Diane stood near Jackie. She had first gone to the accident site, but there wasn’t much to see. Just some skid marks and an elaborate piece of 3-D chalk art. Then she had a cab take her by a few of Josh’s favorite hangouts (the video store, the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex, the sand wastes outside of town), but he hadn’t been at any of them. He was probably (if he was not injured as well, but she couldn’t bear to even think of that) at one of his father’s several jobs, doing exactly what Diane didn’t want him to do. There would be consequences when Josh came home tonight. There would be a reckoning.

In the meantime, she needed to see how Jackie was doing. It had been Josh, not her, that had done this, but still Diane felt the guilt personally, as though she herself had been at the wheel.

Jackie had broken off the tip of the plastic knife the nurse had given her with her dinner and was using the jagged edge to hack away at her arm cast.

She had not seen Diane come in, but she had grown used to that. Most results have no visible causation. You wake up, and there’s a friendly face above you, or a part of you you had never seen and will never see again has been taken from you, or a part of you you never had before you now have. This is how hospitals work.

Everything about Jackie looked sore to Diane. Her skin hung from her skull, her hair lay flat. Even her teeth looked loose. Her neck and face were still covered in angry purple blotches from the librarian’s poison. What little strength Jackie had was being used to cut at her freshly cast cast.

Diane had a cast when she was twelve. She had fallen out of a tree and broken her leg. This is a common injury for children, as trees dislike young humans and are notorious for picking them up and dropping them if they get too close. She had been grabbed by a ficus tree in her mom’s office. Ficus trees are not tall trees, but they are muscular trees, stronger than they look. Diane had been able to break its grasp, but when she fell, she stumbled forward to the top of some steps, where she tumbled down to the lower floor, landing on that floor’s emergency secret trapdoor, which had opened up onto the basement’s jagged rock pile. She had, like most people, feared and loathed houseplants ever since.

“It itches like crazy, I know,” she said.

“Not trying to scratch it. I’m looking to see if that paper is still there.” Jackie had gotten a good-size hole in the cast. “But now it also itches, thanks.”