I stare fixedly, carefully at the wall as Charm stands and shuffles through a pile of folders and clipboards on the bedside table. She produces an oversized sheet of plastic and waves it in front of me. “It’s still pretty rad, don’t you think?” Her voice is soft but shaking with some enormous emotion, barely contained. Joy?

I look at the X-ray in her hands. For a long second I can’t tell what I’m seeing; it’s been years since I’ve seen my lungs without the white knots and tangles of proteins inside them. Now there’s nothing but ghostly lines of ribs hovering above velvety darkness, clean and empty, just like the pictures of healthy lungs in Charm’s textbooks.

She holds up a series of smaller photos beside it. Ultrasounds. I see my heart, my liver, my kidneys. A caption in blocky capitals reads Findings: normal.

I stare at the images for two seconds, then three. I blink. “I don’t understand.” My voice is a whisper.

“Zin—the proteins are gone. All the stuff that’s been accumulating in your organs is just…” Charm snaps her fingers. “The doctors checked your identity like four extra times because they were sure you couldn’t be the same girl. They have no idea how it happened.”

She gives a smug little toss of her bangs that makes me ask, “But you do?”

Charm smiles at me with the gleeful enthusiasm that usually precedes a science lecture. “Well, I have a theory. I think when you travel to another dimension—which is a real thing that happened to us, by the way—the laws of physics, of reality itself, bend to match that universe.”

“I thought the laws of physics never bent. I thought that’s why we call them laws.”

Charm sniffs. “Well, maybe they’re more what you’d call guidelines, than actual laws. Anyway, the rules of Prim’s world are different than ours.” My brain, which is still processing the immensity of those clean X-rays, pauses to waggle its eyebrows and say, Prim, eh? “In her world there are wicked fairies and magic knives and probably unicorns. In her world, kisses lift curses.”

I mull this over for another string of seconds. “But not in this one, huh?”

Some of the fervor leaks out of Charm’s face. “No, not in this one. They took about fifty samples and confirmed that your RNA is still fucked. You are still officially diagnosed with Generalized Roseville Malady.”

I picture the rules of this world reasserting themselves over my cells, harsh reality swallowing fantasy. I glance sideways at Primrose and understand that it’s not just the leather jacket that confused me when I first saw her: her hair is an ordinary blond rather than a shimmering, impossible gold; her eyes are blue rather than cerulean; I think she might even have pores. She isn’t a fairy tale princess any longer.

Charm clears her throat and slides the X-rays back into their stack. “But like, this is pretty good. Very good. It’s like the clock is reset.”