Piper’s room is as loud as she is. A hot-pink-and-zebra bedspread contrasts the lime-green shag rug. Fuzzy neon throw pillows line her bed, and fuchsia lava wiggles in blobby waves in a lamp on her desk.

Piper pulls her body out of her chair and onto the bed, her limp legs following reluctantly as she grabs them one by one and flops them onto the bright bedspread. When I try to help her, I notice her cast-free right leg.

“You got it off!”

Piper shrugs and swats me away.

“Forget about my stupid leg; you were about to tell me the best part about the audition,” she says. “Is it about your boy toy? You still haven’t told me his name, by the way. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

I plop myself in her empty wheelchair, rolling back and forth with my legs, grinning wildly. I tell her about the surgery while she thumbs through a health-and-fitness magazine on her bed.

“Haven’t you had like twenty?” she says, flipping the pages loudly.

“Yeah but this one’s cosmetic—to fix my eyes.”

I pull up the corners of both eyelids. Piper purses her lips as she scrutinizes my face.

“Sounds pricey.”

“It is. And the craziest part is, I think Cora and Glenn sold Sara’s dolls to pay for it.”

Piper lies back on her pillows, focused on the ceiling instead of me.

“Sounds like everything’s coming up Ava.” She turns to me, her eyebrows furrowed. “Where’s your wig?”

“I don’t need it anymore. That’s what I’m telling you. This surgery is what I need.”

Piper turns back to the ceiling, nonplussed. Shouldn’t she be excited? She’s the one who pushed so hard for me to do the play.

A glint of light catches my eyes, and I notice pieces of glass in the corner of her room. I pick up a pointy shard, and the remnants of a smashed picture frame along with a picture of a volleyball team crumpled below the wheel of the wheelchair. In it, Piper stands front and center, smiling, burn-free on two legs.

She watches me pick through the debris, and I notice again the pink puffiness around her eyes.

“What happened?”

She shrugs. “Little setback at physical therapy.”

I hold up the mangled frame.

“This doesn’t seem like a little setback.”

Piper reaches out to grab it, almost toppling off her bed.

“Okay, big setback, then. Massive, colossal setback. Is that what you want to hear?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

“It’s fine. I’m fine. I just don’t need you going all Spanish Inquisition about it. But if you must know, I spent yesterday trying to walk. And failing. And listening to doctors tell me my temporary paralysis might not be so temporary.” Piper scrunches a shaggy pillow into a ball. “Stupid doctors don’t know their butts from their elbows.”