Page 81 of Campus Fake

He hadn’t even asked me to repeat myself. I’d barely gotten the words out—accident, hospital, Sam—and his voice had gone all Captain. “Which hospital?”

They’d all arrived within the hour. Foster and Abby first, then Drew and Harper with Rory in her car seat, then Liam and Ava with Eric hot on their heels. I’d texted Viv and she’d shown up not long after Eric.

That had been four hours ago.

The waiting room was small and too bright, with fluorescent lights that hummed at a frequency I was convinced was designed to make everything feel worse. The chairs were hard plastic, and a television mounted in the corner played the news on mute, closed captions scrolling across the bottom like the world outside was still happening.

I couldn’t fathom that. The world outside should’ve stopped.

Everything inside me felt like it was frozen while I waited for news of Sam’s condition, and yet the world kept moving. It didn’t make sense.

My hands were wrapped in white gauze where a nurse had picked glass out of my palms and cleaned the cuts. She’d also checked my shoulder which was bruised but not dislocated, like I’d told the EMT. They’d insisted on imaging, and I’d sat through the CT scan with my jaw clenched because every minute in that machine was a minute I wasn’t in the waiting room when news could come. The scans had come back clean but I didn’t care. I hadn’t cared about my own body since the moment I’d crawled out of that car.

I stared at my gauze-covered hands, my mind flashing back to the moment right before the accident. Guilt slithered through my gut as helplessness ate away at me. I could see plays clearly on the ice. It was my job to see several steps ahead and block a goal. How had my instincts failed me so horrifically in that moment in the car? How had I not seen the other car not slowing down as we came to the intersection? Why didn’t I ignore the green light and look both ways anyway?

Abby was curled into Foster’s side, her face ghostly white. She hadn’t said much since she’d arrived. Foster had told me quietly, when we’d gotten up to grab coffee and snacks for everyone about an hour in, that he was worried about her. After losing her parents and then her Gram, he didn’t know what another loss would do to her.

I hadn’t known what to say to that. I’d never lost anyone before. And yet I already knew with absolute certainty that if Sam didn’t make it through this, the person I’d been before tonight wouldn’t either.

Drew was pacing, something he’d been doing since he got here. His shoes made a squeaking noise against the linoleum floor, but instead of being annoying, the rhythm of it had become oddly grounding. Harper sat with Rory asleep against her chest, her hand resting on the baby’s back, and I’d caught her eyes tracking Drew’s path back and forth, clearly worried about him. Liam sat with his elbows on his knees and his leg bouncing, cracking his knuckles every few minutes until Drew told him to stop and Liam told Drew to stop wearing a hole in the floor, and then neither of them stopped.

Eric sat next to me. He hadn’t spoken much either, but at one point he’d leaned over and asked me to walk him through exactly what happened. I told him everything I could remember. The green light. The impact on the passenger side. The blood. He’d listened without interrupting, his jaw tight, and when I finished he’d put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed once.

“She’s tough,” he said.

I nodded because I didn’t trust my voice. She was tough. She was the toughest person I knew.

But tough didn’t make you invincible, and right now she was somewhere behind a set of double doors I couldn’t get past, and every minute that ticked by without news made the walls close in a little more.

Eric had texted Jordan and his parents. Jordan was catching a flight as soon as possible. Neither of his parents had responded. I wasn’t surprised although it brought them even lower in my book than they’d been before. Eric, however, was fuming more and more the longer they didn’t respond.

I stared at those double doors. The same ones they’d wheeled her through when we arrived. I’d memorized every detail of them by now—the scuff marks at the bottom, the small rectangular window, the sign that read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. I kept waiting for someone to come through them and tell me she was awake and everything was going to be fine.

No one came.

And the longer we waited, the more my guilt grew until it felt like a living, breathing thing festering inside of me. I’d messed up, and if Sam didn’t make it, I’d never forgive myself.

The coffee Foster and I had gotten sat untouched on the chair beside me, having gone cold a long time ago. Liam had eaten most of the snacks and then offered to get more, but no one was really hungry. We all just sat there, existing in the kind of silence that only happened when you were in limbo, waiting on news that had the power to change your life in unimaginable ways.

Another hour crawled past. Then finally the double doors opened and a doctor stepped through.

Every single one of us stood up.

The doctor scanned the waiting room and seemed momentarily taken aback by the size of the group. “Family for Samantha Lowe?”

We all raised our hands, and I watched the doctor’s expression shift as he tried to reconcile the question with all the hands in the air.

Eric stepped forward. “I’m her brother. Eric Lowe.”

The doctor nodded and glanced at the rest of us. Eric didn’t hesitate. “Whatever you need to say, you can say it in front of all of them. Everyone’s family here.”

The doctor looked at Eric for a moment, then spoke. Sam had sustained a head wound that had caused some bleeding, but they didn’t believe it had caused lasting neurological trauma. There had been some internal bleeding as well, which they’d been able to stop surgically. But she had slipped into a coma, and they weren’t entirely sure why. They wouldn’t know her full condition, or whether there was additional neurological involvement, until she woke up.

Until. He’d said until, not if. I held on to that word like a rope thrown into dark water.

“Can we see her?” Eric asked.

“One at a time,” the doctor said. “If she does wake up, I don’t want to overwhelm her with a room full of people.”