“Ayo you got a gun on you? Think we gotta stake this,” he said, showing how one we’d erected was wobbling.

“A gun?” I said.

He made a shooting motion.

I was such a noob. A gun was a drill.

“Oh word. Yeah there’s one over there,” I said. “But think he said we just gotta weigh em down with sandbags, we don’t need a gun we got sandbags.”

At dinner that night we ate out in the hallway again, by the window. D doing dick jokes to whoever would listen. E harassing local folks tryna find someone with trees—going through similar withdrawals, apparently.

I was just looking around so content, taking it all in. When I noticed a weird flicker at the corner of my sightline.

I looked up.

A lil bird perched on the chandelier, way up in the atrium.

Flying up, fluttering its wings, bumping into the glass. Confused. Then catching itself, flying in circles some, before returning to its chandelier perch.

Kept doing that.

I went Guys, look, a bird, sorta quietly, sorta to myself.

There were like fifteen people at the big-ass table we were sitting at.

And like fifty other similar tables all around us, in a row. All humming with Intel-related chatter.

No one was listening.

I watched it do the same thing a few times. Fly into the glass, get confused, then return.

Couldn’t figure out how it even got in.

Or how it would fly out.

I wanted to help it.

How could I.

It was so high up, I couldn’t reach that high. A ladder couldn’t, even. And who was to say it would even accept my help, if I tried.

Boss man came over from another table. Said Five minutes boys, gotta mount the last of the TVs by walk-through at 9.

I killed the last of my chicken parm.

Looked back up at the bird.

Realized I couldn’t help it, so just zoomed in on it on my Instagram story, took a video, added a funny caption, and posted it.

5

NEW LEAF

March 2019

“So no. This drug is different,” derm bae explained at our intake appointment, last month. “How dupilumab works is, it’s an antibody. So neither a steroid nor an immunosuppressant: it neither tries to override the problem nor shut it down.”

Derm bae was only three years older than me—I’d stalked her LinkedIn and deduced this from her graduation years—but was already the head derm at UPenn’s dermatology center.

“So what’s happening is,” she continued, “your body keeps flaring up, getting inflamed, bc it thinks a foreign antibody is attacking. Thinks a bad thing is invading. When really nothing is. So dupilumab, since it’s also an antibody, essentially replaces those imaginary, malignant antibodies your system was convinced were attacking, and signals to your body that…No, nothing foreign/bad is invading!”