“I know, I know, you want to know my biggest fear so you can fix me. Well, get your clipboard ready, because here it is: I’m sixteen and I have to start my life over because of a split-second error on the highway. But every time I get close to actually enjoying my new life, you all dig into the past and make me relive it. I just want to move on. And my biggest fear, Dr. Fix-It, is that I never will.”

Turning her back on the group, Piper pumps herself furiously toward the exit, the heavy door banging shut behind her.

16

I find her by the community-center roundabout, streaky mascara dried on her cheeks and the front wheels of her chair teetering precariously over the curb. I slow-clap as I plop down next to her.

“Wow. You will do anything to win therapy points. You should see Dr. Layne in there scribbling furiously on her clipboard.”

The corner of Piper’s lips lift reluctantly, but her eyes stay trained on the ground as she rocks her wheels over the curb until they’re just about to fall, and then snaps them backward.

“Don’t you have things you’re tired of talking about?” she asks.

Across the parking lot, Cora watches us from the driver’s seat of Glenn’s truck, probably trying to figure out why I’m sitting on the curb with a tearstained Piper instead of “recovering.”

“I just can’t believe you were ever friends with Snartface McGee.”

Piper wipes her face with the back of her zebra compression garments.

“Since fourth grade.” Piper turns to me, her eyes almost as pink as her sleeves. “But now she’s erased me, along with the memory of what she did.”

“What did she do?”

Piper continues to stare at the mountains now bathed in pink-hued shadows as the sun goes down behind us. Sitting at the base of her wheelchair, I can see the burns on her neck more clearly, the way they wave upward toward her face like a plume of smoke from a candle.

“This,” she says, pointing to her leg. “Well, technically, the streetlight she hit broke my leg.”

“Kenzie was the one driving?”

Piper nods. “Yeah. Crossed the median. Plowed into a pole.”

She tells me how she and Kenzie used to be inseparable, and how Kenzie had a few too many drinks on New Year’s Eve and crashed driving home. She didn’t visit Piper in the hospital, and when Piper went back to school, Kenzie turned their friends against her and looked right through her in the halls.

“She full-on ghosted me,” she says.

I shake my head in confusion.

“Wait, so if it was her fault, why does she hate you?”

“Who knows? Guilt? I became this constant reminder she didn’t want around anymore.”

The guilt of the healthy. The first time my old friends visited me in the unit, I felt it.