“Is there anything you need?” she says, rubbing her hands with sanitizer, ready to get to the next in line.

They have to ask this. It’s how we got insurance to help us pay for my wheels and the stander that looks like a hospital bed turned on its end. Just one note from the doctor and it becomes a “medical necessity.” I hate the stander. It takes ten minutes to get me up and strapped into it, and then, you guessed it, I have to just stand there for, like, an hour. There’s a tray so I can read or do homework or whatever, but all I ever do is watch the clock. It’s supposed to make me stronger, but I don’t buy it. I think it’s somebody’s practical joke.

“No, thank you. We’re all right,” Mom says a little shakily, and we watch the doctor leave.

“All right, all right, all right,” I say to her back as we roll down the hall. “Right as right can be. Right as rain, thank you, ma’am.”

“That’s enough.”

“What?”

“Don’t be snarky with the doctor.”

“Why? She can’t hear, or if she can, she won’t remember. We never see the same one twice.”

“That’s not the point.”

“What is the point?” I say as we get in the elevator to head back to the van to drive back to school to live the other half of this already long day.

“The point is politeness. The point is courtesy. The point,” she says, then pauses, “is that we’ve just been told you are seizure-free and that is a miracle.”

I let that sink in—the idea of a miracle. You think of it like something you’d see on one of those evangelical TV shows—like if I’d suddenly jumped up out of the wheelchair and started walking while a choir sang “hallelujah.” But I guess Mom’s right. I guess you can have invisible miracles too, brain waves finally smoothing out and leaving me on a calm sea.

Neither of us says anything as she loads me into the van. When we hit the interstate, she runs the cuff of her sweater under her eyes.

“Are you crying?”

“Hush. I’m trying to keep my eyes on the road.”

Later that night at home, I wheel out into the hall and lean way over to make sure there’s no light under Mom’s door. It’s closer to morning than night, and even though I have school tomorrow, there’s one more thing I need to do that’s more important than sleep.