Brett Brinkley—former high school golden boy, one-hit wonder, reality TV star—lay dead on the dance floor at our ten-year reunion. The party was over in more ways than one.