“How do you want this to go?” his mom asked.
Now that he was in the car, headed for the hospital, the rush was fading, leaving him limp and exhausted. Her question confused him. He pulled it around in his head, trying to make sense of it. Finally gave up and said, “Wha—”
“His dad will get the cops involved. You want to be part of that?”
“Oh God. Nate’s dad is the cops. Remember the guy who came to our door when Pete and Kathy reported a break-in?”
He caught his mom’s scowl in the rearview mirror. Nate’s dad was going to freak. He’d already told Nate several times to stay away from Cody. And the Grove kids all had their daddies’ lawyers, and he was pretty sure Billy Jones’s uncle was a county sheriff. And on top of everything else, there was the simple knowledge that the blame almost always landed squarely on him. Everybody knew Cody Lawrence was trouble. He lived in the Hole. His mom worked the truck stop. Everybody knew he was a fag. Cody shook his head. “They’ll say I started it.”
“Did you?”
“Jesus, Mom. How dumb would I have to be to pick a fight with nine guys at once?”
The wrinkles around her eyes seemed more pronounced in the rearview mirror than usual, but he recognized that she was trying to force a smile. “People do crazy things for the ones they love.”
Cody’s heart burst into motion, but Nate chose that moment to begin coughing—a deep, hacking sound that brought up way too much blood.
“Hang on, kiddo,” his mom said.
“I’m bleeding all over your upholstery.”
It was the first thing he’d said, and Cody’s mom laughed, the same sad laugh she used when a “past due” notice arrived in the mail. “Don’t you worry none ’bout the car.”
By the time they reached Warren’s tiny hospital, Nate was a bit more coherent. He looked worse than ever, though. His entire shirt was blood-soaked, and the left side of his face was already beginning to swell. They helped him out of the front seat with his arm over Cody’s mom’s shoulders. She waved her hand at Cody, shooing him in the direction of the car.
“There’s napkins in the glove compartment. Clean yourself up as well as you can before you come in.”
It surprised him. He didn’t want to leave Nate, but when he plopped into the passenger seat and flipped down the visor to check the mirror, he understood. His face looked almost as bad as Nate’s. His eyebrows and his bangs were caked with mud. His nose had obviously been bleeding at some point, but he hadn’t noticed. Now, it had dried all over his mouth and chin. Flakes of it clung to the light stubble on his neck. He looked down at his shirt and realized it was red down to his navel. If he walked into the hospital looking the way he did, they’d make a fuss over him. At the very least, they’d whisper about him. That Lawrence kid from the Hole again, always causing trouble. They’d insist he wait for the cops to arrive.
If he wanted to get out of there with as little hassle as possible, he needed to look less like a victim.
The mud in his hair was red, a mixture of blood and dirt, but things dried fast in Wyoming’s high-desert climate. It didn’t take much to scrub it out. He dug in the glove compartment and found napkins, plus a few wet wipes from the diner. He also found a warm can of generic soda in the front seat. He drank half and used the rest in lieu of water, scrubbing his face clean. He took off his shirt and put it on backwards, so the blood was hidden in the back. There wasn’t much blood on his sweatshirt, so he zipped it up and checked himself again in the mirror. There was a broad, oozing abrasion on his forehead from having it rubbed in the dirt. He combed his hair down over it, wishing he had a baseball cap. Other than that, he didn’t look too bad. He’d have a black eye and his upper lip was about twice its normal size, but hopefully nobody in the ER would look at him closely enough to notice.
Finally, he hurried inside.
Nate was nowhere in sight, but his mom was sitting in one of the waiting room chairs. He took the empty one next to her. “What’s going on?”
“They’ve already called his father. He’s on his way.”
He thought of Nate, somewhere on the other side of the waiting room doors, all alone. “Can I see him?”
“I don’t think so. They wouldn’t let me go back.”
Cody ran his hand through his hair, then remembered he was trying to keep his scraped forehead from showing and shook his hair back into his face. He glanced around the waiting room. A middle-aged couple with worn, haggard faces sat in chairs on the far side of the room, holding hands, their heads together, caught up in their own crisis, and Cody couldn’t help but wonder if this was how Logan’s parents had looked on that horrible weekend after Thanksgiving. In another corner, two men sat side by side, legs splayed, heads back, their eyes closed, their muddy work boots and company hats marking them as roughnecks from a nearby oil rig. A bunch of nurses and receptionists sat behind the desk, more than were probably needed at such a small hospital, looking busy without doing much of anything. They were trying so hard not to look at Cody and his mother, it must have been giving them headaches.