I meet his concerned gaze just as the last memory hits me. I picked myself off the concrete. “I saw you,” I whisper. “You were right there.” I remember meeting his eyes. And they were full of anger, full of desperation, full of gut-wrenching pain.
He screamed my name. I heard it only once before something hard met my face.
My face.
For the first time, I raise my hand to touch my cheek. All I feel is tape, gauze, maybe. But whatever lies underneath it—that’s what hurts each time I begin to smile.
BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP!
“Take deep fucking breaths,” he tells me, rubbing my arm.
Someone knocks twice, and then the hospital doors open. A nurse in pink scrubs sticks her head in. “Daisy, you’re awake.” She smiles, and then she turns slightly to whisper to someone else. “Can you go let her friends know?” She shuts the door behind her and pads closer to me. “My name is Janet. How are you feeling?”
She pours a cup of water and passes it to me. I take a sip and hand it immediately to Ryke. “Can I have a mirror?” I ask her.
Beepbeepbeepbeep.
I can’t articulate my feelings beyond panic. I just need to see my face first to understand these emotions that blow through me.
“Do you want me to call the hospital psychologist first?”
What? “Ryke.” I turn to him with widened eyes.
“Can you just give her a mirror?” he asks Janet with a hard gaze.
She nods. “Okay.” Janet tentatively picks up a handheld mirror from a drawer, and I take it from her.
I raise it up to my face. BeepbeeepBEEPBEEP.
Bandages cover my left cheek down to my jaw. But my lip is swollen, and dark purpled bruises sit beneath both eyes. I look…so much worse than Ryke, no wonder he stared at me like stop fucking talking about my injuries.
I start picking at the tape, to uncover the bandage, and Janet swats my hand away. “Don’t touch.”
“I need to see it.” I don’t even know what it is.
And then another nurse in blue scrubs waltzes in with Connor and Lo.
“Hey,” Lo says with a weak smile. “How are you doing?” He touches my feet above the blanket. I want to return the smile, but it hurts too much to do so.
“Okay,” I say.
Connor just nods. “Has anyone told you what’s happened?”
“Sort of,” I murmur. “I want to see what’s wrong with my face.”
“She doesn’t know?” Lo frowns and glares at Ryke like it’s his fault.
“We’re fucking getting there.”
“Let me help,” the other nurse says, sidling to the bed. “We have to put new dressings on the wound anyway.”
Ryke stands up while both the nurses hover over me. He joins Lo and Connor at the foot of the bed, and my heart rate stays at the same beepbeepbeepbeep pace.
Janet slowly removes the tape, peeling back the bandage that clings to a few stitches…no wait, a lot of stitches.
“It was a deep gash,” Janet explains in the kindest way possible. “You’ve had an MRI. Everything came back normal. The doctors said you may have a slight concussion, but otherwise, you’ll be fine in about two weeks, no more stitches. Just a—”
“Scar,” I finish for her. They free my face of gauze and tape, and there it is: a reddened gash that runs from my temple, across my cheek, to my jaw. I move my tongue in my mouth, along my gum, feeling the backs of the stitches, as though my cheek was cut open at one point.
“How…” BEEPBEEPBEEP. I look up at Ryke, my eyes like saucers.
“You were hit with a fucking two-by-four. The doctors think there was something sharp on the board that sliced you.”
“You were given a tetanus shot,” the blue-scrub nurse assures me.
Janet says, “We can get the psychologist in here.”
Because I’ll have this scar forever. Because I’ll never be the pretty Daisy Calloway in magazine spreads or down runways. I am no longer a model.
I am no longer the person my mom aspired me to be.
But I am more me now than I was before.
I shut my eyes and lean my head back. And my heart rate—it slows. I take a deep breath. What feels like my very first one ever, and silent tears fall. A pressure so heavy begins to rise off my chest.
“It’s okay to be upset,” Janet tells me.
I open my eyes and shake my head, a weak laugh escaping. “I’m not upset.” My chin quivers. I wipe the tears and I say, “I’m relieved.” My gaze meets Ryke’s. “How sick is that?” And then I burst into tears because I know I shouldn’t feel this way.