You okay?

Mom asked it while everybody else was talking over the sludgy ’90s music Jenny’s always has playing. The whole team was there, even Coach Wanda. Kit was half listening to Natasha telling a story about Mr. Derringer, Samhattan’s physics teacher, when Mom leaned across the table and said:

Hey. Kit. You okay?

What a question, Kit thought then. What an absolutely insane question. How could she not be okay? She’d hit the game winner not two hours before. She was seventeen. Her best friends in the world were beside her. There was a table full of as much pizza as she could ever eat. If she wasn’t okay then, in that exact moment, would she ever be?

What do you mean? she asked.

But Mom wasn’t a fool. And like the rim never lied, Mom could tell if you did.

Still, Mom didn’t press. She nodded and turned her own half attention to Natasha and the others as they broke out laughing, even as Kit busted up, too, despite not hearing the punch line. Thanks to Mom’s question.

You okay?

Didn’t people know that, whether or not you were okay, the moment they asked if you were, you weren’t? And that it was always better not to ask?

Kit wishes she hadn’t called 911 the first time she had a panic attack. She worries it’s given her a stigma. Do people treat her gently? Different than they do each other? Is Kit…damaged in some way?

She felt it then, again: the greasy but vague touch of anxiety at the base of her neck. It always starts there, a small spot of heat, a dull, unsettling sensation she’s always seen as being piss-yellow. It lives there; a flock of urine-yellow birds with matted feathers that multiply fast when they want to. They came with their own heat, those birds, and while there was Kit’s entire body to attack, they always crawled up the neck first; a straight shot to the head.

Mom squeezed Kit’s hand. A small, quick one. Kit almost pulled away. But Evelyn Lamb had a way of knowing when those birds were peeking above their nest, and Kit felt the heat, mercifully, subside.

That made two close calls in one night, Kit noted. And this fact nearly ignited a third. Kit wondered if it would take a lifetime of game winners to avoid panic forever.

Later, home again, Dad asked the same thing. Mom was already upstairs and Kit stood in the living room, the TV controller in hand, the screen still off.

Kit, he said, his sudden voice like brutish bare hands from the doorway over her shoulder. Everything okay?

Kit turned to face him. Jason Lamb seemed to stumble upon his daughter’s darker moments innocently, whereas Mom always knew. Eyeing him, she thought, again: Why ask something like that on a night like this? Were her parents hoping she’d freak out?

She only nodded.

Yeah, she said. Amazing.

Because it was true.

Dad smiled. He looked up the hall to make sure Mom wasn’t listening, then said: