Terry (who is technically a physical therapist) has his arm around me in the picture. He used to come in with all his medieval torture devices to make sure I didn’t heal like a human Shrinky Dink. He’d strap my arms into “the airplane,” splaying me out like a taxidermied pheasant in flight.

“PT: pure torture,” I say.

Piper tosses the frame into my lap. “Well, you look pretty happy here.”

In the picture, I’m smiling huge. I was leaving after more than four months of imprisonment. No more dressing changes in “the tank,” where nurses pried off my dead skin. No more screams in the hallways. No more Nickelodeon on loop. No more poking and prodding. I was going home.

Turned out home was as unrecognizable as my face.

“I was an idiot,” I say.

I hold up both pictures—the one of me encircled by my parents, and the one of me surrounded by professionals trained to keep me alive.

“Ava Before the Fire, and Ava After the Fire.” I look at me on the stage as a normal teenager. “I don’t even know this girl anymore.”

Piper nods.

“One second you’re loving life, and then you cross a little yellow line on the road and bam!” Piper slams her palms together. “Goodbye, walking.”

“Or an electrician puts a faulty wire in your wall before you’re born and sixteen years later, your life burns down.”

I lie back on my pillow and swat at the Native American dream catcher I hung above my bed a few months back.

Piper nods to the round web of string and feathers tasked with catching all my nightmares. “Bad dreams?”

“Yeah.”

“Me too. Dumb stuff like crashing on my bike. Layne says it’s my brain’s way of working out trauma in a familiar context, or some psychobabble.”

“Yeah, I get those.” I fail to mention that I also dream I’m facing down the flames again. I feel the heat. Taste the smoke. See my dad rushing through the fire.

Then there’s the dream where I’m me Before, jumping on the trampoline with Sara, or helping my mom weed the garden. No face full of scars. No flipper hand. No missing ear.

I don’t know which is worse. When I wake from the nightmares, relief washes over me because the fire isn’t real.

But with the dreams of Before, the nightmare starts when I open my eyes.

Piper takes the lid off a shoebox jammed to the brim with cards, opens the top one, and reads out loud:

“ ‘We have been so touched by your bravery and wish you a speedy recovery.’ ”

She sticks her finger in her mouth, making a gagging noise as she holds the box over my trash can.

“May I?”

I grab the box before she can chuck it.

“Cora thinks they inspire me.”