But I wasn’t really a goner until I turned the page. She was still hot and blond but no longer dead. Her eyes were wide open, blue as June, defiantly alive.

And it was like—I don’t know. A beacon being lit, a flint being struck in my chest. Charm (Charmaine Baldwin, best/only friend) says Sleeping Beauty was my first crush and she’s not totally wrong, but it was more than that. It was like looking into a mirror and seeing my face reflected brighter and better. It was my own shitty story made mythic and grand and beautiful. A princess cursed at birth. A sleep that never ends. A dying girl who refused to die.

Objectively, I’m aware our stories aren’t that similar. Wicked fairies are thin on the ground in rural Ohio, and I’m not suffering from a curse so much as fatal teratogenic damage caused by corporate malfeasance. If you drew a Venn diagram between me and Briar Rose, the overlap would be: (1) doomed to die young, (2) hot, in a fragile, consumptive way, (3) named after flowers. (I mean, look: I have a folklore degree. I’m aware that Sleeping Beauty’s name has ranged from Talia to Aurora to Zellandine (do not Google that last one), but the Grimms called her Briar Rose and my name is Zinnia Gray, so just let me have this one, alright?). I’m not even blond.

After that birthday I was pretty obsessed. It’s one of the rules for dying girls: if you like something, like it hard, because you don’t have a lot of time to waste. So I had Sleeping Beauty bedsheets and Sleeping Beauty toothpaste and Sleeping Beauty Barbies. My bookshelves filled with Grimm and Lang and then McKinley and Levine and Yolen. I read every retelling and every picture book; I bought a DVD set of the original Alvin and the Chipmunks run just to watch episode 85B, “The Legend of Sleeping Brittany,” which was just as awful as every other chipmunk-related piece of media. By the time I was twelve, I’d seen a thousand beauties prick their fingers on a thousand spindles, a thousand castles swallowed by a thousand rose hedges. I still wanted more.

I graduated high school two years early—another one of the rules for dying girls is move fast—and went straight into the Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology at Ohio University. Seven semesters later I had an impractical degree, a two-hundred-page thesis on representations of disability and chronic illness in European folklore, and less than a year left to live.

Dad would cry if he heard me say that. Mom would invent some urgent task in her flower beds, tending things that weren’t going to die on her. Charm would roll her eyes and tell me to quit being such a little bitch about it (it takes a particular kind of tough to pick the dying girl to be your best friend).

All of them would remind me that I don’t know exactly how long I’ve got, that Generalized Roseville Malady is still largely unstudied, that new treatments are being tested as we speak, etc., etc., but the fact is that nobody with GRM has made it to twenty-two.