Coda 01 - Promises

of blood.”
    “Rub some dirt on it.”

    “He’s delirious,” Lucy said, but Matt shook his head, a tiny hint of a smile in his eyes.

    “No. He’s not. He’s going to be fine. Right, Jared?” “Yeah. I feel great. What’s for dessert?” He squeezed my hand.
    Dan was yelling—I couldn’t tell what. Cops were all around, and there was so much noise. I could hear Lizzy and mom crying. And now, it was really starting to hurt, and I could hear Grant saying, “Stay back. Give them some room.”
    “It’s just like the movies,” I said to Matt. Now he started to look concerned. He was obviously re-evaluating his denial that I was delirious. “Jesus Christ, Matt, it hurts.”
    “Hang on.”
    I was feeling very light, like I might float up off of the ground. It seemed good that Lucy was holding me down, although I wished she didn’t have to make it hurt so much. There seemed to be lights floating around that I couldn’t focus on. I heard Lucy say, “He’s going into shock.”
    “Jared.” And now Matt sounded scared. “Jared, I love you. Don’t you dare die on me.”
    I tried to put my hand up to touch his face, but I couldn’t quite get it there. My vision was starting to fade. “Matt, I think I’m going to faint now.”
    “No, Jared! Stay with me!”

    I didn’t hear anything after that.

    T HE first few times I woke, I was heavily drugged. I was vaguely aware of a parade of faces: one gray-faced doctor and an army of nurses, all interchangeable in their blue scrubs. Lizzy, Brian, Mom, Matt. Lucy? My molasses brain caught on that one, ripples of confusion, before flowing along into oblivion. I was vaguely aware that there were often people in my room I couldn’t see. They talked a lot, but only random phrases stuck with me—“replace the window” and “like a nanny”—but I couldn’t make any sense of them.
    I kept feeling things crawling on me, but nobody seemed to notice. I finally managed to catch one of the nurses and said, “Bugs on my skin.”
    She patted my hand and said, “It’s the Oxycodone.” I heard the words but had no idea what they meant. I was trying to break the sentence down. It was definitely in English. I fell asleep again before I got any further than that.
    T HE time finally came when I woke up, and the world made sense again. The fog in my brain had receded and become only a cloudy blotch in my memory. I was relieved that, at that moment, the only person in the room with me was Matt. He was leaning against the wall, looking out the window.
    “Oxycodone makes me itch,” I said. Well, maybe there was still a little bit of fog left. I wasn’t exactly sure why that was the first thing to come out of my mouth.
    His head whipped my direction. “What?”
“The painkiller they were giving me. It makes my skin crawl.”
    He smiled and came to sit on the bed next to me. “That explains a lot. You kept saying ‘bugs.’”

    “Next time I get shot, tell them I want Vicodin instead.” “I will.” But then his face became serious. “You look like hell. How do you feel?”

    “Like I need a shower.” I was looking around a little more and realized there were flowers everywhere. “Who are all those from?”
    “Mostly your students and various members of the Coda Police Department. The school. Mr. Stevens. A lot of them are from people I don’t know. You’re a hero, you know?”
    “Do I get a cape? I want red.”
    “The way the story is being told, you bravely jumped in front of Mom and me in order to save our lives.” His eyes were crinkling at me, and his voice was light. “You took a bullet for us.”
    “What am I, the secret service? I was just trying to get your attention. I wasn’t planning on getting shot.”

    He smiled. “Your secret’s safe with me.”
    We didn’t talk for a minute, and I started thinking about the scene at the table, before the incident in the front yard. Matt had actually told his dad about us.
    “Why did you do it?”

    He must have been thinking about it, too, because he didn’t have to ask what I was talking about.
    “That day, I just kept thinking about the choices I had made in my life. Some of the hardest ones were decisions I knew he would hate if he knew about them. But they all turned out to be good. First, I decided not to join the military. And I think that was the right choice. Second.” He was ticking them off on his fingers as he talked. “I decided a few years ago to quit dating. I’ve already told