Verlene lunged down and grabbed Clem by the upper arm and pulled. Clem's hand came off Archie's leg. She didn't fight it. She just went where she was pulled, a foot or two across the concrete, and then caught herself on one hand and twisted around and said, perfectly level, "Ma'am, please don't touch me. He needs to lie down. He needs to lie flat with his legs up. Dad, lay him down."
I laid him down. I took my wet towel off the back of a lounge chair and rolled it and put it under his ankles to raise them, the way the action plan in Clem's pouch says to, the way we'd practiced on stuffed animals and then on each other, because if the blood pressure is dropping you want the blood in the middle of the body, not pooled in the legs. Archie lay there looking up at the underside of the awning with his chest going fast and shallow, and his grandmother stood over him, and over my daughter, with her phone already out.
She had picked up the sloth pouch. I didn't see her do it. One second it was on the concrete by Clem's knee, unzipped, with the second carrying tube still inside it. The next it was in Verlene's left hand, clutched against her stomach, and her right hand was holding her phone to her ear.
"Yes. Hello. I need police at the Meadowlark Commons pool. On Sumac and 151st. A teenage girl just injected my six-year-old grandson with a needle, some kind of drug, some kind of narcotic, she carries them around in a bag, I've reported her before to the Association, and I want her arrested. Yes. Yes, he's—he's on the ground, she did something to him. I have the bag. I have it right here. It's—" She held the pouch up close to her face, and squinted at the label on the tube, and read it out loud, slowly, in a voice everyone around her heard. "Epi. Epi-neph-rine. I don't care what it says, it's a needle, she stuck a needle in a child. Send the police. Yes. I'll hold."
I heard every word of it. So did the forty or fifty people standing around the pool. So did Yoshiko Prosser, a retired middle school science teacher from Fescue Court, who was sitting in a lounge chair ten feet away under a straw hat the size of a satellite dish, and who had been, for reasons she'd later explain to a county prosecutor as "an instinct you develop after thirty-one years of eighth graders," holding her phone up and recording since Clem had first crouched down.
"Verlene," I said. "Look at him."
Because something was happening to Archie. Something good. It had been maybe ninety seconds since the injection, and the squeak at the end of his breathing was softer. His color, which had gone a bad grayish white around the mouth, was coming back pink. He was shaking, a fine trembling in his hands and his jaw, which is the epinephrine, the adrenaline doing exactly what adrenaline does, and his heart was going so hard I could see the pulse jumping in his neck above the welts. But he was breathing. He turned his head and looked at Clem, and said in his small hoarse hallway voice, "My heart's going really fast."
"That's the medicine," Clem said. "That's how you know it's working. You're doing great. Can you breathe a little better?"
He nodded.
"He's fine," Verlene said, into the phone and to the crowd at once, as if that settled something. "See? He's fine. He was fine before she touched him. He was just coughing."