What if I wasn’t alone?

Alone with missing chromosomes and a capital-S Syndrome?

No. No, that thought could go right back out of my head. It didn’t make sense anyway. I wasn’t alone. Not even close. I had two people right in this very room who knew every bit of me and loved me and stayed by me always. They were all I needed.

No, Nonny’s baby was going to be tall and make friends the way her mom did. No needles, no surgeries. Nothing wrong, nothing missing.

See that, Cecilia? I said silently. Can you hear that tiny, squishing heart? You won’t let anything bad happen to that little protostar in Nonny’s belly, will you? Our deal will work. It has to work.

That tiny, squelching heart would keep on squelching for as long as I had anything to say about it.

Audacity

On Monday morning I woke up before my alarm.

Today was the day to be audacious.

I did my best not to fidget and rush too much. Even still, my mom said, “What’s with you today, girly, you got ants in your pants?”

“I’m just in a hurry to get to school,” I said.

I’d told Mom that I needed to get to school early that morning so I could work on a project with a friend. I think Mom was excited that I was doing something with a friend in the first place, so she didn’t ask too many questions.

Technically what I told her wasn’t a lie, but I still felt sort of guilty about it.

Before we loaded into the car, when Mom wasn’t looking, I swiped the chocolate frosting from the pantry (the store-bought kind I eat with graham crackers, not my mom’s good homemade stuff) and dropped the container into my backpack. Talia was bringing the other supplies.

When we pulled up to the school, I said a quick-as-a-rabbit goodbye to Mom and ran inside.

Talia was already there. Waiting for me by her locker.

By her left foot, she had a big green bucket full of sand and two little green shovels. And wonder of wonders, she grinned when she saw me. That made me grin, too.

“Ready?” she said.

I pulled the chocolate frosting out of my backpack. “Oh yes.”

We’d picked early morning because we knew we’d be alone. The teachers were in meetings or in their classrooms. None of the other kids had come in yet. We were alone in the hallway, which was exactly what we needed to be.

We looked both ways, like we were crossing the street, and when we were absolutely positively certain nobody was there, we dashed to the smelly locker of Dustin Pierce. The big bucket of sand Talia was carrying didn’t even slow her down because she was so strong. She could have arm-wrestled anybody in our class and she would have won. Maybe even Ms. Trepky, although I had a feeling Ms. Trepky was much stronger than she looked.