“What?”
“Yeah. It’s probably the cleaning shit. I’m going to get water, Evie. Do you want some water?”
“Sure. Yeah…thanks.”
After he leaves, I notice that there’s water on the cart beside my bed.
He comes back with two big cups of water from the nurse station. He must have filled them both up with a lot of ice, because it’s clinking together kind of loudly.
He holds a cup out to me, and I take it with both hands. Landon carries his own to the window. He peeks out the blinds, and I see yellow light from streetlamps.
“What time is it now?” I ask him.
“One-thirty.” I’m frowning at his shoulders, trying to decide what still seems off, when I notice that I still hear ice clinking.
I watch as he sets his drink down on a table and takes a seat on the vinyl couch beside the window. He pulls his phone out and leans over it.
“What game are you playing?” I ask after a minute.
“Nothing.”
His voice sounds weird, but I can’t put my finger on exactly how.
“Will you come sit beside me?”
“I’m cool here for now.” He sounds casual, but—again—my Spidey sense is screaming. Then I realize why. My mom and dad cook asparagus in the pan, with olive oil and lemon juice, and he ate that just fine. His eyes were wet just now…and that’s not why.
“Please?” I say in my most injured voice.
After a long second, Landon gets up, a shadow moving through the darkened room. As soon as he sinks down into the chair beside my bed, I notice his shoulders pumping: up and down, and up and down, as if he’s breathing hard. He looks down at his knees, then wipes his palms on them.
“Landon…look at me.”
“What?” The word is sharp. Then he looks up, and I can tell something is wrong.
“You’re not allergic to lemons,” I whisper.
His face tightens, and for a second, he looks furious. Then he cups his hand around his eyes.
“What happened?” I ask softly. “Did I… Is it me? Did I make you upset or like…mad or something?” Tears fill my eyes.
“No, Evie.” His face and voice are hard. “I promise, you did nothing wrong today. Now, I’m going to go back to the couch.”
I nod, and a tear streaks down my cheek. I’m just so tired, my body so strung out, I can’t help it. “Sure.”
He sighs roughly.
“I said okay.” My voice is reedy, and I hate myself for it.
“It’s not you, Evie. I said it isn’t you. Just let it go.”
“Okay.” I bite my lower lip, willing my tears to stop. “Go back to the couch. I can’t make you talk to me.”
Landon stalks over to the couch. Instead of sitting down, he opens up the blinds fully, revealing a dimly lit view of another wing, and a parking lot below.
“You don’t leave shit alone, do you?” His voice is hard. His back is to me.
“I don’t,” I snap. “If I like someone, I don’t leave ‘shit’ alone. I try to see if they’re okay. Does that bother you? If it does, I think that says more about you than me.”
Now his shoulders are really heaving.
Tears streak down my cheeks. “I’m sorry I’m so annoying to you. I’ll just shut my mouth now.”
I lie back against my inclined bed and shut my eyes. My ankle throbs. I’m thinking about that, not Landon, when I crack my eyes open to find him standing by the bed.
“I don’t like hospitals.”
He sinks down into the seat beside my bed and puts his head in both his hands.
“I’m sorry.” I feel a swell of empathy for him. I just can’t help myself.
His shoulders start to rise and fall again. His hands sink into his hair. “Why do you care, Evie?”
“Because I care.”
“You don’t know me.”
“So what? But that’s not even true. I do know you.”
“You just met me.” His voice sounds hoarse.
“Well—so what? I can still know you. Honestly, it doesn’t take that much. I know that when you cut your tenderloin, you like all the pieces to be straight, like some kind of freaking surgeon,” I say, slicing the air with my finger. “You finished all your math homework for the semester early, but you don’t want anyone to know you did, because it’s not the image you want people to have of you. I think you downplay how smart you are, because you say that you hate pop music, but you know all the words to almost every song that’s gotten air play recently, meaning you must know them as soon as you hear them.” He hasn’t looked up at me, so I keep going.
“You’ll play that cricket game on Xbox with Em for longer than half an hour, which says you’re nice when you don’t have to be. You’re polite; you do the dishes all the time.”
Landon lifts his head, a smirk-smile on his lips, and I keep going for the win.
“You’ve had a life so far that most people would not envy, but it hasn’t made you a jerk. For example, you held back on Pax that first day in the lunchroom. We all thought you didn’t hear him come behind you, because you had on ear buds. But you must have, because you didn’t have an iPod or an iPhone in your pocket.”
His brows arch. I arch mine too, as I continue. “I know you were really nice to me today. So I do know you. At least some. And I thought we were friends.”
He drops his head back down and heaves a long breath. “I’m an asshole.”
“No you’re not.”
I watch his shoulders as they rise and fall. Then his hard, gray gaze lifts up to mine.
“When I was two,” he says softly, “someone left me at a hospital. This hospital.”
Seven
Evie
The words are quiet and flat. As he says them, he moves a hand over his face—fingertips clutching at his forehead, like he has a headache.
“WHAT?”
He lowers his hand. His face is hard and tight. “That’s how I became a ward of the state, Evie.”
My stomach twists up. Someone left Landon at the hospital when he was two? Why? Was he sick? Was it on purpose? I remember how this conversation started, and I feel a heavy pit in my stomach. “God…Landon. I didn’t know.”
“Of course not.” The words are growled.
“When you were two?” I whisper.
“About.”
“Do you know why?” The words are wobbly—because my throat is tight.
“What’s your favorite memory when you were two?”
“Umm…I don’t—oh. So you don’t know.” I sink my teeth into my lower lip, trying to picture Landon as a two-year-old, left in an ER. “I can’t even imagine.”
“Neither can I,” he says dryly.
“Do you know anything about it? Would you rather me not ask?”
He shrugs, his face carefully neutral. “Probably my mother. On the admission papers, she put ‘Ash Ville.’”
I try to envision a woman with Landon’s gray eyes checking into an ER here with him, and then leaving him behind. I truly can’t imagine.
“God, Landon. So you have no idea.”
He shakes his head.
“Was she…was your mother sick?”
He shakes his head again.
“Do you know for sure that she—you know, that she meant to leave?”