I squeal as the cold sends shock waves through my whole body. The tile is icy against my bare feet. Shivering, I grab the shampoo and work it through my hair. The water isn’t the usual cold; it’s more like alpine snowmelt cold. Or maybe my dehydrated body is imagining things.

Still, it feels good. I can almost hear my skin slurping it up. I lather everywhere and rinse, paying special attention to the IV site. It’s obviously infected. I’ll ask Mom to take a look tonight, see if I need an antibiotic.

But right now I have to hurry, leave the house before Mom gets home from work and tells me I’m too sick to go to practice.

I don’t often use conditioner in my hair, but the knots are so bad that I have to. As I finger-comb, strands of hair drop to the tile and whirl away into the drain. The more I comb, the more hair comes out—and more and more.

I’ll worry about that later, because I’m already so late. Coach will make me shoot extra three-pointers tonight for missing an hour, but I don’t mind. My shooting has been weak from outside the arc this year—down to 36 percent lately, after shooting 40 percent my junior year—and I hate being weak.

Back in my bedroom, I start to squeeze into a clean sports bra. I brush my left breast with the back of my hand and gasp, flinching away from myself. It felt like touching a stranger. The skin against my hand was cold and limp, like a deflated basketball.

Carefully, slowly, I run trembling hands over my deflated breasts, my stomach, around my thighs to my butt. Without the ice-cold water and soap providing a distraction, the difference is obvious. I am thinner. Too thin. A wisp of a girl.

I must have lost ten pounds or more in the last twenty-four hours.

“Mom?” I whisper. Panic edges into my chest, and my legs twitch as if to take flight. Calm down, Paige. You’re a warrior. You can handle anything.

I plunk naked onto my bed and stare at nothing, the wrongness too heavy in my head to ignore any longer. In my peripheral vision, the red digits of my basketball alarm clock stare back. I turn my head to take them in fully, just looking for something familiar and bright and solid.

And I notice it, the thing I didn’t see when I first woke up. Beneath the time stamp, in much smaller letters, is the date: Mar 13.

I’ve been asleep for six days.

Suddenly I’m noticing other things too. The stale urine reek coming from my sheets. My ceiling fan, which is always, always on, perfectly still in the space above me. And barely audible but steady and overwhelming now that I’ve detected it, the sound of birds. So many birds, squawking, flapping, screeching.