The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness Read Free Book Online

that the deer somehow went all the way over the top of us, which is some kind of freaking miracle. Its bulk takes up the entire back seat, its neck broken, its dead weight pressing against us. The engine stopped when we drove into what I now see is a ditch, and I can hear movement all around us.
    I must be in shock. Dozens of deer,
dozens
of them, are leaping out of the forest on our side of the road, crossing it, and disappearing through the treeline on the other side.
    They keep coming. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s unreal.
    “Mikey?” Henna says, her eyes wide with fear and the same shock as she sees what I’m seeing. Her left arm looks awful, twisted in a horrible way, so I take her right hand and hold it, as the impossible flood of deer spills around us like we’re an island in a river.
    “I’m not going to lie to you,” the big Latino intern Dr “Call Me Steve” says, as he sews up my right cheek, “you’re going to look pretty rough for a while.”
    “He hasn’t taken his graduation pictures yet,” Mel says, standing to the side of the gurney, arms crossed, and so comprehensively not flirting with Call Me Steve that, as flirtations go, it’s working really well.
    “Then you’re going to have two black eyes in them, I’m afraid,” Steve tells me. “I’ve reset your nose” – he glances at Mel with a smile – “which is turning out to be a specialty of mine” – he looks back to me – “so it should be close to its normal shape within a week or so, but I’d keep the bracing bandage on for a week more after that, otherwise you won’t be able to breathe. And as for this” – he puts a rectangle of gauze over my stitches – “I think you were probably hit by an antler or hoof rather than glass. It’s a raggedy tear. I did my very, very best, but you are going to have a scar, my friend.”
    “It’ll make you look rugged,” Mel says.
    “Because I woke up this morning,” I say, “and the one thing I realized I lacked was ruggedness.”
    “Your lucky day then,” says Call Me Steve.
    “It is,” Mel says, and her face gets that angry look it always does when she’s about to cry. “He could’ve been killed.”
    Dr Steve reads the vibe and starts to make his excuses. “Wait,” Mel says. She tears a strip of paper off my admissions chart and writes down her phone number. She gives it to Steve. “It’s all right. I’m nineteen. I should already be in college. You’re good.”
    Steve just laughs, but he takes the number. “Go now, please,” she says. “I’d like to yell at my brother for almost dying.”
    When we’re alone, she doesn’t yell. She just stands in front of me, gently gently gently not quite touching the wounds on my face. She
is
crying now, but her face is so fierce, I know she’d take my head off if I mentioned it.
    “Mikey,” she finally says.
    “I know,” I say.
    She tries to gently hug me, too, but even that’s too much. “Ribs!” I say, groaning. She just sits down next to me on the gurney.
    It turns out that both the slight fascists and the pot farmers who live on our road are equally nice in a car accident. My phone disappeared somewhere under the dashboard and Henna was still pinned in, so I don’t know who called 911. Before the ambulances and the fire truck even arrived, though, people were running out of their houses with towels – the first of them stopping for a moment in wonder to watch the last of the deer flood disappear – then they were pressing those towels against my face. A couple of other people tried to get Henna’s door open to get her out in case the car caught fire. She screamed every time her arm moved, and she wouldn’t let go of my hand, not even when Mr and Mrs Silvennoinen were retrieved from their house – we were like six doors away when the deer hit us. They were fantastically calm, so much so that it was only when I saw them that I realized how much pain I was in.
    Someone called my house, too. My mom