“Crow? You okay?” No mumbling now. Allie sounds concerned. On point. Like her practical, everything-is-under-control self.

“Me? Yeah. Fine. Why?” I say, pretending I can will away the surreal things I am sick of seeing. Still, the black blue band around her head bulges up in response to the thrashing and crashing. It’s like a pimple. I cringe, feel my shoulders lurch up toward my ears. It looks like it’s going to pop.

“You just spaced out completely. Petit mal seizures. Ask your doctor about petit mal seizures.”

“No. Shut up. I’m fine,” I say, bent on redirecting her attention to where it belongs, but where she was never good at putting it. “What happened, Al? I had no idea it was this bad . . .”

Which is utter bullshit. If I’d stopped to pull my head out of my own miserable arse for a minute, I’d have seen it. Her mother died. Allie wasn’t there when it happened, like she always swore she would be. And just when she thought she might at least be free to do her own thing, whatever escape hatch she was banking on was taking too long to open even a crack. Long enough for guilt to creep in, for her to see that her father and brothers were eating frozen hot dogs and wiping their arses with pages from the phone book. They needed her now. Allie was pinned beneath that relentless old beast of family duty. Again. You don’t need some sort of foolish tumour-induced psychic power aura vision to know that breaks people. But pleading ignorance is the best mea culpa I can muster.

“It was an accident.” She smiles. The tumult of colour around her head surges and thrashes harder.

Bullshit.

I watch as the pressure builds in the bruise-coloured bulge, and the cobalt sea rocks and roils into whitecaps. In the bottom half of my field of vision, the black soot spot starts to swirl, making me dizzy and nauseous and slightly panicked. I can’t look away. Something’s gonna give. It just needs a shove, but I don’t know how. Until all of a sudden I can see little pink daisies exploding into ribbons of blood-red, streaming from Allie’s wrists, her stomach, her heart.

“I saw Char a few weeks ago,” I squeak. “She said you should watch what you eat over Christmas. And some cryptic shit about sharp daisies and love flowing better than blood.”

“What a psycho bitch.”

“Allie, the pills? What were you trying to do with the razor blade?” The words push past my better judgement as I watch and wait for the air around Allie to respond. “Char wanted me to apologize to you for her.”

Sure enough, she explodes. “She’s a sick little sociopath, you know that. I’m fine. They pumped my stomach and are sending me home tomorrow.”

Then the daisies, the ribbons of red, all disappear as the blue-black dam bursts. The wall that stood between Allie Walker and her damage is swept away in a violent rush of spilling sapphire.