Clem didn't look at her. She was talking to Archie, low and steady, the way you'd talk to a horse.
"Archie, this is my medicine. It's like a really fast shot. It's going to pinch, and it might make your heart go fast, and that's okay, that means it's working. You're going to feel better really soon. I'm going to count to three. You can squeeze my dad's hand. Dad."
I got down on my knees on the hot concrete and took the little boy's hand. It was clammy and cold, in ninety-one degrees, and it clamped onto two of my fingers like a vise.
Clem held the auto-injector in her fist, orange tip down, the way she'd been taught since she was four years old. She pulled off the blue safety release with her other hand. Blue to the sky, orange to the thigh. She found the outside of his thigh, halfway between his hip and his knee, through the wet nylon of his swim trunks, and she swung the pen in, firm, at a right angle, until it clicked. I heard the click. I'll hear it the rest of my life.
"One," she said. "Two. Three." She held it. Then she pulled it straight out and looked at the tip, at the orange sleeve that had extended to cover the needle, and set it down on the concrete beside her, and put her palm flat on his thigh and rubbed it in slow circles. "Okay. Okay, buddy. That was the worst part. You did so good."
That was when Verlene screamed.
I don't use that word lightly. It wasn't a yell. It was a scream, the high, long, full-throated kind that stops every other sound in a place, and it stopped every other sound at that pool. The DJ's music kept going for a second, then even that cut off, because the DJ had turned around. Forty or fifty people stopped where they were, in the water and on the deck and at the cornhole boards, and turned toward the clubhouse awning, and what they saw, from where they were standing, was a teenage girl on her knees next to a crying six-year-old, with a used needle on the ground beside her, and the president of their homeowners association pointing at her with her whole arm.
"She stabbed him! She just stabbed him with a needle! Somebody call the police! She injected him with something!"
"It's epinephrine," Clem said. She was still rubbing his leg. She still didn't look up. "He's in anaphylaxis. It's epinephrine."
"You don't know what it is! You don't know what's in that! Get away from him!"