When the ER staff saw I didn’t know enough to fill out the forms, they sent me off to a tiny cubicle to wrestle with an admissions official. After forty minutes, I felt like a boxer who’d been punched for thirteen rounds but couldn’t quite fall over. Because April had come in as a pediatric emergency, they were treating her, but they needed parental consent, and they needed to be paid—not, I need hardly add, in that order.

I couldn’t guarantee the payment, and I wasn’t legally able to give consent, so I tried to track down April’s mom at work, which was in itself a bureaucratic nightmare; it took me nine minutes to find someone with the authority to deliver a message to an employee working the floor, but that someone said Mrs. Czernin’s shift had ended at four and she wasn’t in the store any longer. She wasn’t at home, either, but the Czernins did have an answering machine, with a message delivered in the hesitant voice of someone uncomfortable with technology.

I tried Morrell again. He hadn’t been able to track down Marcena. Only because I’d run out of other ideas, I called Mary Ann McFarlane.

My old coach was alarmed when she heard what had happened—she didn’t know about any health problems April had, certainly she had never collapsed before. Several times last year, she’d suddenly run out of steam during drills, but Mary Ann had put that down to lack of conditioning. The coach knew nothing about health insurance, either: she assumed most of the girls on the team had green cards, entitling them to Medicaid, but she’d never needed to check. And, of course, both April’s parents worked, so the Czernins probably didn’t qualify for public assistance.

When I hung up, the admissions official told me if I couldn’t get April’s care sorted out they’d have to move her to County. We argued over it for a few minutes, and I was demanding to see a supervisor, when a woman burst in on us.

“Tori Warshawski, I might have known. What did you do to my girl? Where’s my April?”

Her use of Boom-Boom’s old name didn’t register with me at first. “Did you get the message I left on your machine? I’m sorry I had to notify you that way, Mrs. Czernin. April collapsed during practice. We were able to revive her, but no one knows what’s wrong. And they need her insurance information here, I’m afraid.”

“Don’t ‘Mrs. Czernin’ me, Tori Warshawski. If you hurt my girl, you are going to pay for it with the last drop of blood in your body.”