“I have so many ideas. I have a folder—oh, I should have brought it—I didn’t know we’d be talking about this. Okay, so definitely my eyes first—right? And then there’s this really cool thing I read about where you take donor hair for eyebrow transplants, and it doesn’t look like a real eyebrow exactly, but it’s amazing, and I don’t even know—”

Dr. Sharp holds up his hand.

“Whoa, whoa, slow down, there. Let’s start small.”

He pulls the sagging skin below my left eye up slightly, closing the gap between my bottom eyelids and my eyeballs.

“I’m thinking something like this.”

He hands me a mirror, and I feel like I’m back on picture day, watching time reverse, revealing the old me. I think of all the times I’ve lifted my drooping eyes, a momentary dalliance to make sure I’m still in there.

“It would be like that permanently?” I ask.

“Yes. It would be a fairly simple procedure. We’d graft a small strip of skin from behind your ear to patch this area. You’d be looking at about a week back in the unit, and you’d have your eyes sewn shut like before.”

The last time Dr. Sharp sealed my eyes, I was in a postcoma morphine haze. I remember nurses globbing gel onto my eyes so I wouldn’t go blind. I remember being able to blink after the surgery because I had eyelids again.

Most of all, I remember the impenetrable darkness.

“I could do it again,” I say.

To look more like me, I could do anything.

Dr. Sharp shines a light into my eyes, telling me to look up, down, sideways. Then he calls in a nurse to hold an optometry board for me to read the capital letters. I make it almost to the bottom.

Dr. Sharp turns to Cora now.

“The good news is her eyes are stable. No corneal ulcers. No waning sight. The bad news is, that means a surgery at this stage might be considered an optional procedure, so you’ll need to talk about it.”

“We’ll think about it,” Cora says, her voice tight and quick, so unlike the usual friendly banter she exchanges with anyone with a name badge in the unit.

“Of course,” Dr. Sharp says.

Cora tells me to give her a minute to check out, but from the waiting room I see her talking heatedly with Dr. Sharp, who just went up like a thousand points in my book for going rogue without the express permission of the committee.

I turn my attention to a series of black-and-white photos on the walls from former burn-unit patients, each one rock climbing or swimming or something equally awesome, and each one has a one-word moniker: COURAGE for the ziplining girl with swirling scars up and down her leg. SURVIVOR for the burned boy playing baseball with one arm.