I’m the one everybody liked, Myra Lipinski, oh yeah, Myra, she’s nice, the one that everybody liked and no one wanted to be with. The odd shape. The socks, those socks—well, her parents had accents. The face, unfortunate, with its too small eyes, its too wide mouth. The hair mousy brown, too thin and straight, greasy after half a day, no matter what. Even as a five-year-old: the aunt and uncle who once came to visit, sitting with my mother at the kitchen table, chatting quietly in Polish, and smiling over at me. “What are they saying?” I asked my mother, coming over to stretch myself out across her lap and shyly smiling back at them. “What are they saying about me?” And my mother finally breaking into English to tell me, “They say you look like … your father. And now we are not anymore talking about you.” I lay still in her lap, contemplating the yellow-and-orange pattern of her apron and forbidding myself my thumb, until she crossed her legs and dislodged me.

So. I sold the tickets and I decorated the gym and I helped win the volleyball games and I sang a good alto in the choir and I lent my notes to anyone who asked; and if people wanted to copy from my test paper, I let them do that, too. I did not become bitter. I don’t know why. Maybe I didn’t think I had the right.

After graduation, I stayed here in Ashton, venturing no further than the twenty-two miles necessary to get to Boston College, where I earned my BSN. I went to nursing school because I knew it would be a way for people to love me. And for me to love them, too. This happens in illness. The sad plates of armor separate; the light comes in.

At first, I worked in the intensive care unit. I wanted the challenge and the prestige of working in the hardest place. You’re eating lunch in the cafeteria, wearing your scrubs, your high-tech stethoscope around your neck, a hemostat clipped onto you somewhere, tourniquets tied onto it. You know a long list of lab values cold; you could intubate if you had to; you can rate heart murmurs and evaluate lung status and draw blood and start IVs better than most of the attending physicians. You see a burst of ventricular tachycardia race across a monitor screen and you save the patient and let the doctor know about it when you get around to it. You can give a lot of drugs that nurses on other floors can’t. You can decide when to get certain kinds of tests performed. When you call down to any other department in the hospital and say, “This is ICU,” they pay attention. You come first. When you say stat, it gets done stat.