“I like you too, April May. Now shut up.” She moved around to sit behind me, lifted up the blanket, and placed the cold circle of a stethoscope on the injured side of my back.

After a few seconds she said, “The main concern is that your lung might be punctured, but I’m seeing no signs of that.”

“What would that feel like?”

“I have no idea, no one’s ever stabbed me in the back. Now seriously, be quiet.”

I tried to work up some spit to lick my lips because they felt super dry. My tongue came away tasting sweet, like I’d been wearing grape-flavored lip gloss or something.

“Can I have some water?”

Jessica handed me a bottle, saying, “Go easy on it, you don’t want to start coughing right now.”

New York ambulances can never really go very fast since there’s nowhere for the traffic in front to go. Luckily, you’re always pretty close to a hospital. The weirdest thing about being in the ambulance (aside from being half naked under the blanket and having just been stabbed) was the steadiness of the siren. You hear sirens all the time, but they’re always either coming or going—getting louder or quieter, and pitch-shifted by the Doppler effect. You never just hear a siren steadily for a long time. I guess Jessica and Mitty did, but it was one of those familiar but slightly off things that stuck in my head. That’s what I was thinking about when we took the last turn before we arrived at Bellevue and the siren turned off.

“Can you do me a favor?” I suddenly asked.

“Probably not.”

Moving my arm as little as possible, I carefully reached into my pants pocket and pulled out the flash card. “This is extremely important. Can you take it to the check-in desk or whatever and tell them to hold it for Robin Vree?”

There was a long pause. The ambulance was stopping in front of the ER and I could hear people talking outside. She grabbed it and tucked it into her uniform just as the ambulance doors opened, and she launched into a monologue, directed at the hospital doctors: “Twenty-three-year-old female, shallow stab wound to the left upper back between shoulder blade and spine, third and fourth ribs possibly fractured. No sign of spinal damage or lung puncture. Wound is packed but still bleeding. Blood pressure one twenty over eighty, cap refill good, no sign of internal bleeding . . .” It went on like that for a while. And then pretty immediately I was swooped into the system. X-rays, pain meds, shots, swabs, stitches.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A lot of people came to my hospital room over the next couple of days. The first (that I remember, at least—I was on pain meds for some of the time) were a couple of guys from the NYPD.

“Ms. May, I’m Officer Barkley, this is Officer Barrett, we need to ask you some questions about your attack.”

“I don’t actually know that much, but I’ll do my best.”

“What were you doing when you were attacked?”

This didn’t seem particularly relevant, but they were police, so I just told the truth. I was there shooting a video about the July 13 attacks and also about the demonstration going on on 23rd. Did I think it was a dangerous thing to do? Yes, but I wanted to do it anyway.

We went through the details of the actual event: the thousand-pound fist of the knife going into me; the body collapsing on me; the weird, disgusting, formless body dead on the ground.

“Do you know what happened to your attacker?”

I was talking softly, unusual for me, but taking deep breaths felt like being stabbed all over again. “Something very odd. I know Andy didn’t kill him, though I think he would have been happy to. Whatever happened to that guy was not normal.”

“Your friend Andy. His camera was missing its memory card.”

“Oh god!” I said. “That’s awful news!” And now I’m lying to the police. To my ear, it sounded not at all convincing. “It must have been in there when he was filming, he’s not an amateur.”

“You don’t think it’s possible that there was never a card in the camera?”

I felt like I was on treacherous ground here. I decided to keep all the doors open.

“It doesn’t seem like the kind of mistake Andy would make, but maybe. Sometimes when a DSLR gets jolted, the card slot can open and the card can fall out.” And then, for good measure, I added, “We need to find that card! It’s not like we can reshoot that video! That was a once-in-a-lifetime chance!” I’m talking louder now, the pain suppressed by the adrenaline of lying. It was absolutely terrifying.

“Ms. May, given the circumstances, aren’t there more pressing concerns than your video?”

“You have your jobs, I have mine.”

They went over the whole thing with me again and told me that I was going to have to write a witness statement as soon as I was feeling up to it.

“Considering the circumstances, we’re posting a uniformed officer at your door.”

That gave me something to think about—two murder attempts in less than twenty-four hours, and the police only knew about one of them. I got to think about that, and how Carl had saved me, and how he hadn’t saved a bunch of other people. I got to think about those things all by myself and for maybe just a little too long.

* * *

—

I haven’t told you a ton about my parents. It’s not that I don’t like them. The opposite, actually, they are just massively supportive, sweet people. It was almost a cliché at the School of Visual Arts (where Andy and Maya and I went) that no one’s parents wanted them to be there. It’s a ridiculously expensive school, so a lot of the students are children of doctors and lawyers and investment bankers, and not many of those parents see art school as the best path to long-term success. But when my classmates swapped horror stories about the battles they had to fight to get their parents to shell out for school, or just simply allow them to pay their own way, I really didn’t have much to contribute.

My parents saw I was passionate about something and did what they could to help me get it. I mentioned before that my parents own a company that manufactures and sells machines that milk cows. They fell into this after spending a summer interning on a small dairy farm after they graduated from school with degrees in political science. They thought the systems the farms used looked impractical and inefficient, and five years later, their company was supplying half of Northern California’s small-scale dairy farms with upgraded systems. By the time I went to college they were selling to most of the northwest US and had a warehouse filled with equipment tailored for small dairies that they sent all over the world. They’d hired people to do the day-to-day work and were semiretired.

I think, since they didn’t really know how they had become successful, and it certainly didn’t have a ton to do with their education, they figured I should just do whatever. It had worked for them. They still owned the business, and I guess they “ran” it or whatever, but most of their time since I went to school was spent helping to run local nonprofits and traveling around to see bands they were into. Some parents worried about their children squandering their inheritance. I worried about my parents squandering it before it got to me.

They were just very happy people. Maybe I’m so snarky because I was just bored with how pleased they always seemed to be. Though not bored enough to ever actually do anything traditionally rebellious.

Here’s an example of how supportive they were: When I called them from the hospital, they did not immediately fret or cry or ask me how I could have put myself in such danger, which would have been the normal response. We got through the initial report of what the doctors said (I was fine, though a couple of my ribs were cracked), they said their “We’re so glad you’re OKs,” and then . . .

“Robin says he got your note and everything’s being taken care of.” This was my mom.

“My note?” I was confused.

“The note you left at the hospital reception desk.”

I hadn’t left a note; I’d left a memory card. My dad picked up the conversation, not giving me a chance to figure it out.

“He also says not to call or text anyone about that stuff. You shouldn’t be stressing right now.”

“Um, OK?” Why on earth had Robin gone through my parents?

Mom started again: “He was very adamant. He says it’s being taken care of and he’ll see you soon. So you won’t call or text anyone?”

“I mean, I might.” Lying to the police was one thing; my parents were too sweet for duplicity.

My dad: “Robin said he needed you to confirm verbally that you would not call or text anyone but us.”

“This is very weird.”

“We trust him, though, right?” my dad said.

“He seems like a very nice boy,” followed my mom.

“He is indeed, and no, we’re not dating.”

“So?” my dad again.

“OK, I won’t call or text anybody.”

We talked for another twenty minutes, and they barely even brought it back around to how I had been stabbed in the back due to my own stupidity.

“Concentrate on getting well, we’ll be there in the morning,” Mom said. They were cutting their vacation short.

“I love you guys.”