JACK PULLED ME AWAY FROM MY PILE OF MORTIFICATION and into the lengthening shadow of a nearby tree.
“Sit,” he instructed, taking my red bag as my shoulders slid down the bark.
Pinpricks radiated through my hands and feet, and my head was still buzzing. He asked me a question, but I couldn’t concentrate on the words. Was I crying, or were my eyes watering from throwing up? I wasn’t sure.
The next thing I knew, Jack was squatting next to me and giving me instructions. “Slow breath in through your nose, long breath out of your mouth.” He repeated it several times until I finally got the hang of it. “That’s it. Keep it up.”
Slowly, slowly, the buzzing finally stopped. The world inflated back to normal size, and right in the center of it blinked Jack’s big brown eyes.
“You with me?” he asked in a voice edged with concern.
I nodded and wiped my face on my coat sleeve. My mouth. So gross.
He uncapped a half-filled plastic bottle of water he’d been holding. “I don’t have any exotic diseases, promise. Swish and spit, preferably over there.”
I leaned as far away as I could and rinsed my mouth. A couple of students striding down the sidewalk gave me the stink eye. Great. Hope they weren’t with Simon’s group.
I rested awhile, eyes trained on the grass in front of me, until my stomach stopped cramping and I felt somewhat normal. He stared at me the entire time, but he didn’t say anything. I was sort of thankful for that.
I finally gulped down more water and held up the bottle. “Guess this is mine now.” My voice sounded scratchy. Throat hurt, too.
He shifted out of his squat and sat back in the grass, balancing his elbows on his bent knees, and handed me the cap.
“Thanks. Where’d you learn that breathing trick?”
“Years of meditation. Works, right?”
It really did. I tried a few more repetitions, just to be safe. “Why are you here?”
“If you keep posting vague hints about where you are, I’m going to look for you.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Yes.”
I pretended to be annoyed, but truth be told, I wanted him to find me.
Jack crossed his arms over his knees. He was wearing faded olive-drab jeans and the vintage black leather jacket. Just under the jacket’s sleeve, carved wooden beads encircled his right wrist, along with a crisscrossed stack of braided-leather bracelets and cords. “You want to share what brought all this on?” he asked.
“Bad shellfish.”
He squinted his disbelief. “Must’ve been really bad to make you cry like that.”
“What do you want me to say? I’m a big coward, okay?” I sagged against the tree and sighed. “I’d never seen a dead body before. Not a human one, anyway. Unless you count mummies in the de Young Museum.”
“Not the same.”
I appreciated the reassurance, but the whole thing was humiliating. “Go on—tell me how I made fun of you for being squeamish about dissecting a fetal pig, and now here I am, falling apart.”
“Are you kidding? My eighth-grade teacher died when I was fourteen—that was the first dead body I saw. I bawled my eyes out in front of the entire funeral home when I saw her in the coffin. Then I did exactly what you did in the bushes back there, only I did it all over one of the standing floral displays. All my classmates were there, and my ball-less display of emotion spread around school like wildfire. Took me a year to live that down.”
“I think you’re exaggerating to make me feel better.”
“I’m not, but is it working?”
I took another swig of water. “Besides, it’s different. This is what I thought I wanted to do with my life. And I can’t illustrate how the lungs function if I can’t even look at lungs. It’s not like I can draw from other people’s illustrations.”
“Why not?”
“Do you think Albrecht Dürer copied other artists’ work? No. And if I want to be great, I need to be able to draw directly from the source.”
He didn’t respond, but I was too frustrated with myself to elaborate any further. Besides, he was an artist, right? He had to understand. So why did he look so damn grave? Or maybe it was disappointment. Not sure what he had to be—
Oh.
“I’m such an idiot,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”
“Why?”
I gestured toward the anatomy lab. “Because you ‘fixed’ this for me. I don’t know exactly what you did, but I’m thinking it couldn’t have been easy.”
He shrugged with one shoulder and waved it away with the flick of a wrist. “I’m more worried that everything I try to do for you turns to shit.”
“It really does, doesn’t it?” I was only joking, but he groaned, so I whapped him on the shin with the water bottle. “If you think a few tears and some upchucked pretzels are going to stop me from coming here twice a week, you don’t know me.”
He didn’t smile, but his shoulders relaxed, and a few moments later he templed his fingers together, looking cheerfully devious. “Know what you need?”
“A stronger stomach?”
“Next best thing. Mint.”
“Umm . . .”
He dug out his phone and tapped the screen a few times. “An inbound N train is ten blocks away. You feel okay to walk to the stop?”
“With you?”
“That was sort of the idea, yeah.”
“How do I know you won’t lead me into some creeptastic CSI situation?”
“Damn. There goes my plan to harvest your kidneys.”
“Please, don’t mention kidneys right now,” I said, pressing the heel of my hand against my stomach.
He shuddered. “Now you’re making me queasy. Look, it’s a busy spot in the Castro. We only have to make one transfer. Fifteen minutes to get there, tops. Just text someone,” he suggested. “Make sure someone knows where you are.”
I thought for a moment. “Give me your wallet.”
“Excuse me?”
I held out my hand. “If you want to take me somewhere, give me your wallet.”
He didn’t even hesitate, just dug it out of his back pocket and handed it over.
The black leather was warm and worn around the edges. “I thought you were vegetarian,” I said as I cracked it open.
“A bad one, remember? Please don’t dig around too much in there.”
I wiggled out his driver’s license. “Afraid I’ll find condoms or your My Little Pony club card?”
“It’s called a Brony card, thankyouverymuch. Oh, Jesus—don’t look at the photo.”
How could I not? It was ten times worse than the one on my state ID, and I wasn’t sure, but he seemed to have a ton of acne, which made me feel a lot better about his stunning good looks now. “Let’s see, Jackson Vincent is your real name, and not some fanfic Fast and Furious character you made up—surprise, surprise. And your birthday is in December, so that makes me, what, five months older than you?”
“Told you I liked older women.”
I held back a smile. “Five eleven? You seem taller.” And closer. His cheek was only a few inches away from mine.
“Six one. I got the card a year and a half ago.”
“Where’s this address?”
“Ashbury Heights.”
“Huh. Do you go to Urban Academy?”
“Checking up on me?” He puffed up, more than a little pleased about this.
“Well, do you?”
“Would that magically make me safer in your eyes?” he asked.
“Probably not.”
“Good, because plenty of asshats go to that school, believe me.”
“If your family’s rich, I’m not impressed.”
“That makes two of us. What are you doing?”
Mom thought I was working, and since she was just starting a twelve-hour shift a few buildings away, I figured I’d flown under the radar. But Heath expected me home. I snapped a photo of Jack’s license with my phone and sent it to Heath with a text: Going out to the Castro. If I’m not home by midnight, this guy kidnapped me. Then I replaced the ID—seriously, was that the edge of a condom wrapper?—and stuck the wallet in my jacket pocket, along with my phone. “I’ll give it back to you when you deliver me home with both kidneys intact.”
If I hadn’t been sitting down already, his grin would’ve knocked me flat on my ass. “Any more arguments? Because we need to leave if we’re going to catch that train.” He held out an upturned palm.
Most people who offer to help you stand just end up giving you a weak hand, but Jack tugged me off the ground with a surprising amount of force. This earned him a few extra points in my mind. I like people who follow through on promises.