Mom’s always telling me to be patient, to keep listening to myself and it will come. Yeah, easy for her to say. She’s known she wanted to be an interior designer since she was a little girl, like Cole has known he wants to be a photographer or Jordan has known she wants to play basketball.

Sometimes I think about being a magazine editor, but then I think being a poet or writer would be cool, or maybe some type of visual artist, or a historian, or even an astrologist or a thrift shop owner. But I could also see myself as a professor. Or even an astronomer. It would be amazing studying stars, moons, planets . . . the whole universe. I don’t know. At any given moment, I could have a million ideas about who I’m meant to be floating through my head. So what exactly am I supposed to be listening to?

Cole must see the angst on my face because he reaches for one of his hugs. I let him pull me in, and watch Daddy walk past us to the back corner of the elevator, as far away as he can get from Mom.

REX

I turn off the car. Check my phone again. Cole’s posted a new pic of Carli walking into her hospital room with the caption “The strongest girl I know.” She’s looking back over her shoulder, scared.

“You’re okay,” I whisper, tracing the curve of her face with my finger. But her expression doesn’t change.

My heart slumps and I’m out of my truck, hitting the lock button. I have a plan. I’m going to move as fast as I can. So fast I can’t think about where I am.

Full-speed through the parking lot. I mean, my legs are moving so fast in these stiff jeans, I’m sweating. I swear February doesn’t mean shit in Houston.

A minute later my red-and-black Air Jordan 1s hit the curb to the hospital entrance (like what!), and I’m walking toward the doors. Almost there. So close that the sliding glass doors part for me.

Then bam! Here comes the world’s fat ass—thirteen million billion billion pounds—trying to sit down on my chest.

I turn around, walk away from the doors, and slide my right hand down the back of my neck, trying to get rid of the weight. But this hospital is extra heavy. Air is ripping in and out of the very top of my lungs—in-and-out and in-and-out and in-and-out so fast it burns. Feels worse than the final minute of a game I’ve played all thirty-two minutes of, when I’m sure my lungs are about to say, I’m done.