I was wary at first because it was her, but she and Kaley had things in common. So, I began to relax and accept that maybe Emily needed a friend after all she’d been through just as much as I did.

But with a new friend as blunt as Emily, it was like having a mirror held up to me at all times. If my hair was bad, her face would make sure I knew it. If I smelled like a three-day-old sweater, she’d fish a perfume out of her purse and spray it at me when I wasn’t looking.

“I’ll do your makeup for graduation,” Emily said, tapping her long nail against her chin. “You’re basically the smartest student in our school. You need to look the best.”

“You can’t dress me up if you’re not coming,” I decided. “We go together, dressed up, or I go alone and get to dress myself.”

Emily let out a loud, throaty sound and a few heads turned our way from other tables. “They’re only giving me a participant’s graduate certificate out of pity. I’m not really graduating. It’s humiliating, and I’m not going.” She clanked the spoon against the edge of her mug after she stirred it. “I don’t need to graduate anyway. My grandmother left me a ton of money for when I turn eighteen, which is in like three weeks.”

“Seriously?” No wonder Emily had been buying me so much stuff; lipstick, clothes, false eyelashes I’d never wear…

“Yeah. My parents tried to access it a couple of times while I was half-dead or whatever, but since I wasn’t fully dead, the lawyers wouldn’t release the funds. Like, who does that to their own kid?” Emily shook her head and guzzled back her drink, but she kept talking the second the mug detached from her lips. “So now I have all this money and I don’t know what to do with it. Mostly, I want to get away from my parents. My therapist said they’re the cause of a bunch of my problems, and since I can’t change them, I have to change myself, or something stupid like that.” She rolled her eyes. “Anyway, now I’m stressed about having all this money.”

Kaley’s eyes flickered over to mine. “Aw,” she said. “That’s a rough problem to have.”

I stifled a smile.

“Buy a house,” I suggested. “It’s a good investment.”

“Well yeah, that’s what I thought. I have enough for a down payment, but I’d still need to get a job to cover the mortgage payments,” she grunted, “and who would hire the high school drop-out who was in a coma for a hundred years?”

“You weren’t a drop-out,” Kaley said.

My gaze drifted to my coffee as the girls chatted. Neither of them knew that this was my third cup today and that I’d sneak another few cups at ten p.m. once everyone had drifted off to their own rooms to go to bed. I knew the science of caffeine and how it was affecting my body these last weeks. I’d known how that would play out even before my hands had started shaking and my thoughts had started spinning.