“Cora bought a bunch of stuff for me at a secondhand store. I mostly just wear the stuff I inherited from Sara.”

Piper pauses her search, eyeing my clothes. I bury my hands inside the front pockets of the sweatshirt I’m wearing, which reads San Diego in swirly letters. I’ve never been.

“You wear a dead girl’s clothes?”

I try to explain that it’s not that weird. Sara and I had an open-door borrowing policy. Every time I’d visit, I’d go home with an overnight bag filled with half my clothes and half hers.

I take an arguably hideous paisley shirt from Piper’s lap and stuff it in the back of my closet with the rest of the thrift-store atrocities.

“What are you looking for, anyway?”

“Inspiration.”

Piper yanks a formal gown from the depths of the closet and hands it to me. “This is a maybe.”

My fingers run down the satin fabric of the green dress Sara wore to her sophomore homecoming dance. I did her hair in spiraled curls, and Cora took about a million pictures of Sara’s date awkwardly pinning on her corsage, and we all pretended not to notice his fingers “accidentally” brushing her boob. Twice.

“This is it!” Piper squeals. She holds my silicone mask over her face. “I saw people in the unit with these and I thought they were so weird, but for this, it’s perfect!”

“For what exactly?”

“Helloooo. The most iconic Broadway character of all time?”

My brain catches up to her. She’s had some out-there ideas, but this…this is asking for a train wreck.

“Noooo.”

“Yes. The Phantom!”

“Like The Phantom of the Opera phantom?”

“No, like tollbooth phantom. Of course opera phantom.” She grabs the green homecoming dress I’m about to throw into the discard pile. “And I’ll go as Christine!”

I take the mask and hold it up to my face so Piper can see exactly what she’s suggesting.

“You want me to go as a deformed psychopathic hermit to my first party at this school?”

Piper nods.

“It’s social suicide,” I say.

“It’s a stroke of genius!” she says. “Like when you have a zit on your face and you don’t want anyone to make fun of it, so you talk about it first so no one else can.”

I snap the elastic rubber band around my head, feeling the familiar claustrophobia of my hot breath trapped beneath the plastic.

“I’m not dealing with an acne blemish here, Piper.”

“Listen, you show up as the Phantom, it’s like daring people to mock you, and if they do, they’re total losers because you already made the joke. You own it.”

“I own my scars?”

Piper picks up a scarf from the pile of clothes on the floor and slings it around her neck.