The nurses start to wheel Carli off, and I see her face. Hold up, she’s scared. Her eyes are wide open, and her small, round nostrils are flared. Carli pushes up onto her elbow and turns back to look at her family. But walking away, her dad is looking down, her mom is gazing out a window, and Cole is busy with his phone.

Two fat tears fall down Carli’s cheeks, and I’m sick. I hate seeing her like this. I wish I could rush in and hold her hand . . . rush in and tell her everything will be okay.

I press my forehead to the window of the door and mouth:

You’re okay.

You’re okay.

You’re okay.

Over and over again. And before the nurses wheel her out of view, our eyes meet, her face rearranges itself to resemble something like peace, and I feel like I’m back in the gym, catching her again.

Very Important Things

CARLI

It’s four thirty p.m. on Monday. Cole’s at his game. Mom’s back at work after taking the weekend off. And I’m sitting on the orange velvet sofa in the living room with my legs stretched out. I’m alternating between cutting very important things out of magazines and staring at a blank page in my notebook.

No more boys in my notebooks.

And definitely no more boys on my walls.

Instituted those rules after I kissed my first boy (Patrick) behind the bathroom stalls at basketball camp when I was twelve. After I got home, I must’ve written his name down in every color marker, crayon, and ink pen I owned. Then I waited for him to call, waited for him to ask me to be his girl, waited to put bursts of colors—bright, intoxicating colors—all over my walls.

None of it happened.

After Patrick, I might’ve been tempted to write a few more boys’ names down, thinking they were true. But between side chicks, ego-tripping, dudes trying to get all big and bad, dudes thinking they could tell me what to wear or how to do my hair, dudes not doing what they said they would do, dudes being all sweet one second and not even texting me back the next, dudes trying to pressure me into sex, or dudes plain working my nerves, they were all false alarms.

But nothing about Rex feels false. I know this is going to sound crazy, but in the hospital, he came to me in a vision. There he was, on the other side of my operating room doors, same face drenched with the same tenderness.

It felt like déjà vu, as if it was the same moment I first saw him on the basketball court wrapped in different skin. Instead of burning up, I was freezing cold. Instead of catching me with his arms, he caught me with his words.