“Yeah. Piper got it the worst, obviously. But we all have scars.”

As the surgery date nears on my calendar and the ground outside begins to thaw, I feel more like myself than I have since I woke up. Cora even tells me one night during lotioning hour that I’ve been singing in the shower. I mutter an embarrassed apology, but she just laughs.

“Don’t you dare stop,” she says. “It’s nice to have music in this house again.”

One afternoon in mid-April, Piper and I huddle over a round table in the library during study hall. She’s whizzing through her precalculus homework, and I’m trying to figure out how to write a five-page paper about a five-line sonnet for English, when Asad slaps a flyer down on the table between us.

“Saturday night, ladies. Drama event of the season.”

A girl at the table next to us whispers, “Shhh…”

Piper shushes her back and snaps up the paper, takes one look and pushes it toward Asad, shaking her head.

“I’m not really in a partying kind of mood,” she says. “Especially one at Kenzie’s house.”

Piper hasn’t been in the mood for anything lately. Like yesterday, when a boy in the hall whistled and made some bestiality joke about her bird tattoo, she barely noticed. I mean, she rammed her wheelchair into his calf, but her heart wasn’t in it.

I pick up the flyer. PRESHOW SOIREE. This party could be just the thing to bring back the go-ahead-I-dare-ya, middle-finger-to-the-universe Piper, who would go to the party for no other reason than to screw with Kenzie.

“Sounds fun,” I say.

Piper cocks her eyebrow at me.

“You? Wallflower Ava wants to go to a party?”

I nod as the girl at the other table shushes us again and shoots Piper some serious side-eye.

“It’s your funeral,” Piper says, clearly talking louder on purpose. “Besides, Asad hasn’t told you the worst part yet.”

Asad’s eyes dance and he doesn’t even try to suppress his spirit fingers.

“Costumes!”

After school, Piper explains the annual ritual of the cast and crew party while she rifles through my closet.

Everyone dresses as a Broadway character to compete for tickets to a play at the downtown Eccles Theater. Last year, Piper, Kenzie, and Sage won as dancers from Chicago, with fishnets, black blazers, leotards, and top hats.

“It was epic. Of course, we had an edge since Kenzie’s parents buy the tickets.” Piper pauses to hold up a long-sleeved dress with a high collar. “I’m sorry. You do realize you’re a sixteen-year-old girl with decent C cups, right? Why do I feel like I’m going through the closet of a middle-aged widow?”

I grab the dress and toss it into a growing pile of castoffs.

“It’s not that bad.”

Piper holds up another frock. “Oh, it’s that bad.”