Brazing by Lila Felix

  The next morning, my phone rang way too early and normally I would’ve let it go to voicemail, but the caller ID read Tate.

  “Hello?”

  After several clearings of the throat, she spoke, “Bridge, I need hospital.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “No.”

  She sounded like a sliver of her normal, boisterous self and something about the heaviness of her breathing scared me awake and into action.

  “Call an ambulance, Tate!”

  “No. Money.”

  Which meant she couldn’t afford an ambulance.

  “Text me your address, now.”

  I grabbed the keys to my truck and took off in the direction of the parking lot. She was still stubborn I’d give her that. Who cared about the cost of an ambulance when you were in trouble? I wondered what was wrong with her. She hadn’t seemed sick last night. She’d seemed the opposite of sick.

  Her dorm was only a few blocks down from mine and I left the truck running while I went to her room. Her dorm wasn’t co-ed like mine was, but this was an emergency. I tried my damndest to look at the floor and only up to see the numbers on the doors. Finally, I got to her door and walked right in without knocking. By then she was on the floor, looking whiter than Preacher’s picket fence and her hair clung to the sides of her face and her neck with sweat as their glue. Her t-shirt and pajama pants stuck to her torso and legs like her hair and the closer I got, the more she began to shake.

  Two seconds was all it took to decide that an ambulance just wasn’t going to be fast enough for me. I grabbed her purse, some little leather thing with a knuckle duster on it, picked her up through a slew of pitifully pale cussing and protests, and bee-lined to my truck.

  That’s when the shivering started again. By the time I climbed in behind the steering wheel, the teeth chattering could be heard above the roar of the engine. I reached over and buckled her seatbelt across her lap making sure not to clothesline her in the process and cranked on the heat.

  I made a mental note to keep a blanket in the back from then on.

  “Cold,” she tittered out, desperately grabbing for the vents.

  “The heat’s on. Hang on.”

  And that’s when I went against the cardinal rule Stockton had doled out when he bought me the truck.

  Don’t speed.

  I was sure he meant, “don’t speed for the joy of speeding.” Certainly he didn’t mean ‘don’t speed when there’s a sick girl in the passenger seat. Even if he did—what Stockton couldn’t see wouldn’t kill him.

  That was West’s wisdom.

  Her breaths became more and more labored as I drove and it seemed like the closer I got, the worse whatever was wrong with her became.

  “Talk about something else,” she said with closed eyes.

  I didn’t want to talk about anything else. The only real thing I wanted to discuss was why she didn’t call 911 as soon as she knew something was wrong. And what kind of roommate leaves her like that without taking her to the doctor.

  That’s what I wanted to talk about.

  But I also didn’t want to upset her any further.

  “Um—instead of studying last night, I went to a pool hall and swindled some city boys out of Daddy’s allowance.” I patted my pocket. “Five hundred bucks.”

  “Dirty.” She managed a faint smile

  “It was dirty. But they deserved it. They had the collars of their Polo shirts popped up. It was too much. I couldn’t help myself.”

  When I looked over for her response, she’d passed out.

  People passing out scared me. And the really weird thing was, it made me think about my parents. I hoped to God, every time I thought of the way they died. I hoped to God they’d gone quickly.

  And that’s when the emergency room with all its red crosses and reassuring signs came into view.

  As soon as I parked at the entrance of the emergency room and pulled her from the passenger’s side, scrub-clad women barreled from the automatic doors with a slim white bed and a wheelchair. After seeing her condition, they decided on the bed.

  “Don’t worry, Tate, sweetheart. We’re gonna take you right in.”

  But Tate didn’t respond.

  One of the nurses asked me to move my vehicle—and with robotic motions I somehow managed not to wreck it.

  When I went inside, the same woman pointed me towards those horrific waiting room chairs. The emergency doors that led to the place where she was refused to tell me anything, regardless of how long I stared at them.

  Wait, how did they know her name?