Except I don’t have any secret reserves of strength. There’s no amount of conviction or hope or love that can keep my overstuffed heart from stopping or my oxygen-starved brain from going gray.

My hand barely brushes the splinter when my vision turns the final, empty black of a theater screen just before the credits roll. I feel myself falling down, down into the kind of sleep that has no dreams and never ends.

The last thing I hear is my own name, spoken in a voice that sounds like a heart breaking. The last thing I think is how ironic it is, how fucking hilarious, that Charm should spend her life trying to save me, and I should die trying to save her, and both of us would fail.

10

I FIGURE I’M dead. Again.

True, there’s a grayish light glowing through my eyelids and stiff sheets beneath my skin, but I chalk that up to the random sensory misfirings of a dying brain. Ditto for the soft squeaking of orthopedic tennis shoes on waxed floors and the distant beeps of machines. It’s the smell I can’t seem to ignore: hand sanitizer and human suffering. Surely no version of heaven has hospital rooms.

I open my eyes. There’s a paneled ceiling above me. A whiteboard with the name of my nurse and a smiley face written in blue marker. The intrusive chill of oxygen tubing beneath my nose and the prickle of an IV in the crook of my arm. The window is one of those unopenable, industrial affairs, nothing at all like the arrow slit of a castle tower.

I know my regional hospital rooms: I’m in the ICU of Riverside Methodist Hospital on the north side of Columbus.

It occurs to me that one explanation for the seven days I spent trapped in a fairy tale is that I collapsed on the night of my twenty-first birthday and have spent the past week hooked up to an IV, furiously hallucinating about hot princesses and un-wicked fairies. That maybe I’m actually in one of those bullshit Wizard of Oz stories where the girl wakes up in the final chapter and everyone assures her it was all a dream.

But then—why is there a slender splinter of wood held tight in my fist? I press my thumb against my own fingertips, feeling for blood or bruises; there are none.

“Hey, hon.” The words are rough with exhaustion, cracked with relief.

How many times have I woken in a hospital bed to the sound of my father’s voice? How many times have I turned my stiff neck to see my parents perched at my bedside with new worry lines carved into their faces, cardboard cups of watery coffee clutched in their hands?

“Hey.” My voice sounds like it’s coming from inside a rusted pipe organ, a flaky wheeze. “Where’s my Prince Charming?” It’s the same joke I always make when I wake up from my surgeries and procedures. Usually Dad pulls a wounded, “Am I not charming?” face and Mom rolls her eyes and tousles his hair in a way that tells me she, at least, is thoroughly charmed.