I’m standing up, moving toward the crowd toward her. “Echo?”

She looks at me. “I’m sorry, Ben.”

I’m almost there, reaching for her. “It’s okay, it’s okay—”

“No, it’s not, because I took some—” she curls forward, teetering, and vomits at her feet. “Oh god—”

She pitches forward and I catch her before she tumbles off the stage, and then I’ve got her in my arms. “Echo?”

She looks up at me, and her skin is pale and yellowing and the whites of her eyes are yellow too. “Not—not okay. I took a bunch of Vicodin, Ben—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I just couldn’t take it anymore—” and then she vomits again, on me, on the floor.

I glance at Brayden. “Call an ambulance.”

Brayden just stares at Echo, who is limp now and barely breathing. “Echo? Jesus, what did you do?”

“CALL A FUCKING AMBULANCE!” I shout, and he jerks into motion, digging his cell phone out of his pocket and stabbing at it.

I tune out as he relays information to the operator, my sole focus on Echo. Her head lolls backward, and I roll her in my arms so she’s facing down. Drool and blood-laced vomit streams from her lips, and she’s gagging, gasping, groaning, crying, mumbling unintelligibly.

“Echo, stay with me baby, it’s me, it’s Benji, I’m here, okay? I’m here, you’ll be okay, just stay with me, just hang on, okay?” My voice shakes, trembles, and it’s hard to carry her without putting weight on my knee, but I don’t dare put her down, so I balance against the stage.

I hear sirens, fucking sirens. My head spins, my heart clenches. I’m hallucinating, or remembering. I’m seeing the fight with Oz on Kylie’s front porch, Oz stumbling backward, slamming into and rolling off the hood of a car, blood on the windshield and on the road as he hits the concrete, and then the sirens; I’m seeing Cheyenne’s F-150 at the light, the red Mustang flying through the intersection and bashing into the driver’s side door, toppling it over, and the blood and her head hanging, already dead, and the sirens approaching, uniformed EMS and the subtle shake of a head, because she’s already dead.

And now…

Now there’s sirens approaching yet again and Echo is unresponsive in my arms, and I’m unable to breathe, I need to breathe, need to breathe with her, need to breathe for her, but I can’t because I’m sobbing, carrying her in a limping run toward the medics and the stretcher as they slam open the bar door and rush through the parting crowd. They take her from me and I’m answering questions automatically, but I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know her blood type or what she drank or how many pills she took.

Brayden is beside me, his shoulder under my armpit keeping me upright, providing answers. “I saw an empty fifth of whiskey, but I don’t know if she drank the entire thing at once. The Vicodin was mine, and there were only ten pills left.” He chokes and we’re supporting each other now as he falters. “She twisted her ankle a few months ago and I left the bottle for her, and I just forgot it—I didn’t think she’d do this, she’s never—never tried anything like this before…”

We’re at the ambulance and they’re lifting the stretcher into the back of the vehicle. One of the medics stops both of us with his hands outstretched. “Are either of you family?”

“She doesn’t have any family here,” Brayden answers. “I’m the closest thing she has.”

“One of you can ride along.” He gestures to the ambulance, and Brayden climbs in with a glance at me.

“Meet us at the hospital!” he shouts as the doors close.

The last I see of her is an oxygen mask going over her face, one of the medics saying something about “naloxone”, and then the doors are closed and the ambulance is gone. I hobble as fast as I can toward my car. I don’t know where my cane is. I can’t find the Silverado, my mind drawing a blank. But then it’s there in front of me and I’m twisting the key and tearing out of the parking space. I make it to the hospital in record time, find a parking spot in the ER lot and I’ve got another long walk to the doors, my knee screaming and on fire, but I ignore it, ignore it, grit my teeth and limp as fast as I can.

When I get into the waiting room, I see Brayden with his hands fisted in his hair, head tipped back, eyes closed, pacing back and forth in front of a stretch of empty chairs. He sees me, comes toward me.

“They’re pumping her stomach right now. We won’t know much until she wakes up, assuming—assuming she does.”

“Is there a danger she won’t?” I ask.

He nods. “Yeah. I’m not sure when she took the pills, or how many, or how much she drank on top of them. She could—she might have liver damage, maybe even brain damage…but at least she’s still breathing, right? There could also be heart failure. We just don’t know. There’s nothing we can do but wait.”

I turn away and take a step, two, and then my knee gives out on me and I collapse, catch myself on a chair and climb into it. “Shit. What the hell happened to her?”

“Her mom died,” Brayden says. “It was sudden—”

“I know,” I interrupt. “I was with her in San Antonio.” I can’t bring myself to tell him the truth.

“Ohhhh,” Brayden says, realization in his voice. “You’re the other reason she’s so fucked up in the head, aren’t you?”

“She wasn’t like this the last time I saw her. She got drunk after the funeral, but after that she seemed…upset, obviously, because shit, who wouldn’t be? But suicidal? I had no idea she’d…I didn’t think she was capable of doing this to herself.”

Brayden sits beside me. “I’ve known her since our freshman year at Belmont, and I didn’t think she was either.” He extends his hand. “I’m Brayden.”

I shake his hand. “Ben.”

“Our girl’s been through some shit, and she’s never been this bad.” Brayden puts his head in his hands and palms his forehead. “Breakups, being cheated on, a pregnancy scare…she was always solid. She’d drink, go into her head for a while, and in time she’d be fine. Even when she was raped she didn’t get this bad.”

“Raped?” My voice goes thin as a razor and twice as sharp. “You mean what happened with Marcus Shaker?”




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