“I’m bleeding,” I say like one might say it’s raining. Like I am reporting the weather.

“Shit,” Jameela says, loud enough that the patrons at the tables closest to us on the other side of the open kitchen stop and stare. She grabs my hand, flinging it over my head. The blood pools on the board, on the food—those poor mushrooms are inedible now—and drips down my arm. Jameela presses a clean cloth to it and I look up, watching where her dark skin surrounds mine, where the blood leaks into the white fabric on my sleeve.

It should hurt. But it just...doesn’t.

“What the hell, Hollywood?” Amy asks, suddenly beside us. And ow. That hurts. That name on her lips, the concern in her eyes, the absolute fear as she looks between me and Jameela and the blood on the counter, is like a switch flipped in my nerve endings, and the pain comes rushing down my arm.

“I... I’m bleeding,” I say.

“Yeah, no shit.” She grabs my hand from Jameela’s grasp, sending searing hot pain through my forearm. I hiss and her face crumples. “Are you okay? Did it hit the bone?” She turns to Jameela. “Did she hit the bone?”

Her voice is frantic, her face white as a sheet.

“I don’t know.” Jameela herds us toward the back of the kitchen. We’re undoubtedly causing a spectacle but it’s too hard for me to tell. My vision starts to close in, a fuzzy blackness encroaching from the edges of my eyes.

“I think I need to sit down.”

Amy continues to swear, repeatedly and angrily as someone procures a chair and someone else shoves a glass of water in my uninjured hand and everyone else stops what they’re doing to watch their head chef potentially pass out next to the sink.

“Get back to work,” I say, though it has none of the authority I’d like it to. But they listen, at least.

“I’ll take over,” Jameela says to Amy. She looks down at me. “I think she’ll need stitches.”

As I look between them, it dawns on me. “You want her to take me to the hospital?”

Jameela frowns but takes my spot at the counter, her back straight and tall but also kind of fuzzy. That’s probably not good.

“Come on,” Amy says. She wraps her arm around my back, pulling me up while keeping my other arm above my head.

“I don’t want to go with you,” I say, dead weighting into the chair like a toddler throwing a tantrum.

Amy huffs, her jaw squared. She looks down at me, her lips pursed. “Too bad. You cut your fucking hand open—”

“Why do you care?” I whisper-hiss.

Amy rocks back on her heels, her eyes transform from angry concern to hurt. From the corner of my eye, Carly stops to stare at us both.

Amy shakes herself, literally shakes her head, squeezing her eyes shut like she’s resetting her own router, and bodily lifts me again. For a skinny chick, she’s actually quite strong. Or I might be losing too much blood.