Cora’s earnest eyes search my face, and mine hers. Even in her pajamas with no makeup, she’s beautiful. Mom used to joke that her little brother didn’t stand a chance against Cora’s looks, which lured him all the way up to the city.

I sigh. “Cora, the only way I’m going to survive the next two weeks is if I’m as thick-skinned as humanly possible, and lucky for me, hypertrophic scars are about as thick as it gets.”

Cora’s lips press together again as I ba-dum-ching an imaginary drum set.

“Oh, come on,” I say. “I can either laugh or cry about it, and I’m about all cried out.”

Cora does neither. Instead, she holds my hands, my purply skin particularly alien against hers. At least my right hand still has fingers. Calling the stumpy, clawlike structure at the end of my left arm a hand is unspeakably generous. It’s more of a pincer now—fused fingers opposite a massive thumb that is actually my transplanted big toe.

Cora squeezes my hand—or claw, or whatever it is—tight. “It’s your junior year of high school. Make some friends. Enjoy it.”

I exhale long and slow. Cora doesn’t understand: even my old friends back home didn’t know how to be around me after the fire. Probably because I wasn’t really me anymore.

I doubt many people at this new school are looking for that one special burn victim to round out their squad, either.

So instead of a clan, I have a plan: do everything in my power to disappear. Not like a magic act or anything but more like a melt-into-the-background camouflage. The only way to get through these two weeks of feigned normalcy is to minimize exposure as much as possible—mine and everyone else’s.

“I almost forgot—” I grab my headphones off the desk and sling them over tomorrow’s outfit draped on the chair.

Cora tenses, probably using every ounce of willpower in her five-foot-three frame not to grab them off her perfect ensemble. She hates my headphones almost as much as I love them. Well, need them.

“You and your music,” she says.

I don’t tell her it’s not about the music. Most of the time I don’t even notice what’s playing. I wear them to block out the world.

To help me fade away.

Uncle Glenn stops at my doorway to say good night. Standing there with his signature awkward smile and the top of his nose turning slightly upward, he looks so much like my mom. Sometimes it makes me so sad I can barely look at him. Sometimes I can’t turn away. My mom was beautiful, too, but not in the porcelain-doll way Cora is. Mom’s beauty was more unbreakable—crow’s-feet by her eyes and calluses on her hands.