Episode9
997 Words
Chapter 9
Kayla pov
Priya reached me before the door had even fully closed behind Cole and Rhys, breathless, her hand closing around my wrist.
"Did you see his face?" she said. "Cole's face. He looked like someone had knocked the wind out of him."
I had seen it. I'd been standing close enough to catch the exact moment his jaw locked, the way his shoulders had gone rigid before he crossed the hallway and pulled Rhys away without a word. My chest was still doing something strange and hopeful about it, something I didn't fully trust.
"Maybe he remembers me," I said, quietly, testing the words before I let myself believe them. "Maybe that's what this was."
Priya's face didn't share my hope. She tilted her head, studying me the way she did when she was about to say something I didn't want to hear.
"Or," she said, gentler than usual, "his brother just got a date to the biggest event of the year, and Cole hates losing. Any version of losing. Even ones he doesn't actually want."
I opened my mouth to argue, though I didn't have anything solid to argue with. My stomach was still tight, my pulse still too fast, caught somewhere between the two explanations and unable to fully land on either.
A car horn sounded outside, sharp and insistent, cutting through the moment before I could say anything else.
"That's my mom," Priya said, already turning toward the door, tugging my sleeve. "Come on, we're going to be late."
I took a step forward, still half-lost somewhere in the hallway behind me, in the shape of Cole's face right before he'd disappeared. My fingers found the edge of the sweater still draped over my shoulders, Rhys's sweater, and I ran my thumb absently over the worn fabric, not quite thinking about either of them and both of them at once. Some small, foolish part of me was still smiling.
My foot hit something slick.
The world tilted sideways too fast to process, my arms flying out for balance that wasn't there, and then the floor came up hard and fast, my ankle twisting beneath me at an angle that sent white-hot pain shooting straight up my leg.
I heard myself scream before I fully understood I was the one screaming.
"Kayla!" Priya dropped beside me instantly, hands hovering, unsure where it was safe to touch. "Oh my god, Kayla, don't move, don't move."
The pain was everywhere and nowhere at once, radiating out from my ankle in waves that made my vision blur at the edges. My hands were shaking. My breath came fast and shallow, too fast, like my lungs had forgotten how this worked.
"Someone call someone!" Priya's voice had gone sharp, panicked, carrying down the hallway. Footsteps approached, voices rising around me, a small crowd gathering the way crowds always seemed to gather around anything that looked like disaster.
The horn sounded again outside, longer this time, before cutting off abruptly. A minute later I heard her, Priya's mom, her voice cutting through the crowd before I even saw her face.
"Priya! What happened, is she….." She dropped to her knees on my other side, taking in the scene in one fast, assessing sweep. "Oh, sweetheart. Okay. Okay, don't move, help's coming."
"What happened?"
"She just fell….."
"Is she okay?"
I couldn't answer any of it. I was too busy trying to breathe through the pain, my whole leg pulsing hot and wrong, tears blurring the ceiling tiles above me into pale, shapeless smears.
Priya's mom knelt close, her hand smoothing back the hair stuck to my forehead, her voice dropping low and steady, the kind of calm that only came from someone who'd handled a crisis before. "I've already called an ambulance, it's on its way. You're going to be fine, Kayla. Just breathe with me, okay?"
I nodded because it seemed like the thing to do, even though nothing about the pain in my leg felt like it was going to be fine.
The next several minutes blurred together in fragments. Priya's hand gripped mine so tightly it almost hurt. Her mother's jacket folded gently under my head. The wail of a siren grew louder outside, cutting through the noise of the hallway until it swallowed everything else.
Paramedics moved fast once they arrived, efficient and calm in a way that somehow made the whole thing feel more real, not less. Hands assessed my ankle, gentle but firm, and I hissed through my teeth at the pressure, my whole body flinching before I could stop it.
"We're going to lift you now, okay?" one of them said, kind and steady, the kind of voice built for exactly this. "A small pinch of pain, then it'll ease."
It didn't feel small. I gripped the edge of the stretcher as they moved me, breath catching hard in my throat, the hallway spinning gently around me as they wheeled me toward the doors.
Priya walked alongside as far as they let her, her face pale, her hand still holding mine until the last possible second.
"My mom's calling your aunt right now," she said. "We're coming too, okay? Right behind you, the whole way."
I managed a small nod, my throat too tight for words.
As they pushed me through the doors, the cool evening air hitting my face, I turned my head slightly, some instinct pulling my attention toward the far end of the hallway behind us.
A girl stood near the lockers. Ponytail, swinging slightly as she lifted one hand in an easy, unhurried wave. A smile curved across her face, small and satisfied, like she'd been waiting to see exactly this happen.
I was almost sure I'd never seen her before. I tried to hold onto the image, memorize the shape of her face, but my vision was already going soft at the edges, the lights overhead smearing into long, pale streaks.
Then everything went black.
- Writer
