“Is that why your mom was crying?” I don’t dare mention that her eyes betray her, too, for fear I’ll go the way of the picture frame.

Piper laughs, not like ha-ha funny, but more like an isn’t-life-a-kick-in-the-pants, cut-you-open-and-squeeze-lemons-in-the-wound kind of way.

“She hasn’t stopped crying since the crash. Mom cries and cleans. Dad drinks. Everyone has their inebriation of choice.”

I wheel myself to the foot of her bed.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’ve got my coping strategies, too.” She smiles for the first time since I got here. “Close the door.”

Piper leans forward on her bed, her arms wrapped around her waist, trying to pull up her shirt. “Help me.”

I lift the back of her shirt, revealing two feathery, rainbow-hued wings on each shoulder blade and a long line of black letters that start at the first vertebrae on her neck and run all the way down to two little pelvic-bone divots in the small of her back.

“Did you write that?” I ask.

Piper looks up at me, annoyed.

“Did you even listen to my Fire Mix? It’s the main line from that Atticus song—my anthem?” She arches her back slightly so the wings move with her shoulder blades. “I’m officially a phoenix.”

She tells me how Asad took her to a tattoo parlor after school yesterday. A niggling feeling works its way into my chest, and I’m not sure if I’m more jealous of Asad for going with her or of Piper for hanging out with Asad.

“I would have gone with you.”

“Except you don’t drive. And I distinctly remember you saying that you would never intentionally scar your body. Besides, Asad’s such a chump, he’ll do anything for anyone,” she says. “So what do you think?”

I touch the warm pink skin around the ink.

“I think it looks painful.”

“I’ve been through worse,” she says. “It’s good, though, right? Now even if I can’t walk, I can fly.”

“You’re going to walk.”

She flinches slightly when I touch the wing of the phoenix.

“You have to walk because I’m going to get up on a stage, and you’re going to give me a standing ovation.”

She cranes her neck to look at me.

“Someone’s been drinking the BS therapy Kool-Aid,” she says. “Next you’ll be telling me you’ve found your new normal.”

I kneel on the floor, picking up the biggest shards of glass with my pincer hand and dumping them in the trash.

“Not yet. But for the first time in a long time, I hope it even exists.” I smooth the volleyball picture on Piper’s desk. “I had to learn to walk again, too, you know. After the coma and after they plucked off my big toe. Both times, I wanted to give up. Know why I didn’t?”

“Because your spine wasn’t broken?”