Asad wags his finger at me.

“Not so fast. Cynthia Chang just found out she got mono for Valentine’s Day, so they’re holding last-minute reauditions for Glinda.”

“As in Glinda the Good Witch. The beautiful, angelic fairy? You’re kidding, right?”

Asad shakes his head while we gather painting supplies, but Piper stares at me.

“Not everyone has a voice like yours, Ava,” she says.

“Or a face,” I say.

“We’re not talking about your face.”

Asad closes the curtains, eclipsing the make-believe audience.

“ ‘Everyone deserves the chance to fly,’ ” he says quietly, almost to himself, before he realizes Piper and I are both staring at him. “My favorite line from Wicked. Gah, how have you not seen that?”

A few of the paintbrushes slip through the gap between my toe-thumb and my fused fingers. They hit the ground like pickup sticks as I try to get Asad and Piper to see this idea is a nonstarter, no matter how good it felt to sing again.

“Life is not a musical, okay?” I say. “I can barely look in the mirror, and you’re saying I should get up on a stage in front of the whole school?”

Piper reaches out and picks up the paintbrushes for me.

“I’m saying the same thing I was about that bonehead photographer,” she says. “The fire didn’t take your voice. So use it.”

March 27

Nobody tells me my parents are dead for two weeks.

Buried while I slept.

"We needed you to fight," a nurse says. "We were afraid you'd give up if you knew."

She's right.

I do.

I fade away.

Away from the truth.

Away from a world

with no parents.

Cora chatters by my bed.

Nurses ask me questions.

I talk only when I have to.

They want me to look at my face.

Not yet.

They want me to walk.

I'm not ready.

They want me to say where it hurts.

Everywhere.

Nurses change me

wash me

manage me.

But I'm already gone,

tucked deep inside my broken body.

A dying star

collapsing.

My voice feels broken, too.

It's not.

I just can't find the words.

20

Piper and Asad take turns all week pointing out the audition list hanging outside the auditorium door.

On the last day of sign-ups, Piper does her best chicken impression with her hands tucked into her armpits to make wings. “Bok, bok, bok.”

“Nice,” I say. “I don’t see you trying out.”

She puts away her wings.

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“It just is.”

“So it’s not because you think it’ll bug Kenzie to have me in her play and you’re using me as a pawn in your feud?”

Piper stops in the middle of the hallway, eliciting a dirty look from a boy who nearly trips over her wheelchair. She flips him off.