"Who is that?" June asked.
NS did not look away from her.
"That is XH."
June tightened both hands around his sleeve.
"No."
The word was quiet, but it closed the entire corridor.
I stayed beside the pages I had dropped. Every instinct told me to cross the distance, take her from NS, and make her look at me until recognition returned.
The clinic instructions held my feet to the floor.
Approach from the front. Say your name. Do not touch without warning.
"June," I said. "My name is XH. We are backstage at Utopia's graduation rehearsal. The lights went low because of the storm."
Her eyes moved over my face without finding anything familiar.
"Why does he know my name?"
NS answered carefully.
"Because he knows you."
"I don't know him."
I had imagined June forgetting a birthday, a promise, or one of the arguments that had once seemed large enough to end us.
I had never imagined being forgotten all at once.
Thunder struck close enough to shake the fire door.
June flinched. I lifted my hands where she could see them.
"I am not coming closer," I said. "You are safe."
"Then go away."
The pain arrived cleanly. It did not resemble jealousy or anger. It felt like someone had removed an organ and left the body standing.
"I can step back," I said.
I did.
June watched my shoes as if even that movement might be a trick.
NS slowly opened the front of his graduation gown and pulled it from his shoulders. Beneath it, he wore a pale blue shirt. I still wore black.
"Look at me again," he said. "I am NS. I was outside the quiet room with your medical folder."
He placed the folder on the floor and moved away from her.
June's hands remained raised where his sleeve had been.
"You were waiting for me," she said.
"Yes."
"At the hospital."
"I went with you to appointments."
Her gaze snapped back to me.
"Then why is he saying he was there?"
"Because I was there too," I said. "Not at the first appointments. At the last one. You made me promise to say my name if you could not find it."
"Stop telling me things about myself."
Her voice rose.
Footsteps sounded beyond the corner.
JP appeared first, moving too quickly for his cane. Kitty, TZ, HS, and the others followed him. A rehearsal assistant tried to ask why everyone had left the stage.
June turned and found a corridor full of black gowns and frightened faces.
"June?" Bunny said.
"What happened?" JP asked.
"Give her space," Kitty said.
"Should I call someone?" Anna asked.
Their voices collided.
June covered one ear.
"Stop."
Nobody heard the first time.
"Stop!"
HS stepped between the group and June.
"Everybody quiet. One voice only. JP, clear the corridor. TZ, find the campus nurse. Do not bring security unless the nurse asks."
JP immediately turned on the rehearsal assistant.
"Power problem," he said. "Take everyone back to the auditorium."
For once, nobody argued with the worst liar in the class.
TZ ran.
The others withdrew around the corner, but June had already begun backing away. Her shoulder struck a wheeled stage-supply table. Rolls of tape, spare batteries, cable ties, and tools rattled across its metal surface.
"June," Kitty said. "It's me. Kitty."
June looked at her.
For one second, hope entered Kitty's face.
Then June asked, "What do you want?"
Kitty stopped breathing.
NS moved before grief could make her answer badly. He guided Kitty one step back without touching June.
"She needs one anchor," he said.
"She needs us," Kitty whispered.
"Then help her by making us smaller."
The emergency lighting flickered.
June's hand searched behind her across the supply table. Her fingers closed around the handle of a short utility knife the stage crew had used to cut tape and cardboard signs.
Nobody moved.
The blade was already extended.
June held it in front of herself with both hands, not like someone preparing to attack, but like someone who had discovered the only object in the corridor that might keep strangers away.
"Don't come near me."
HS spoke softly.
"No one is coming near you."
I looked beyond her.
The fire door behind the supply table had drifted open. Beyond it, three narrow concrete steps descended to the dark service passage beneath the stage. June's heel was less than the length of my hand from the first step.
"June, there are stairs behind you," I said.
She glanced over one shoulder.
The movement shifted her weight backward.
"Stay where you are!"
"I will. Please move one step toward the light."
"You are trying to trap me."
"No. My hands are here. You can see them."
Kitty took June's handwritten card from inside her gown. Her fingers shook so badly that she nearly dropped it.
"June, you wrote this today," she said. "May I read it?"
June stared at the card.
"You are lying."
"Maybe you think I am. That's okay. I won't come closer."
Kitty swallowed and read from the back.
"XH is the boy beneath the jacket at the Lovers Statue. He promised to say his name."
June looked at me again.
Rain hammered the high windows. Somewhere beyond the auditorium, the Grand Fountain pumps continued beneath the storm, steady and distant.
"I put my jacket over your head in the rain," I said. "You told me the statue could remember a promise even when people failed it. I laughed at the story. You became angry because I laughed."
"Anyone could have told you that."
"Yes."
I did not turn a memory into a test.
"You don't have to remember me yet."
Her face changed, not with recognition, but with terror.
"Yet?"
Her heel reached empty air.
June began to fall backward.
I crossed the corridor before thought could stop me.
She swung the knife.
Heat opened across my left forearm. My sleeve tore, and blood appeared through the black cloth.
I caught her wrist above the hand, not the blade. The utility knife struck the floor. Kitty kicked it beneath the supply table, then snatched it up by the handle and carried it away.
June's other foot slipped over the step.
I pulled her against me and turned so my back struck the fire door instead of her head striking the concrete.
The door slammed shut.
June screamed.
It was not my name.
"Let me go!"
She hit my chest with the heel of her hand. Her fingers clawed at my gown. She twisted hard enough to reopen the cut beneath my sleeve.
"Get off me! I don't know you!"
Every word landed in the same place the knife had missed.
"There were stairs," I said. "I am moving you away from them."
"NS!"
NS knelt several feet in front of us so she could see his face.
"I am here."
"Make him stop."
NS's eyes met mine. There was no rivalry left in them. Only the terrible calculation of how to keep one frightened person from hurting herself without making her fear worse.
HS pushed the supply table across the fire door and cleared the floor behind us.
"The stairs are blocked," he said. "XH, loosen your arms. June, he is going to let go slowly. Nobody else will touch you."
I released the pressure around her waist.
June tried to wrench free, stumbled on the hem of her gown, and caught my shirt before she fell. I lowered us both to the floor. My arms remained around her, open enough for her to leave, close enough to catch her if she collapsed.
She did not understand the difference.
"He's holding me," she sobbed. "Why is he holding me?"
"Because you nearly fell," NS said. "The man holding you is XH. I am NS. Look at my blue shirt. Look at his black gown."
June looked from him to me.
"You were wearing black."
"I took the gown off," NS said. "You saw us in the dark and mistook me for him."
Her breathing stopped between two short gasps.
"No."
NS did not hide from the truth.
"You kissed me. I stopped when I understood. You were confused, June. I did not let it continue."
She stared at his mouth.
Then she looked at mine.
I felt the moment return to her in pieces too sharp to hold.
"No," she said again.
Kitty crouched beside the opposite wall and unlocked her phone. She opened the photograph from Malaysia, taken outside the consular office after I had returned with the passports. June stood in the rain with one hand stretched toward me while the others crowded behind her.
Kitty placed the phone on the floor and slid it close enough for June to see.
"You went back for him when the rest of us were scared," Kitty said. "You held out your hand before anybody else did."
June stared at the image.
Her struggle weakened.
"Malaysia," she whispered.
"Yes," Kitty said.
"The passports."
"Yes."
June's hand remained twisted in my shirt. Her ear was pressed against my chest.
"Your heart is too fast," she said.
It was the first thing she had said to me that belonged to us.
"It usually is when you have a knife."
The joke escaped before I could judge it.
June made a broken sound that might once have been a laugh.
Her eyes lowered to my sleeve.
Blood had reached my wrist and begun falling from my fingers onto the white edge of her gown.
She touched the old scar across my knuckle, the one she had traced beneath the Grand Fountain, then followed my hand to the fresh blood.
"You always get hurt when you come toward me," she said.
"I keep choosing bad entrances."
Her eyes rose to my face.
This time, they stopped.
"XH?"
I could not answer immediately.
She touched my cheek with both hands as if checking whether the face would remain beneath them.
"My name is XH," I said. "I am here."
Recognition struck her harder than fear had.
She saw NS without his gown. She saw Kitty holding the utility knife far away. She saw the blood running down my arm and the red marks her hands had left across my neck.
Then she remembered the kiss.
"I kissed NS."
Nobody lied to her.
"Yes," NS said.
"I thought he was you."
"Yes."
"And I cut you."
I pressed my palm over the wound.
"You were frightened."
"I cut you."
Her voice broke open.
June began to cry loudly, without the dignity she had protected through the clinic, the disclosure, and every rehearsal. She cried into my chest until she could no longer form a complete sentence. She apologized to NS, to Kitty, to me, and then to people who had not asked for one.
"What did I do?" she gasped. "What did I do to all of you?"
"You became ill," I said. "That is not the same thing."
"I didn't know you."
"I knew you."
"I fought you."
"You thought a stranger had grabbed you."
"I stabbed you."
"And now the nurse is going to be extremely annoying about it."
She shook her head against me, crying harder.
I held her face so she could see that I was not smiling away the truth.
"You don't have to remember me every minute," I said. "I remember enough for both of us."
The campus nurse arrived with TZ and an emergency bag. She took in the blood, the discarded gown, June on the floor, and every frightened witness.
"Pressure on the forearm," she ordered. "Not the wrist. HS, bring me those clean towels. TZ, call the ambulance back and report two patients. One laceration and one episode of acute confusion."
"I am not leaving him," June said.
"You are both going," the nurse replied. "You can argue about seating after I stop him bleeding."
When the nurse tried to separate us enough to wrap my arm, June gripped the front of my shirt.
"XH," she said.
"Here."
"XH."
"Still here."
She repeated my name through every siren approaching the auditorium, each time with the frightened concentration of someone tying a knot before the dark could take it loose again.