They Sacrificed Me to Avoid Favoritism novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Chart

The doctor writes down that Marisol was transported late, her father hands her a script to read, and her grandmother takes her home, until Noemi's video shows an empty ambulance he sent away.

The emergency doctor wrote the time on my chart before she said a word to me.

"Your friend gave you the injection at what time?" she asked.

My voice was a croak. "I don't know. Maybe ten minutes after it started."

"And the ambulance would have reached you when?"

"Twenty minutes."

She stopped writing and looked at me over her glasses.

"Then you did the right thing, and you were lucky. Ten more minutes and we wouldn't be talking."

I lay in the bed with a clip on my finger and a line in my arm.

My throat felt like it had been scraped with a fork.

"Is it okay if I ask you to write that down?" I said. "What you just said about the ten minutes?"

She looked at me for a while.

"I already did," she said. "I wrote the time of the reaction, the time of the injection, and that she was transported late. I'll print you a copy when you leave."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Keep it somewhere safe."

The curtain slid back.

My father came in first, buttoned up, his hair neat, holding his phone in both hands.

My mother came in behind him and stopped at the foot of the bed.

She didn't look at me. She looked at my feet.

"Marisol, I'm glad you're alright," my father said. "We need to talk about what you said to the reporter."

"I said you lied."

"You said you went and got it yourself, which is true, and it looks reckless." He held out the phone. "The station wants a follow up. I wrote you something short."

On the screen was a paragraph.

It said I had waited my turn like everyone else, that I was proud of my school, and that my father had done the hardest thing a leader can do.

"I'm not reading that," I said.

"It's three sentences."

"I know how many it is."

"The board votes Monday. Do you understand how this looks if my own daughter says I put her in danger?"

"I was in danger," I said. "You put me there."

He lowered the phone.

"I put you in line," he said, very evenly. "Everyone in that line was somebody's child."

I looked at my mother.

"Mom, where was the pen?"

My mother's mouth opened and shut.

"Teresa," my father said. "Not now."

She said nothing.

I lay there and waited for her to say one word, and she didn't.

"Then read the statement and come home," my father said. "Your mother will make you soup. This will be forgotten by Wednesday."

"No."

His jaw moved.

"Then you'll stay in your room until you can behave," he said. "No phone. No friends. I'll handle the press."

The curtain moved again, a hard yank this time.

My grandmother stood in the gap in her gardening cardigan with her sleeves pushed up to the elbow.

She is seventy-one years old and she worked in an emergency room for thirty-four of them.

"Lucia," my father said. "This is a family matter."

"I'm family." She walked past him to my bed and picked up my wrist, looked at the clip on my finger, and read the monitor.

Then she picked up my chart from the end of the bed and read that too.

"Who signed this?" she asked.

"The attending," I said.

"Good. She doesn't waste words." She tucked the chart under her arm. "Marisol, can you walk?"

"I think so."

"Gabriel, she's coming with me."

"You don't make that decision."

"I made your wife," my grandmother said. "I can make this one."

My mother flinched.

My grandmother turned and looked at her daughter for the first time.

"Teresa. You can go home with him, or you can come with us. But you will not stand there and say nothing again while she's lying in a bed."

My mother's eyes filled. Her hands twisted at her lanyard.

"Mama, the vote is Monday. Please, I can't."

"I know you can't," my grandmother said. "That's the problem."

She helped me sit up.

I walked out of the emergency room in a borrowed pair of socks with my grandmother's hand under my elbow, and my parents didn't follow.

In her little Buick my grandmother handed me my phone from the paper bag of my things.

It lit up the second I touched it.

Forty messages from Noemi.

The last one said: Don't watch this alone. I got the whole clip from a girl in the back row.

Under it was a video.

I pressed play, and the first thing I heard was a paramedic's voice on a radio.

"Unit Two is clear and open at the east gate. We have room for one more."

Then my father's voice, easy and sure.

"Take the board chair's wife. She has a headache, and she's been standing in the sun."

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