The week after the disastrous non-kiss, I texted Jack to say I wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t come over. He replied K, which was worse than no reply at all. For two days I did not get dressed or leave my room much. I had to stop Mom from calling Dr. Osterley. I told her I might be seriously ill but she had to respect the fact that I was a teenager with hormonal ups and downs. I said she should consult her book on the adolescent brain. I said did she think it was fair for my emotional life to be public property just because I had cancer. She backed off. Which left me to stew in my room. Which I had to admit had its downside.

In a fit of cooped-up frustration, I pulled out the sketchbook she got for me and started sketching my shirt hanging on the back of the chair. I drew in jagged, careless lines so anyone watching would know it was an idiotic thing to do and my heart was not in it. My heart was back in Jack’s kitchen, obsessively and pointlessly going over who said what when, replaying the stool-spinning scenario to edit out the moment I closed my eyes, expecting something to happen, and the moment I laughed.

Little by little, what I was doing overtook what I was thinking. The pencil scratched into the silence. My thoughts dropped away. All my attention was taken up by the folds of the shirt. They fell from the shoulder seams in soft columns. My job was to brighten their curves and deepen the crevices between them, to give each one its own peculiar shape. A long triangle squeezed in the middle. A tube. A canoe with slanting ripples. The lower edge of the shirt gathered all the folds together and made sense of them. I tried to show this by going over the hemline twice. Tipped my head. Too heavy? Too dark a stripe at the bottom? I erased it and redrew it more gently, compared the shapes again and feathered the shadows so you could hardly tell at what point they turned into light. When I stepped back, there it was: a second shirt hanging in a second, silvery world that appeared to be newly made but might in fact have been there all along.

I found my mother downstairs, slowing to a dignified pace before entering her study. She smiled, not so much at the drawing as at my face.

“Sorry, Mom.” I went up close so she would hug me.

“For what?”

“Nothing. Just sorry.”

The next day I drew Cloud curled up on my bed. She ruined it by turning over. I drew that pose instead until she moved and I had to start again. After lots of attempts, I gave up and rubbed her stomach, thinking about her miniature organs inside, all in perfect working order.