After school, Asad waves for me to join him on the stage when I walk into the auditorium. I take the stairs around the back rather than try to climb up with my compression garments and scars holding my knee joints together like superglue.

A bunch of other people are already standing in a circle on the stage when I slide in next to Asad.

“What’s this?” I say.

“The circle of trust,” he whispers, like he’s uttered sacred words. “We do it every day before practice. Tony says it helps us bond.”

“Tony?”

“The student director. The ‘Welcome to Oz’ guy? Looks like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s taller and more dramatic brother? Anyway, he makes us hold hands, and we all say one thing about someone in the group.”

I roll my eyes, trying to look more annoyed than terrified. I’ve inadvertently walked into a total nightmare.

Tony strides into the middle of the circle, a good foot taller than anyone else, with his arms outstretched as he completes a 360-degree turn. He’s wearing all black again, and I wonder if he changes after the final bell or if his drama-demigod status is an all-day thing.

“The circle of trust,” he says solemnly. “Let us begin.”

He grabs the hand of a girl next to him. She grabs the boy’s next to her, and so on around the circle. I watch the hand-holding wave push toward me, expecting full well that when it hits, the wave will crest, break, and drag me under.

When it reaches me, Asad grabs my right hand quickly, whispers something, and nods for me to hold out my left hand to the boy on the other side of me. So I do.

Only it’s not a hand.

It’s my flipper. My claw. My penguin Frankenhand with my big fat toe sticking out and my fused fingers all clumped together like a flesh-colored oven mitt.

The boy next to me already has his hand out midway when he sees it. When everybody sees it. His fingers hang in the air between us like someone pressed the pause button on my life. Oh, how I wish they would. Maybe some rewind action while we’re at it.

He grabs the hand of the girl on the other side of him instead, who—because fate is just that unkind—happens to be Kenzie, the girl Piper warned me about. She directs her pinch-faced snartiness right at me and my unheld fingers.

“You have to hold it,” she says. “It’s bad luck if you don’t.”

The boy’s eyes flick from me to Kenzie to Tony, then back to my hand again. My skin buzzes up the back of my neck, and I scratch it even though I’m not supposed to, partly to ease the itch, partly to do something with the claw of shame hanging by my side.