“Shh…” Aunt Deedee said.

* * *

—

“Do you know where you are?” a doctor asked me. His face was familiar and I wanted to tell him that yes, I was in a hospital where he had been my doctor for some days now and that I recognized his weirdly long upper lip. His cupid’s bow looked like a tiny waterslide.

“In the hospital?” I said.

“That’s right,” he said. “Do you know what year it is?”

“2010.”

“Okay, it seems like you’re a bit more oriented, so I want to just go over with you what has happened, what your treatment plan is, and where we can go from here. You were admitted to the ER with internal bleeding, a grade two laceration to the spleen, minor lacerations to the kidneys—” The doctor saw my attention start to wander and put his face weirdly close to mine, said, “Stay with me here, I need informed consent, buddy! After this there will be some forms to sign. There was some bowel and mesenteric vessel injury, two cracked ribs, and a grade one hematoma on your liver. We were able to go in nonoperatively and halt the bleeding in your spleen.”

“Nonoperatively?”

“Basically, in this case we inserted a wire into your vascular system through the groin and were able to stop the bleeding.”

“That sounds super bad,” I said.

“Actually, you’re very lucky,” the doctor said. “You’re young. You’ve got that good protoplasm. You’ll heal fast.”

“I can’t believe protoplasm is a real thing,” I said. “I mean, what a crazy word!” I was also thinking that Jesus really had performed art through my veins, and I was suddenly anxious about how much of my other memories were real. Obviously the nurses were not Foley artists. But had Anthony come to see me and told me he couldn’t be with me anymore? Had I told Aunt Deedee that Jason had been part of the group who attacked me? Had he even been there? I hadn’t seen him at first, but I had heard his voice, and I swear at one point I had seen his face, heard his disgusting laugh. I didn’t know how I would ever be able to trust myself enough to say for sure. A nurse had wrapped my fingers around a chubby plastic pen and was holding out forms for me to sign on a clipboard.

“Here,” she was murmuring, “and here. Here. And this states you do not have insurance. Here.”

“Wait,” I said, thinking that I did have insurance, but then I remembered Aunt Deedee had been fired from Starbucks and so our health insurance was probably gone. “So what happens if you don’t have insurance?”

“Well, honey, you’re still seventeen, so we can probably get you retroactively into Medi-Cal, but even if we can’t, you were the victim of a crime, so all your expenses will ultimately be covered by the Victim Compensation Board, as long as you cooperate with the police investigation.”

I was still seventeen, so I got insurance. Bunny had turned eighteen, so she’d be tried as an adult. Of all the arbitrary boundaries in the world, I marveled.

“We’re going to transfer you out of the ICU,” the doctor said, “to a regular room. We’re gonna hold on to you for a few more days, just to give that spleen some time to heal and make sure we don’t get any clots or blockages in your urinary tract from those kidneys. I do think the police want to have a word with you, and they’re out in the hall—are you up for it?”

“Uh, sure?” I had not thought about that at all, the legal side of my situation.

The doctor and nurse left, and a man and a woman entered my room. Some kind of switch flipped and suddenly I was sure all of this was fake, that it was part of some TV show or social experiment. These were not real detectives but people impersonating police detectives. It was so obvious. The man had mussed-up hair and was wearing a leather jacket over a button-down shirt that had a stain on it. The woman didn’t know how to dress at all, and her outfit was so extremely basic that only a costume designer could have produced it. They were both beautiful and yet ordinary-looking, with eyes that were too shiny.

“Michael,” the woman detective said, “I’m Detective Carmine and this is Detective Brown.”

Even their names sounded made up.

“We were hoping you could tell us a little bit about what happened on the evening of Tuesday the seventh.”

“Was that the night I got beat up?”

She nodded.

“Well, I was working, and then I got off work and I was in the parking lot.”

“Going to your car?” the male detective asked.

“No, I don’t have a car, I was just lighting a cigarette and I was about to walk home, when I saw a group of guys, and they called me over.”

“Did you recognize any of them?” Detective Carmine asked. Her teeth were way too white. It was the little details that people forgot about, and it was forgivable on TV, but for someone to be trying to get away with it in real life was absurd. No detective would ever have teeth that white.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Not sure if you recognized them?”

“I just—I’m coming to this place in my life where I’m not sure I believe in punishment.”

The two detectives exchanged a look.

“I can’t talk about this right now,” I said.

“We just need you to tell us as much as you can,” Detective Carmine said in a soothing voice. “Unfortunately, when you were admitted they were under the impression that you had been in a car accident and so no one preserved your clothes for evidence, so we have no fibers, no hairs, no actual physical evidence of any kind. Do you have any idea why someone would want to hurt you?”

“Well, because I’m gay,” I said. “Which would make it a hate crime. Which is, can you see why I am hesitant to just accuse people of a hate crime?”

“That’s something for their lawyers to worry about,” Detective Brown said.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want those boys to be punished. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe they were bad. I was disgusted by them. The look on their faces, the way they had laughed at me as they did it. But I was confused about whether or not to say Jason was among them. And it didn’t seem fair to name the others if I was going to refuse to name him. I remembered the nurse saying that my medical expenses would be covered so long as I cooperated with the police investigation, and I thought: They are trying to extort me!

“I just need to think about it a little bit more,” I said. “Would that be all right?”

“In an investigation like this,” Detective Carmine said, “it can muddy the waters. You don’t want a defense attorney saying, look, he wasn’t even sure he knew who attacked him, how can you know it was my client? If you won’t cooperate with the investigation, then I’m going to be honest with you, it will be dropped. Most likely it will be dropped.”