They Sacrificed Me to Avoid Favoritism novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Last in Line
At Parents' Day her principal father waves the ambulance off without her and her mother refuses to fetch her EpiPen, so Marisol gets it herself, then hears them call her confused on camera.
The paramedic ran after my father and held up my wrist.
"Mr. Salcedo, the red band means critical. It has nothing to do with whose daughter she is."
He pointed at my lips, which had swollen so much I couldn't close them.
"Her pressure is dropping and she's barely getting air. She goes in the first ambulance."
My father looked at the lawn.
Two hundred parents stood there with their phones up. Every one of them was recording.
Parents' Day at Brightwater Academy was supposed to be a picnic.
Instead forty students lay on the grass holding their stomachs, and the lunch the school had served was the reason.
My father was the principal, and everyone was watching what he would do.
He gripped the ambulance door hard, and his voice shook.
"I hate this, Marisol, I do," he said. "But I can't put my own daughter first with everyone watching."
Then he waved the ambulance on.
The back doors shut in front of my face.
Inside sat three kids with stomachaches, sipping water and talking.
Lindsey Howland leaned out of the doors. She was seventeen, a year ahead of me, and she looked scared.
"Mr. Salcedo, give Marisol my seat. She looks awful."
My father took off his suit jacket and put it around her shoulders.
"You skipped breakfast again, didn't you? You go gray when you do that. Stay where you are, sweetheart."
Then he turned to the crowd.
"This young lady offered her own place to my daughter. That's what this school is about."
People clapped.
Somebody near me said, "Honestly, I'd never have the nerve."
The ambulance pulled away.
My mother took my arm and walked me to a plastic chair under a tree.
She is the school nurse. She laid the back of her hand against my forehead and took my pulse at my neck.
"You're awake and you know where you are," she said. "Slow breaths. This will pass, baby."
It would not pass.
I couldn't make a sound. My throat had closed to a thread.
I pointed at my throat. Then I jabbed my thumb into my own thigh, again and again.
My mother's face changed.
She knew exactly what I meant. My EpiPen had lived in her emergency cabinet since seventh grade, in a box with my name on it.
Last week she had told me she was moving it into her office, out of sight.
I grabbed her sleeve and pointed across the lawn at the administration building.
She didn't move.
"Marisol, listen to me." She bent close and kept her voice low. "Your father has the board vote on Monday. If I run for your medicine in front of all these people, they'll say we play favorites."
I stared at her.
"Hold on a few more minutes. Another ambulance is coming. Just breathe slowly."
She squeezed my hand, then let go and walked back to the other children on the grass.
My vision had gone gray at the edges.
No other ambulance was coming. I had counted. The next one was twenty minutes out.
So I stood up.
My best friend, Noemi Rangel, was sitting on the grass twenty feet away, pale and clutching her stomach. She saw me stagger and got to her feet.
"Marisol? Where are you going?"
I pointed at the administration building.
She understood and put my arm over her shoulders. We went across the lawn together while two hundred phones followed us.
Nobody stopped us. Nobody said a word.
The door of the building stood open, because every adult in it had run outside.
My mother's office has a keypad lock. I typed her birthday with a shaking finger, and the light went green.
In the locked drawer was the box with my name on it, in my mother's own handwriting.
I put it in Noemi's hands.
Noemi had watched me practice on an orange in ninth grade. She pulled off the cap and slammed the pen into my thigh.
I waited as the medicine hit.
The first full breath hurt all the way down.
We slid down onto the floor of the nurse's office and sat there, both of us crying.
When I could stand, I took the empty pen and walked back outside.
A news van had pulled up at the edge of the lawn. A reporter held a microphone toward my father, and he was already speaking.
"My daughter waited her turn like every other child," he said. "I'd do it again."
I opened my mouth and a hoarse sound came out.
"That's a lie. I went and got it myself."
Every phone turned toward me.
My father looked at me for one second. Then he put his hand on my shoulder and smiled into the camera.
"She's confused," he said. "Her oxygen was very low."
Beside him, my mother nodded.
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