“I can’t,” Maria said. “I took it inside and flushed it.”

“You did what?” Lily said.

“Why the hell would you do that?” Mateo gestured to the crew working on Delilah. They were putting one of those braces on her neck that you always saw on car crash victims. Two police cars had pulled up, and the officers were talking to the dorm monitors. “Why didn’t you just let these guys do their thing?”

Maria opened her mouth, then closed it. Mateo hoped she realized how profoundly stupid a thing she’d done.

“I was afraid if they found drugs on her she’d get in trouble,” Maria said. “I figured she probably had something in her purse, and she did. I was only trying to help.”

Mateo shook his head. He couldn’t deal with this right now.

“Why did she even have her purse with her?” he said. “It’s the middle of the night. Did you see what she was wearing? Was she in pajamas or . . . ?”

That was when Mateo looked at Maria. She was wearing a skirt and cardigan.

She was dressed to go out.

Thunder crackled above them. The rain started in thick, scattered drops. Then the sky, which had been clear seconds ago, opened up, dumping buckets of water onto the lawn.

They all jumped up. The entrance to the front hall was too narrow for everyone to fit through at once, and soon Mateo was soaked. He looked back over his shoulder as the paramedics loaded Delilah onto a stretcher. One of them was holding up a plastic sheet to protect her from the rain. A new burst of thunder overhead was so loud, one of the girls cried out.

Mateo reached the shelter of the doorway, but instead of going inside he turned around to watch. As soon as the stretcher was loaded inside, the paramedics slammed the doors and the ambulance peeled out over the grass, water spewing up behind its tires.

A few EMTs had stayed behind to clean things up. With Delilah gone, no one seemed to be in a particular hurry anymore. Mateo jogged out onto the grass, ignoring the water that poured over his head. The first paramedic he reached was a young guy, probably not much older than Mateo.

“Is she going to be okay?” Mateo said.

The guy looked at Mateo and raised his voice to be heard over the pounding rain. “She a friend of yours?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, we don’t know, really,” the guy said. “She must’ve fallen from pretty high up. She lost a lot of blood.”

“Did she break any bones? What about her head, did she hurt it?”

“She’ll need an X-ray, but probably several broken bones, yeah. Listen, you should get back inside. Someone from the hospital will call the school and let you know how she is.”

“Is she going to live?” The words were out before Mateo could stop them.