He clasped his free hand to his chest. “So this is it? This is how it ends?”
She winced. “Sorry!”
She was halfway through the doors when he called her name. She turned back.
“Hey,” he said. “You’re a great kid, Wren Gray. You’re going to do great things with your life. Understood?”
There were so many people in the world. Some were jerks, but most were kind. Wren had to clear her throat before she could speak. “Understood.”
Ahead of her in the crowded hallway, Tessa bounced from friend to friend. She truly was like a hummingbird, all bright flashes and quick movements. Wren moved to join her, then changed her mind and retreated, leaning against the glass-paned wall of the front office. She closed her eyes. She focused on breathing.
All kinds of big things waited for her right around the corner, all kinds of chances and risks and huge, crazy changes. She was supposed to let the thrill of it all sweep her away. But she was scared.
What happened with Charlie—what passed between them when their guards were down—that scared her, too. The idea of a person’s hidden parts mattering most, when she was the one keeping a secret.
In AP English, she’d read a myth about the vastness of the universe. In it, an old woman told her grandson that the world rested on the back of a giant turtle. “It does? Well, what does the turtle rest on?” the grandson asked, and Wren had read faster, naïvely hoping she was about to be given the answer to life.
But no. The old woman laughed and said, “That’s the best part. It’s turtles all the way down!”
Parker had ever seen, and the most brilliant. She didn’t seem to realize she was either, which was crazy. But Charlie had eyes. Charlie knew the truth.
When she smiled, Charlie wanted in on the joke. When she pushed her dark hair behind her ears, Charlie thought, Yes, that is how you do it. When she walked down the halls in her collared shirts and knee-length skirts, he saw with absolute clarity how much classier she was than the other girls in their tight jeans and peekaboo thongs. Charlie had had some experience with girls in tight jeans and peekaboo thongs, or with one particular girl in tight jeans and a thong. She hadn’t left a great impression.
But Wren wasn’t like that girl, or any girl, even though she was clearly and definitely a girl. Once, on the senior patio during lunch, she’d lifted her arm to call over her friend Tessa, and her blouse hugged her curves. He drank her in for as long as he decently could.
On Wednesday, Charlie drifted through the last day of classes as if he were in a fog. Everyone else was wired at the prospect of summer, but Charlie didn’t want summer. He wanted Wren. But unless he manned up and took action—like exchanging more than half a dozen words with her—he was doomed. Wren would go her own way after Saturday’s graduation ceremony, and Charlie might never see her again.
On Thursday, his first official day of no school, Charlie worked alongside his foster dad at the woodworking shop his foster dad owned. He clamped a slab of cream-colored birch onto the workbench and switched on the router, shaping the wood to fit an oddly shaped nook in a client’s bathroom. His thoughts stayed on Wren as he rounded the corner of the plank. Her sweet smile. Her shiny hair. The way her brown eyes grew pensive when the end of her pen found its way to the corner of her mouth, suggesting that she was contemplating something important.
One day in AP biology, Wren had argued with Ms. Atkinson about free will in the face of cellular determinism. It was at the beginning of the semester, but already most of the seniors were starting to tune out their teachers’ lectures, and Charlie wondered if that was why Ms. Atkinson had tossed out the sensationally termed “parasite gene,” a gene that supposedly triggered a propensity toward exploitive behavior in those who carried it. She encouraged the class to consider what the existence of such a gene might imply—“Is that what drives the president of a company to embezzle funds, or an addict to steal from a family member?”—and while Charlie drew into himself, Wren shook her head in frustration.
“Humans are too complicated to be explained by unraveling their DNA,” Wren said. “Aren’t they? Otherwise wouldn’t our lives have no meaning?”
“Why do you say that?” Ms. Atkinson said.
“Because, okay, say a kid is born with the ‘parasite gene,’ if there is such a thing. Are you saying he has no choice but to grow up and mooch off others? He’ll never contribute anything to society?”
“Nice job of assuming it’s a guy,” Thad Lundeen had said.
Wren had blushed. “Fine. Sorry. But what if a boy or a girl is born with … whatever. A fear-of-flying gene. Does that mean he or she can’t grow up to be a pilot? No matter what, end of story?”
Different kids jumped in. The conversation grew loud and off-track, and Charlie wondered if he was the only one to hear her last comment.
“And what about souls?” she said, bowing her head and addressing her desk. “Don’t souls count for anything?”
Her downcast eyes, her pink cheeks—he saw them in his mind still. He held in his brain an entire store of the amazing things she’d done and said. He loved the whole package.
And then, yesterday, when she waved at him outside the school …
Something had passed between them. Something he couldn’t explain, and it had made him forget that he didn’t believe in souls. Anyway, who was he kidding? He didn’t believe in love, either, but this he knew: He loved Wren Gray. He’d loved her forever, it seemed.
The router jumped beneath his hands. Ah, shit. He’d turned it up slightly, so that the bit was pointing toward the left rather than straight down, and the webbing between his left thumb and forefinger moved directly into it. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. He clamped his T-shirt over the wound, and his foster dad, Chris, glanced over.
“Wassup, Chahlie?” Chris said in his rough Boston accent. He took in the blood soaking through Charlie’s T-shirt and put down his rag and can of varnish. He came over and gave Charlie’s wound a close, careful look. He whistled. “C’mon, son. Let’s get you stitched up.”
Grady Hospital was the largest hospital in Atlanta, as well as the fifth-largest public hospital in the United States. It smelled like shit, piss, and body odor. Patients on gurneys lined the ER hallway, since, with more than three hundred patients walking, stumbling, or rolling in each day, there were never enough rooms to go around.
“Just fill this out,” a brown-skinned woman told the elderly white woman ahead of them in the long line.
“I’m fine,” Charlie told Chris for the fiftieth time. He wasn’t, but finances for Chris and Pamela were hard enough without adding on a couple hundred bucks for a drop-in visit to the emergency room. “Really. Let’s go.”
Chris ignored him, just as he’d ignored him the first forty-nine times.
Charlie sighed and searched fruitlessly for an escape route. At the next desk over, a girl tapped into a computer, head down, as a frizzy-haired woman standing before her complained about a crackling sound when she breathed.
“Don’t worry,” the girl said. “We’ll get you taken care of.” She looked up from the computer, and Charlie’s blood froze in his veins. Not really; it oozed relentlessly through the towel Pamela, his foster mom, had given him, just as it had since he’d nearly sliced his thumb off. But it felt as if his blood froze, as well as his brain, his heart, and every last muscle in his body.
“Charlie?” Wren said, her expression registering equal shock.
Wren. Behind the desk. At the hospital. Why?
The frizzy-haired woman took her paperwork with a harrumph.
“Charlie,” Wren said, beckoning him forward.
Chris approached the desk, relieved. “You know my boy?” he said. “Great, because Chahlie here got into a fight with a router, and if you’ve ever gotten into a fight with a router, you know who won.”
Wren smiled uncertainly. “Ouch,” she said. “Well, let me get you into the system. Can I see your driver’s license and insurance card?”
&n
bsp; Charlie had his license. That was no problem. But he had to look away as Chris patted his pockets and put on a show that they both knew would lead nowhere.
“Insurance card,” Chris said. “Sure thing.” He pulled out his wallet, a battered and bruised thing that was perhaps once made of leather. “Just give me a minute here …”
Wren watched. She bit her lip. She looked at the clock behind her and said, “Oh crap, Rhondelle’s going to need her desk back. Her break’s just about over.” She stood up and came around to Charlie. “But, uh, come with me.”
Chris frowned. “’Scuse me?”
Wren grabbed a clipboard. To Chris, she said, “Do you want to have a seat in the waiting room? I’ll help Charlie with the forms, and I can come get you when we need you.”
Charlie knew his face was a fiery red, but he followed Wren to a tucked-away corner of the reception area. He glanced over his shoulder. Chris looked confused, but he turned and walked toward the waiting room.
Wren sat on a cracked plastic chair and patted the empty chair next to her. Charlie sat.
“Thanks,” he said. “Chris, he’s not so good at … you know …” He sighed. He held his left hand, bundled and useless, close to his rib cage and stared at the floor, where a dead cockroach lay beside a vending machine.
“Why don’t I fill this out for you,” she said, sounding crisp and professional. He suspected she’d put some of the pieces together, such as the fact that Chris wasn’t going to find that insurance card. He suspected she’d brought him over here as a way to let Chris off the hook.
“So, you have a job here?” Charlie blurted.
“Not exactly,” she said. “I did it for my community-service hours.” All Atlanta public school seniors had to complete seventy-five hours of community service. Charlie had fulfilled his through tutoring kids at his brother’s middle school. “I finished in March, technically, but …”
“Working hard for free seemed like the best way to spend the first day of summer vacation?”
She looked at him strangely. He’d been trying to be funny. Had he sounded rude instead?
“They’re always understaffed here,” she said. “I like helping out. And it’s better than fighting with … what’s that thing you fought with?”
“A router. And, yes, working here is better. Better, smarter—you name it. I think it’s cool that you help out just because.”
“Oh. Um, thanks. What is a router?”
“It’s a tool for making furniture. For cutting wood.”
“And for cutting flesh?”
“Yeah, but only if you’re a dumb-ass.”
She smiled slightly, and they held each other’s gaze. He still couldn’t believe she was here, or that he was here. That they were here together.
Wren gave herself a shake and held the pen over the paper on the clipboard. “Right. So—oh my gosh, I don’t know your last name. Crap. I am such a jerk. What’s wrong with me?”
“Parker,” he said. And nothing’s wrong with you, not a single thing.
“Charlie Parker?” She sounded delighted. “Like the musician?”
“I don’t know—which is to say no, I guess. Who’s Charlie Parker?”
“Well, the other Charlie Parker”—she gave him a half smile—“was a famous jazz musician. Not that you should know who he is or anything. I just like jazz. Or, my dad does, and he’s in charge of the stereo.”
“I think my birth mom just liked the name Charles.”
Charlie saw a subtle shift in Wren’s expression, leading him to guess that “birth mom” wasn’t a term she ran into often. She recovered swiftly. “And her last name was Parker.”
“Still is, as far as I know.” Except he didn’t know and didn’t want to know. “So. The other Charlie Parker. What instrument did he play?”
She opened her mouth, then shut it. Then she eyed him as if to say, Yes, I really am about to do this, before leaning close and singing a funny tune in a sweet, soft voice. “‘Charlie Parker played be bop. Charlie Parker played alto saxophone. The music sounded like hip hop. Never leave your cat alone.’”
He grinned. She giggled. God, she was adorable.
“It’s from a book my dad read me when I was little,” she said.
“‘Never leave your cat alone,’ huh?”
“Words to live by.”
Again, they gazed at each other. To Charlie, it felt like more than a coincidence that here they were, their thighs inches apart in their crappy plastic chairs, where, in any alternate universe, there was no way their paths would have collided like this.
She cleared her throat and sat up straight. Once more poising her pen above the clipboard, she said, “Your hand. Can I see?”
He tried not to wince as he unwrapped his left hand, the towel sticking to the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. The gash was deep but not too deep. He felt self-conscious about his fingernails, which were dark around the nail beds from years of staining wood.
Wren gently lifted his hand, turning it this way and that.
“I don’t think you’re going to lose your thumb.” She glanced at him. “That was a joke. But you are going to need stitches.”
Charlie had expected that. “Will it cost a lot?”
“Not if your dad—” She broke off, and Charlie could see the wheels turning in her head: how he’d called Chris “Chris,” how he’d referred to his “birth mom.” “Is the man who brought you in your dad?”
“Foster dad,” Charlie said evenly.
“He doesn’t have insurance?”
Charlie hesitated. “He makes cabinets. He owns his own shop. He has a workers’ comp plan, but the insurance people aren’t fans of power tools.”
“Because in an accident, the power tools always win,” Wren said. “And accident reports make the premium go up. Got it.”
Actually, the problem was the high co-pays, but close enough. Charlie was surprised that she understood, but then he thought of the overcrowded emergency room and the cockroach on the floor.
Wren stood. “Stay here, okay?”
He tensed, because maybe he’d guessed wrong and she didn’t understand. Maybe there were rules she knew about that he didn’t. “What for?”
“So that I can … so I …” She looked at him. “Nothing bad’s going to happen. But don’t leave, because you do need stitches, or your thumb won’t heal right. And you need that thumb, I assume? To keep making furniture or cabinets or whatever?”
He gave a terse nod.
She took the top sheet of paper out of the clipboard and folded it in half, then in half again. She put the clipboard on her seat. “Do you promise you’ll stay?”
“I promise.”
“Do you mean it?” she pressed.
He replied in his lowest, most serious voice: “I don’t make promises I don’t mean.”
Twin spots of color rose on her cheeks, and, as was so often the case, Charlie had no idea what wrong or unusual thing he’d said this time.
She pulled herself together. “Um, good. Just stay here—I’ll be right back.”
She walked quickly toward what appeared to be a staff break room. When she returned, she carried a battered first aid kit. The first thing she did was very carefully clean his wound, and he winced at the sting of the antiseptic.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” she cried.
“No, please,” Charlie said, chagrined that he’d made her doubt herself.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
She bit her lip.
“I’m sure,” he repeated. “And thank you. Really.”
Wren proceeded to stitch up Charlie’s thumb herself. She cradled his hand in her lap and smoothed on a numbing cream first, and her touch was so gentle that Charlie knew he would gladly suffer a dozen injuries—a thousand—in exchange for this: the feel of her fingers on his, the tug of the thread, the slight pinch of the needle, the intoxicating scent of her as she leaned in close.
“Katya taught me,
” she told him. She pressed her knees together as she concentrated. When she shifted, the hem of her skirt rode up, revealing a finger’s width of her skin. He wanted very much to look down her shirt, too, but he told himself not to. He almost succeeded.
“I think I know Katya,” he said. “Russian? Wants to be a pediatrician?”
She glanced at him, baffled. “Yeah, that’s her. But how do you know her?”
“I’ve met a lot of a nurses, that’s all.”
Now her expression was doubly baffled, and he felt like a fool. I’ve met a lot of nurses, as if he were bragging, as if he were some sort of player.
Speak, he told himself. Explain. Now.
“I’ve been here a lot, that’s all. The pediatrics ward. That’s how I know Katya.”
“Why were you in pediatrics a lot?”
God, why had he brought this up? The last thing Charlie wanted was for Wren to be concerned about him. To see him as a charity case, or a charity case by proxy.
“Charlie?” Wren said.
“My little brother’s in a wheelchair,” Charlie said quickly. “He’s fine, but stuff comes up. Like, we were here at the beginning of the year, because—”
He broke off abruptly. He picked back up with, “So, yeah. That’s life. Who said life was easy, right?”
He forced a laugh. It was the stupidest laugh of all time. “Just shoot me,” he said. “Do you have a tranquilizer-dart gun? A pill to make patients shut up?”
“You don’t need to shut up,” Wren said. She paused. “Why were you here at the beginning of the year? Does your brother have a chronic illness or something? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, obviously.”
But he did have to tell her. She sounded so worried. She was doing so much for him; he owed her an answer, even if he couldn’t give the full answer.
“No chronic illness,” he said. “Dev’s paralyzed from the waist down, but not from a disease. He’s eleven—did I tell you that? He’s a sixth grader. He goes to Ridgemont. He’s not, like, in some special school or anything. And in January, he … got burned. That’s why we were here.”