Conventionally Yours (True Colors 1)

“Got it,” I said right as the dispatcher picked up, and I relayed our information to her, trying to catch my breath enough that she could understand me. Even though I was flustered, I still got the address right. I always was far better with numbers than words, and I trailed after Conrad who’d already headed to the front staircase. My stomach roiled as uncertainty over what we might find rushed through me.

Professor Tuttle lay in a heap at the base of the stairs, copies of his book scattered all around him. There wasn’t any blood that I could see, but the low, pained moans were enough to make my hand clench tighter around my phone.

“Please hurry,” I told the dispatcher.

“You should hear sirens any moment,” she soothed me. Gracehaven was a small enough city that the main fire station was only a few blocks past the other side of downtown. “I’m going to let you go so you can let the EMTs in.”

She was gone before I could tell her that Jasper was handling that, leaving me to stand helplessly by while Conrad knelt next to Professor Tuttle. I was the one who was supposedly going into medicine, and I was ashamed at how my hands were shaking and my sinuses burning. My head kept ringing with memories of how my moms were always remarking on how badly I handled unexpected disasters, their assumptions that I would freak out often feeling like a self-fulfilling prophecy that ratcheted up my anxiety and dulled my ability to cope.

“Can you hear me?” Conrad asked Professor Tuttle with none of my own hesitance.

“Yes, yes.” The professor sounded weak, but also more like himself than I’d expected. “Still here. Just a bit of a…predicament.”

“Don’t try to move,” Conrad ordered as I finally picked up on the sound of sirens in the distance. “Can you feel your toes and fingers?”

It was the sort of question I should have thought to ask, but my throat remained too tight to even squeeze a reassuring word out—not that I was sure what one should say in such circumstances. I couldn’t lie and tell him everything would be okay, not when it so clearly wasn’t.

“I…can. Everything hurts.”

“I bet.” Conrad was the sort of sympathetic that I should have been. “Do you want me to find a blanket?”

“No. My…phone. Right pocket. Call Julio. At…graduation party.”

“I will.” Conrad leaned in, gently extracting the phone. “I’ll make sure he meets us at the hospital.”

“No need…trouble you guys.”

“We’re going,” Conrad said firmly, and I supposed we were. The ambulance crew arrived right then, a man and woman, Jasper trailing behind them along with two firefighters. Apparently they’d sent a truck too. Despite Professor Tuttle’s protests that he had sensation in his limbs, they strapped him to a backboard with a cervical collar before transferring him to a stretcher. His groans as they moved him made my teeth grind, that helpless feeling continuing to well up inside me.

“All…so…unnecessary,” Professor Tuttle gasped as they got him settled on the stretcher, strapping him down. “Feel…foolish.”

“Don’t,” Conrad said. “This is our fault. You shouldn’t have been trying to carry something down the stairs.”

From the way he glared at me as he said it, it was clear that he blamed me for the professor’s injury. Which probably wasn’t that far from the truth. If we hadn’t been arguing, he might have been more likely to ask for help instead of trying to escape inside, and Conrad and his insistence on carrying triple loads would have been the one with the box. Which meant, really, it was my fault because I’d let Conrad’s comments and my anxiety about the car goad me into an argument that I wouldn’t have otherwise started. Stupid anxiety, always in the way, making me say exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong moment.

Conrad’s harsh glare remained as they wheeled Professor Tuttle out to the ambulance, and we scrambled to Jasper’s tiny car to follow. Jasper drove like the emergency was an excuse to try out for the Indy 500, even though his car seemed prone to an ever-more-alarming series of noises—rumbles and shakes and squeals. While I rode in the back seat, praying that we made it to the hospital in one piece, Conrad spoke into the professor’s phone, leaving a message for Professor Herrera.

“I’m not sure who else to call. They don’t have kids, do they?”

“Nah,” Jasper answered as he badly parked in the hospital’s lot. He was on the white line, and the urge to point it out was almost overwhelming. “Professor Herrera will come, and he’ll know who else to call. It’ll be okay, man.”

I wished I shared both his certainty and his ability to calm Conrad down. Not surprisingly, the receptionist for the ER wasn’t able to allow us to go be with Professor Tuttle or to tell us anything more than we already knew. She directed us to have a seat in the waiting area.