Whatever the reason, the halls of Crossroads High are a lot less daunting with Piper by my side, and I fall back into a familiar rhythm of school—reading and textbooks and long lectures punctuated by short bursts of hallway chaos. I breeze through most of my homework, and before I know it, my sentence is up.

Saturday morning, the day after my official “reintegration” period has ended, Piper sits on my front porch, a can of paint in one hand and her cell phone in the other.

“I’m here to fix your room. Well, your walls, anyway.” She flips the phone to me. “Oh, and I made a playlist for you.”

I read the name of the album.

“Fire Mix?”

“Yep. All the best combustion songs.”

She reaches out to turn up the volume on her phone as I bump her wheelchair up the front step.

“Really? You’re playing this song for me,” I say as Alicia Keys blares into the living room singing “Girl on Fire.”

“Fight fire with fire, right?” She grabs a paintbrush from her backpack and belts the chorus into her makeshift mic. “ ‘This girl is on firrrrr­rrrrr­rre!’ ”

She holds the last note until her face turns red and then takes a small bow in her wheelchair while I slow-clap. She turns the volume down as Billy Joel ticks through the decades of “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

“I had to get that out of my system.” She produces two more paint rollers out of her backpack and holds up a can of paint the same hot pink as her compression garments. “Let’s do this.”

“I should ask Cora and Glenn first,” I say.

“It’s your room, isn’t it?”

“Technically, yes. But still, I should ask.”

Glenn carries Piper upstairs and I almost abort the whole mission when I show them the paint and Cora’s bottom lip trembles. Glenn leans against the doorframe, Cora leaning into him, looking no bigger than one of Sara’s dolls next to his Paul Bunyan–esque frame. Her mind seems like it’s floated elsewhere. She lightly touches the wall.

“Robin’s-egg blue. Sara must have taken a hundred samples from that paint store before she picked this one.”

I run my own fingers across the butterfly wallpaper runner, the backdrop for our many two-person plays and ballets. Part of me wants to preserve this room forever.

Another part—the one I try to ignore—wants to rip it down to the studs.

“We don’t have to paint it. I like the blue,” I say.

“No, no. It’s your room now.” Cora smiles, but it’s missing her usual “everything’s going to be okay” assurance. “Probably should have done this a long time ago.”

Quietly, Cora gathers up the pointe shoes from the shelf in the corner but can’t hide her shock as Piper smears the first long streak down the wall.