We went back into the break room. Mercedes wheeled Tomas beside the couch, so we had a conversation grouping, though I got one of the chairs from the table, so I could sit on the other side of Tomas, rather than on the couch. It was too low for me to sit and have good eye contact with Tomas without one of us turning our heads oddly. I liked eye contact, and for important talks I liked it even more. Micah sat on the arm of the couch, Nathaniel beside him. Mercedes took the far corner of the couch, not sure Tomas would talk in front of her, since he hadn’t talked to any of his family much yet. She’d already told Micah that if the boy wouldn’t talk in front of her, she’d leave us to it.

   Tomas had been the smallest kid in school for years, taking after Manny, but he was all arms and legs in his tuxedo now. He had to be at least his mother’s five-eight, but since her brothers had all turned out to be six-five, except for one who was six-three, nicknamed Bambino not for his birth order but for being “short,” Tomas would probably hit at least six feet someday. The brothers looked like a defensive line on the edges of the dance floor, until their wives dragged them onto the floor, and then they were surprisingly graceful, like watching bulls pirouette through a china shop.

   His black hair was short, but with enough length so someone had used hair gel to style it back from his face in one of those careless wavy hairdos that some men can pull off. In a few years, when he filled out to his new height, the hair would be a serious selling point, but his face still looked like a little boy’s face, so that the combination made him look pretty in a way that most thirteen-year-old boys don’t want, but he seemed to be fine with all that hair framing his face. It probably meant the hairdo wasn’t just for the wedding, but something he did regularly, which meant he cared about his hair more than my own little brother had at the same age, a lot more. I remembered Manny telling me that Tomas was already starting to cut quite a swath through the girls in school, so he probably cared about a lot of things that I didn’t associate with thirteen. I’d been hopelessly backward at the same age.

   He sat slightly crooked, favoring one side heavily. There was a tightness around his eyes, even on the baby face, that said pain. He was hurting, but the kind of meds he was probably getting for pain would have drugged him up or made him sleepy. He was going to hold out from pride. I’d have done the same thing, so I couldn’t really throw stones.

   Tomas gave me a look out of big, brown eyes, the nice hair spilling forward a little so it framed his face on one side. The gesture reminded me of how Asher used his golden hair to frame his face to such good effect. That let me know that it was on purpose for Tomas, too. He knew he was pretty. It was a level of self-awareness that I didn’t associate with most boys his age.

   “Hey, Tomas, I won’t ask how you’re feeling.”

   He grinned suddenly. It made him look years younger and more real than the careless, almost-flirting look of seconds before. “Then you’ll be the only one who hasn’t asked.”

   I smiled back. “I know, you get sick of answering the question. When you’re still in the hospital people ask the question. I always want to answer, ‘I feel like shit, how are you feeling?’”

   He laughed then, and it was like the grin, younger. I liked both; it made me see the little boy I’d known since he was in kindergarten. “I like that, I like that a lot, but Mama would have a fit.”

   “How many of them have asked, ‘How are you doing?’”

   “A lot,” he said, rolling his eyes.

   “Next time, say, ‘I got shot, how you doing?’ See what they say.”

   “Anita,” Mercedes said, “don’t teach him to be a smart-ass. He’s already bad enough.” But she was laughing.

   “I still get stupid questions about the scars,” I said.

   He gave me serious eyes as he said, “Micah said you got hurt bad once.”

   “More than once, but this is the one that the doctors thought would cripple me.”

   His eyes flinched, but I’d used the word deliberately. He gave me narrow eyes; it wasn’t entirely a friendly look, but it wasn’t unfriendly either, more a considering look, like I’d done something interesting.

   “Most people won’t say the word, they talk around it, but you just say it: cripple. I’m going to be a cripple.”

   “Bullshit,” I said.

   He gave me wide eyes, and almost smiled. “Why’d you say that?”

   “From what I hear, if you do your physical therapy you’ll be walking just fine, and if you add more weights and gym work you’ll be running, too.”

   His face darkened, eyes suddenly angry. “They won’t promise I’ll run again.”

   “But if you don’t do your PT, they guarantee you won’t run again, right?”

   He gave me the full force of those angry eyes, his mouth set in harsh lines. He looked bitter. It didn’t make him look older, really, but it did something unpleasant to him, as if his entire energy changed. I understood in that moment that this wasn’t just about Tomas’s body, or even his emotional recovery, but something more profound. Bitterness can spoil you for life. It eats away at all the good things and makes everything seem bad, if you let it.

   “I’ll never run like I could before, so what’s the use?”

   I held my arm out to him, flexing my hand downward at the wrist so the bend of my elbow was very flat and the scars were very clear. It wasn’t like they were ever not visible if I wore short sleeves, but I’d had them so long that I just didn’t think about them much anymore. They ran white and thick across the bend of my arm, mounding at the elbow and running in thin ropes of scar tissue away from it. I’d been told I should have asked for a plastic surgeon when it happened, but once they told me I might lose the use of my arm I hadn’t really worried about scars. Now they were a part of me, like a freckle, or a mole, just something on my skin that had always been there, though of course, the scars hadn’t been there always.

   Tomas’s voice was almost hostile as he said, “I’ve seen them before in the summer.”

   “I don’t try to hide them, any of them.”

   His gaze went lower on my arm to the cross-shaped burn scar, now a little crooked from the claw scar that a shape-shifted witch had given me. I pointed to a much smaller scar on my arm near the shoulder. “This was my first bullet wound.”

   He looked at the slick, white mark. “I know you got shot this year, but you healed it, you healed all of it because you’re like . . . magic”—and even to him it sounded lame, because he looked angry, eyes uncertain, as he added, “You know what I mean, you heal it all.”

   “Every scar you just looked at was before I could heal it all. There’s a few more, including one from the same vampire that tore up my arm. He chewed at my collarbone until he broke it.”