"You just drove into that car," she said. "You drove into it on purpose."

"The car was going to hit you." Simple. Like the logic was so basic it barely needed stating.

"I don't know you," Camilla said. She could hear voices behind her - the other racers had stopped, someone had a phone, someone was shouting about 911. None of it registered. "I've never seen you in my life. Why would you-"

She stopped. She could see the blood now, spreading dark through his jacket at the ribs. Her stomach turned over.

"Because you're a person," he said. "That's enough reason."

Nobody had ever said that to her. Not in those exact words. Not in fifteen years of being passed along and handed back and assessed for fit like a piece of furniture. She'd been told she was a good student, a difficult case, a compassionate kid with a chip on her shoulder. Nobody had ever said the simple thing this boy was saying, which was: you exist, so you matter.

She had no idea what to do with it.

"Don't die," she said. She knew how stupid it was. She said it anyway. "Don't die. I don't-" She pressed her hands over the wound at his side, not with any skill, just the impulse to do something, and he flinched once but didn't tell her to stop. "Can you hear the sirens? There's an ambulance coming. You just have to hold on."

"I hear it," he said.

"Tell me your name." She said it with an urgency she didn't quite understand. "Tell me your name right now."

The corner of his mouth curved. Even now, even in the middle of all of this, he was almost smiling. "Why?"

"Because I can't just call you hey in my head for the rest of my life," she said. "And you're not allowed to die without me knowing it."

Something in his eyes shifted. The calm was still there, but it warmed.

"Adrian," he said. "Adrian Ashford."

She repeated it like she was filing it somewhere important. "Okay. Okay, Adrian, the ambulance is almost here, you hear it? Keep talking to me. Tell me-" She looked around wildly for something to say and landed on the most ridiculous possible thing: "Tell me something good. You look like someone who knows something good."

He looked at her for a long moment. His eyes were starting to go heavy at the edges. She could see him fighting it.

"There's a beach," he said. "Past Long Island. Early morning, before anyone else gets there." He stopped, breathing carefully around each word. "The light comes in at this angle where everything looks - you should see it sometime."

Her chest hurt. It hurt in a way she couldn't account for - she'd known him for four minutes and her chest hurt like something was splitting open in it.

"I'll go," she said. "I'll go, I promise. Just hold on - Adrian, I need you to hold on-"

The ambulance pulled up.

They let her ride with him because she wouldn't let go.

She climbed in and crouched by the gurney and held his hand, and the paramedics worked around her, and the siren cut through the night, and she talked. She talked because she needed him to have a reason to stay conscious and because the silence was unbearable and because she had spent her whole life being someone who didn't say too much and right now she couldn't stop.