“Because I wasn’t going to add walking to the list of things I lost in the fire.”

I leave out the part about Nurse Linda, with her thick Southern accent and her boobs as enormous as her attitude, trying to make me walk for weeks. I also don’t mention how excruciating those first steps were, the blood rushing to fill veins and capillaries that had lain dormant for months, like someone poured fire straight into my bloodstream and whooshed it downward in a burst of searing life.

“The point is, I believed I could do it, and I believe in you, too.”

Piper looks at me like I’ve grown a second head.

“Could I speak with Ava, please? You know, my glass-is-half-empty friend who throws a kick-ass pity party. Is she available? Because I don’t know this Little Miss Sunshine with rainbows shooting out her butt.”

Piper’s smirk falls the instant the door flings open. She tugs her shirt down as her mom strides into the room, but it’s too late.

Her mom jerks up Piper’s tank top. “On your spine? Seriously? After what the doctors said yesterday and you go stick needles in your spine? Are you trying to kill me? Or yourself?”

Piper tugs down her shirt.

“It’s my body.”

This doesn’t seem like a satisfactory answer to her mom, who starts to yell for someone named Frank, who stumbles into the room with bleary eyes and pillow-tousled hair.

“Look. Just look at what your daughter did to herself now.” She pulls up the shirt again despite Piper’s best efforts to keep it down. He looks at her with vacant eyes and then turns back toward the hallway.

“Wake me when she gets an infection.”

Her mom says it’s time for me to leave. Piper wiggles herself down to her chair and wheels me to the front door. Her mom stands in the hallway, arms folded, and I feel like I’m watching one of Dad’s National Geographic shows where two alpha females are about to embark on an epic battle for the pride lands.

“Life’s not a musical, right?” Piper says as I walk down the ramp, careful not to slip on the dusting of late-winter snow that’s started falling.

“Trust me, Piper. Things are going to work out, I just—”

I turn around, but she doesn’t hear me.

She’s already closed the door.

April 3

I walked for the first time

because someone else died.

Morbid, I know.

But true.

Nurse Linda tried to get me on my feet every day.

"Not today," I'd say.

"Then when?" she'd say.

"When I'm ready."

"I won't hold my breath."

And repeat.

Then, Bobby died.

Screams woke me in the night.

"He stopped fighting," Linda said.

I'd hardly known him.

The mummy next door.

White coats wheeled Bobby away.

A white sheet covered his face.

A woman clutched his "personal belongings."