??It’s okay to look around the classroom, but never out the window.
??Don’t let anything weird pop into your head.
??If forced to answer a question never start your response with “Um” or “I think.”
Two seats to her left, Cameron Freeman was folding up scraps of paper and attempting to throw them at the back of Billy Dyer’s head (yeah, real cool, Cameron, picking on a kid because he’s deaf), but the paper was falling well short of its target. Zoe wanted to tell Cameron to cut it out, but Zoe didn’t do things like that. It wasn’t that she cared about what Cameron Freeman thought about her—she didn’t—it was merely the fact that if she stood up to him people would notice she was alive, and that was something Zoe tried to avoid at all costs.
“Okay, class,” Mr. Bahr said. “Everyone find a partner.”
Zoe’s stomach plunged. There were few things more heinous than having to find a partner in class. The looking around, the making eye contact, the inevitable rejection. All around her people paired up with the ease of magnet and metal. Even now Zoe couldn’t help but marvel. How did they do it? Were they really as carefree as they looked? Usually, when the class was asked to partner up, Zoe lunged for Emily, her one and only friend. When Emily wasn’t in her class—like third-period science—she simply kept her eyes down and tried to be invisible. Eventually the teacher would pair her up with whoever was left, usually Billy or Jessie Lee Simons, the emo with the turquoise hair and the piercings. But today, as she pondered her defect, her inability to be normal, she found herself staring straight ahead, and that’s when she noticed Harry Lynch, bent around in his chair with one elbow draped on the front of her desk.
“What?” she whispered, when he didn’t look away.
“You just said my name.”
Was he crazy? Why on earth would she say his name? “No I didn’t.”
“You did. First and last.” Harry spoke matter-of-factly rather than with ridicule. “Why else would I be looking at you?”
Zoe felt her cheeks pool with hot, shameful color. It was a good question, which made it all the more humiliating. Someone like Harry would never look at Zoe spontaneously. Harry wasn’t good-looking exactly, but he managed to hide it well by being big and looking more or less like all the other guys who played football. Maybe she had said his name out loud? She did do weird things like that sometimes. Once, in gym class, she’d accidentally started singing out loud (she needed to sing internally to get through the horror of exercising and wearing gym shorts in public). Maybe she was actually as crazy as she thought she was?
Harry opened his mouth to say something else, but before he could, Amber Jeffries was practically sitting in his lap. “Partner, Harry?”
She gave him the kind of slow sexy smile that was both adorable and sickeningly desperate. Harry’s gaze flickered to Amber’s. “Sure.”
As he turned back to face the front, Zoe’s heart started to beat again. Another bullet dodged. Just about another five hundred billion to go.
Until tomorrow.
*
Once, Zoe’s mom had asked her to describe what it felt like, being her. For a heartbeat, she’d considered telling her the truth.
It’s like being anchored to damp sand, she’d imagined saying. Your head is toward the ocean, your ears are wet, and you’re waiting for the next wave. You want to turn and look, to see what’s coming, but you can’t move. So you just lie there and wonder. Are the waves big today? Will they come, tease me a bit, then recede away? Or will they come at speed, dumping on me again and again, filling my nose and mouth with water until my lungs are burning and ready to explode? The awful part is, you don’t know. So you wait, helplessly, expecting the worst.
Zoe had pictured what her mom’s face would look like if she were actually to say these words. And then she’d said, “It kind of feels like being out of breath. You know, a little light-headed, a little fluttery. But it only stays for a few minutes and then it fades away.”
It was bad enough that one of them knew the truth.
4
As she hurried along the hospital corridor, Sonja caught her reflection in the window and winced. She’d overdone the Botox. She knew she’d overdone the Botox. She wasn’t sure why she’d started doing it in the first place, but once she’d started, it had become surprisingly addictive. First her forehead, then the deep lines that bracketed her mouth. Before she knew it she had become utterly expressionless. Now, no matter how she tried, she couldn’t show how she felt. Which, come to think of it, wasn’t the worst thing in the world.
By the time she found Kate’s door, she was a little breathless. “It’s me,” she said, knocking.
“Come in!” Kate smiled. It was the kind of smile that warmed you through. She gave off an almost serene aura of goodness, Sonja thought. Or perhaps it was simply youth? Kate was in her mid-thirties, at a guess. A hundred and fifty years younger than her.
“I hear you have a case for me?” Sonja said.
As a hospital social worker, Sonja had “cases” that varied widely. One day she’d be dealing with a child who’d been admitted with injuries consistent with abuse, the next with a family who’d lost their primary breadwinner in an accident. When she was dealing with a cancer patient, her role was usually more administrative—putting the person in touch with community services, providing assistance filling out forms and dealing with insurance companies. But no two days were the same. Once, it was what Sonja had loved about the job. Lately, the uncertainty of what lay ahead felt unsettling to her.
“I do,” Kate said. “Come in, sit down.”
Sonja did, eyeing the picture on Kate’s desk—of Kate and a man who must have been her husband, judging by their body language. In the picture Kate was sitting in his lap and they both laughed into the camera, heads tilted up, eyes squinting. It was the kind of photo that came with the frame—beautiful people with a perfect life. People who had a lot of mutually satisfying sex.
“I have a single mother scheduled for a salpingo-oophorectomy on Monday,” Kate started. “Alice Stanhope is her name. She has a teenage daughter and no support people.”
Sonja looked away from the photo. “How old is Alice?”
“Forty.”
“Forty?” Sonja felt her eyebrows rise. Most forty-year-olds had spouses, siblings, and friends coming out of their eyeballs. Tennis clubs and social groups providing meals on rotation every night of the week. It was rare to find a person so young without a network to rely on.
“Yes, I’m not sure exactly what’s going on,” Kate said, reading her mind. “She said she doesn’t have any family other than her daughter.”
Kate pushed a file over to Sonja. Sonja opened it and scanned the top page. “How old is her daughter?”
“Fifteen.”