Piper hoists herself back into her wheelchair and scrapes at a half-torn wallpaper remnant with her fingernail.

“So why did you even come back at all?”

I check the door to make sure no one’s eavesdropping. “Guilt, I guess. Cora’s on a one-woman quest to make me a normal teenager again. She’s probably only letting me paint this room because she has a magazine clipping somewhere titled ‘Redecorate Your Way to Healing.’ ”

“Okay, pop quiz,” Piper says. “In the last two weeks, did you battle with inadequacy and self-loathing?”

“Check.”

“Did you feel like everyone in the school was talking about you and staring at you?”

“Check.”

“And did you compare yourself to others and always come up short?”

“Check.”

Piper raises her hands high above her head, her fists pumping with the paintbrush still in one, so little flecks of pink paint splatter everywhere.

“Congratulations! You’re a normal teenager.”

I roll my eyes. Across the room, I catch my reflection in Sara’s curio cabinet. The plastic sheeting distorts me even worse in the glass.

“It’s not the same, and you know it.”

She wheels herself backward to admire our paint job.

“Well, that looks just terrible.” The paint is drying a little less shockingly bright, but the overall effect is that an erratic Easter Bunny couldn’t decide between marshmallow-Peeps pink and robin’s-egg blue.

When I ask Glenn if Cora wants to see, he says she’s already gone to bed, so I tuck the single remnant of butterfly trim I managed to save into my desk drawer.

Glenn carries Piper back downstairs, where we nuke popcorn and brave the cold to escape the paint fumes. Piper wheels her chair to the edge of the in-ground trampoline and lowers herself down to the black surface. I try not to bounce too much as I lie down, the familiar sway beneath me. I’ve never been out here without Sara next to me. Sun in our faces in the summer. Snow angels in winter. Trading secrets, making plans.

Funny how when your secret keeper is gone, all those dreams and conversations vanish, too.

I block the light from the house with my hand so I can find the familiar configurations in the sky above me. I point out the North Star, and the dipper part of the Big Dipper, just like I used to with Sara when we’d camp out on the tramp.

“I learned in middle school that the stars we see are already dead,” Piper says, munching popcorn. “Which is depressingly awesome.”

Dad and I used to stare up at the sky just like this in our backyard. The stars were easier to see back then from our remote spot of the world.

“It’s more like we’re seeing the stars the way they once were,” I say. “Like, if a star is one hundred light-years away, we’re seeing the glow from a century ago.”