Primrose looks at Charm through her lashes. I see her eyes trace the stubborn line of her chin, the defiant square of her shoulders. “I—yes. I would like that.” Charm gives her a watery, puffy-eyed smile, and Primrose smiles back, and I’m torn between rolling my eyes at them and crying some more.

Primrose unglues herself from Charm with an almost audible snapping sound and turns to me, that silly smile still in place. “And what about you? What will you do?”

I open my mouth to answer, but nothing comes out. I just stare back at her, jaw loose, feeling all those galaxies of possibilities spinning around me. I’ve never thought about the future. I never had one.

Charm’s hand finds mine and squeezes. I squeeze back. “I don’t know,” I answer, and it’s the simple, glorious truth.

11

IT TAKES ME about three weeks to figure it out.

I spend the time bouncing between home and the hospital and Charm’s place. I don’t actually need to be in the hospital. The doctors tell me the first few globules of protein have appeared in my organs, but I still feel better than I have in years, and there’s still nothing they can do but hand me some steroids and suppressants to slow it down. Mostly I think they just want to continue poking and prodding at me. They keep scheduling me for more samples and tests and biopsies, followed by interviews with panels of doctors whose attitudes have moved from baffled to ambitious, as if they’re seeing themselves presenting their findings to packed lecture halls, using laser pointers to circle my miraculously empty lungs. I should be worried about transitioning from dying girl to lab rat, but I can’t seem to be worried about anything. And I already know—in a wordless, formless way—that I’m not sticking around.

Between appointments I’m mostly at Charm’s place, which is conspicuously less disastrous than it used to be. There are even curtains on the windows now, instead of towels held up with binder clips; I would worry about what this means in terms of how hard she’s falling for Prim, except that Prim seems to be falling just as fast. The first time I show up she tells me about the Swiss Army knife Charm gave her with a degree of sappiness generally reserved for bouquets or diamond rings. “It’s mine! Charm says I don’t even need to hide it!” I can’t believe how much I missed those exclamation points. “It’s a tool and a weapon!”

“Yes, but remember there is no dueling in Ohio, for any reason.” Charm says this with the peculiar emphasis that indicates there was another Incident. There’s already been problems with a bank teller who didn’t use her proper title and the HVAC guy who tried to give Prim his number and wound up with a nosebleed. “What should you do if you get in trouble?”