Chapter 14 Behind Closed Doors
It felt like hours before the ambulance arrived, sirens wailing, red and blue lights strobing across the courtyard. The flashing colors painted everyone’s faces in surreal, flickering hues—living people made to look like corpses, then ghosts, then living again.
Her skin was gray-blue in the flashing lights, her lips pale. A violent twitch rippled through her body, then nothing.
“Female, early twenties, seizure with loss of consciousness,” one of the paramedics called out, already at her side, taking over chest compressions. His partner dropped the jump bag, pulling out equipment with practiced speed.
The second paramedic’s fingers found Amy’s neck. Her face tightened.
“Pulse is weak and irregular,” she said. Her partner tore open Amy’s shirt and slapped electrode patches onto her chest. The machine powered on. Luz came to stand beside me, latching onto my hand.
The AED powered on with a high-pitched whine.
Analyzing rhythm. Do not touch the patient.
We held our breath.
Shock advised.
The defibrillator whined louder, charging.
“Clear!”
Amy’s body jerked. Luz ducked her head against my shoulder, trembling. I couldn’t tear my eyes away.
Shock delivered. Begin CPR.
The paramedic resumed chest compressions.
Amy twitched, her face scrunching up, and she coughed once, twice, gasping for air. Relief hit me so hard, I nearly dropped to my knees. Luz was finally able to straighten enough to watch, tears streaming down her face.
“We’ve got ROSC, stop compressions.” The paramedic checked her pulse, “Got a pulse. Breathing agonal… not adequate, bag ’em.”
Metal glinted as they tilted her chin back, sliding a tube down her throat, the bag-valve mask attached. Each squeeze made Amy’s chest rise mechanically.
“Stable enough for transport. Let’s move.”
They began to load her onto the gurney with practiced ease.
“Wait!” Luz lurched forward. “Can we go with her?”
“Only one of you can ride along,” a paramedic said without looking back.
Luz’s eyes darted to mine, a hint of desperation there.
“Go,” I said, though my voice came out strangled. “I’ll meet you there.”
“I can give Ms. Blumenthal a ride,” Kian offered. His voice was calm, but his shoulders were tense. His hands curled into fists at his sides like he had to force himself to remain steady.
Luz hesitated, torn between Amy and me. Then she nodded and followed the paramedics. At the ambulance doors, she turned back.
“Please hurry?”
“I will,” I whispered, but it came out paper-thin, barely audible over the sirens.
Then they were gone, the ambulance pulling away with lights flashing, and the silence they left behind was crushing.
Students lingered, whispering, excited by the drama of it all. I could feel their eyes on me, judging.
“Melanie.” Kian’s voice was soft with gentle concern.
I shook my head like it might rattle my thoughts into order. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to hold in the array of emotions clawing up my throat.
But it leaked through anyway.
Amy’s face burned behind my eyelids from the snap of her body going rigid, to the foam at her lips, and the absolute stillness after the convulsions stopped.
It brought me back to my childhood. The feel of tubes in my arms, cold hospital sheets draped over my body. Luz and Amy helplessly watched as my body betrayed me over and over.
Now Amy was the one lying helpless, and I was standing here, utterly useless.
One thing you can see… Jagged cobblestones beneath my shoes.
Two things you can hear… Murmurs of students behind me. A bird loudly crying out somewhere above. Everything felt too loud.
Three things you can feel… The weight of my coat pulling at my shoulders. My sock slipping off my heel inside my shoe. My own heartbeat, hammering too fast against my ribs like it was trying to escape.
My chest constricted. The air turned to glass in my throat, cutting on the way down. I wheezed, my vision tunneling to a pinpoint.
This usually works. Why isn’t this working?
My hands went numb. The world tilted sideways, and I thought I might drop right there on the courtyard stones.
Kian’s warm hand came down on my shoulder.
“Breathe with me,” he said. “In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.”
I tried and failed. My lungs wouldn’t cooperate.
“Again,” he encouraged. “You can do this. In for four.”
I dragged in air painfully.
“Good. Hold.” My chest burned. “Out for four.”
I exhaled.
“Again.”
We did this three more times, then four, until my vision cleared and the tingling in my hands faded.
“Better?” he asked.
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
“Come on. Let’s get you to the hospital.”
The walk to the parking lot felt surreal. Kian kept his hand light on my back, guiding me through the staring crowd. Students whispered as we passed. Phones tracked our movement.
I cared about the rumors before, but now it was just noise swallowed by the roar in my head.
He opened the passenger door, and I slid in, my body moving on autopilot. The leather seat was soft, and the car’s interior was warm. Everything felt too normal when nothing was normal anymore.
Kian got in and started the engine. Classical music played softly, the melody mournful and haunting.
He turned it off. The silence was worse.
We pulled out of the parking lot and onto the main road. I watched streetlights blur past, trying to focus on anything but the image of Amy’s gray face, her convulsing body. My hand clenched around metal. I opened it to find the coin gleaming up at me from my palm.
I’d been holding it this whole time, and I hadn’t even realized. I stared at the pomegranate design, the six seeds that matched my birthmark.
My throat tightened. I pressed the button to open the window, unleashing cold air into the car. My wrist flicked. The coin clattered onto the asphalt, disappearing into the blur of headlights and shadow.
Stay gone. Please just stay gone this time.
But even as I watched it vanish, I knew better.
My chest seized again, air catching. I fumbled for my inhaler in my bag, taking two puffs, but I still couldn’t stop shaking.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Kian’s hand move toward mine, reaching across the console like he wanted to offer comfort. It stopped and retreated as he remembered the invisible line he couldn’t cross. His knuckles went white on the steering wheel.
The silence stretched between us, heavy with the secrets he was keeping, the answers he wouldn’t give.
Amy almost died. Maybe she still will. And you knew something was wrong.
The thought burned in my chest, but I couldn’t say it. Not while Amy’s fate was still uncertain.
“Melanie—” Kian started, his voice strained.
“Don’t.” The word came out raw. “I can’t do this right now. I need to see my friend.”
He went quiet, but I felt the weight of his guilt pressing against the silence like a physical force.
The rest of the drive passed in tense quiet, broken only by my uneven breathing and the hum of the engine.
When the hospital finally appeared, red emergency signs glowing against the night, relief flooded through me so strongly I almost broke into sobs.
Kian pulled up to the entrance. Before he could say anything, I shoved the door open and stepped out. I walked through the sliding doors and didn’t look back.
The ER waiting room was a study in misery.
Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting everything in sickly yellow. Plastic chairs bolted to the floor in rigid rows. A TV mounted in the corner played the news with no sound, images of traffic accidents and weather reports flickering silently.
The smell of antiseptic barely masked the scent of illness and fear.
A man with a bloody towel wrapped around his hand rocked slightly in a chair. A mother held a feverish toddler, singing softly in Spanish. An elderly woman slept sitting up, head lolling with her mouth open, her breathing rattling.
Everyone here was waiting. Everyone here was afraid.
I spotted Luz immediately. She was pacing near the nurse’s station, arms wrapped tight around herself, eyes snapping toward every person in scrubs who passed.
The second she saw me, she crossed the room and pulled me into a hug so fierce it drove the air from my lungs.
Her tears were hot against my cheek, and mine followed immediately. I buried my face in her shoulder, gripping her jacket like it might keep everything from unraveling.
Our bodies shook with quiet sobs, neither of us able to speak around the lumps in our throats. When I finally pulled back, Luz’s mascara streaked down her face, and her eyes were red.
“I called May,” Luz murmured. “She’s on her way.”
“Good… The doctor hasn’t come out yet?” My voice was barely a whisper.
She shook her head. “Not yet. They just took her back.”
We sank into the cracked vinyl chairs side by side. Her hand found mine and gripped tightly.
While we waited, I noticed three students from campus scattered around the ER. All were wearing the same black bracelets with the sunburst emblem, all with that same gray pallor, that same exhausted slump.
One was getting IV fluids, slumped in a wheelchair with a nurse monitoring her. Another was hunched over a basin, throwing up while someone rubbed her back. The third just sat there, staring at nothing.
“Luz,” I whispered, nudging her. “Look.”
She followed my gaze, and her face went pale. “Mierda. How many are there?”
“Too many.”
We fell back into silence, watching and waiting.
Luz closed her eyes and started whispering, Spanish at first, prayers I recognized from her grandmother.
Then words I didn’t know, names of saints or stars.
I didn’t ask; if I asked, she might stop, and the sound of her voice was the only thing keeping me tethered.
I’d spent too many hours in places like this. Different hospitals, same waiting rooms. When I fainted in gym class. When the migraines got so bad, I couldn’t see. When my lungs decided they’d had enough, my mother sat beside me while doctors ran tests that never explained enough.