When I got home, though, I had more time to think about what had happened. That wasn’t so good. I didn’t cry or anything, but when I was done with my homework I couldn’t think of anything to do except sit on my bed and feel very, very small. Sometimes you feel like you could shout and scream so loud your lungs would burst, and to the rest of the world it would only be about as loud as a mosquito fart.

Then Nonny came home from school. She came in and said hello to me, and she could tell that I wasn’t having the greatest day ever, and then I told her what had happened and she paused for a moment, but not for too long, and said, “Wow, they must not know very many interesting people at all.”

Then she brought me into her room and we blasted Celtic Woman (her favorite) and danced around with hairbrush microphones.

You may not think that Celtic Woman is good blasting-dancing music.

If you think that, let me tell you something.

You’re wrong.

Especially if you’re singing with Nonny.

X’s and O’s

There are a few reasons I’m different from Nonny. A few reasons why piano doesn’t work out so well for me. Why I’ll always be shorter than her, why my heart was ballooned up way too big when I was born, and why I have to wear hearing aids.

It’s sort of a big bundle of crazy, chaotic, dangerous weirdness that happened when I was born.

You ready for this?

Here it goes.

Picture this:

1. The big tube of blood in your heart—it’s called the aorta—squeezed, pinched, and constricted so blood can’t get through and your heart has to pound harder and harder, growing bigger and bigger until it’s ready to pop like some cheesy love song.
2. Your small intestines in a sack outside your stomach where your belly button is supposed to be, and the doctor carefully pushing them back into place. (Gross, but also kind of totally awesome.)
3. The umbilical cord wrapping tighter and tighter around your neck like a boa constrictor.

Fun times, right? When I was two weeks old they took me in for heart surgery, stretching my arms up above my head so they could go in under my ribs instead of cracking open a two-week-old sternum. I always imagine it like some kind of medieval torture. I still have the long white scar across my left side from where they fixed my heart.

Wanna know why my heart was squeezed like a cat’s head in a toilet-paper tube?

Here’s how Mom and Dad explained it to me when I was seven years old.

It’s like your body is a recipe cooked in your mom’s belly. (I know what a uterus is now, but when I was seven and we were in the middle of a restaurant, they called it a belly.) The Recipe of You has forty-six ingredients. Those ingredients are called chromosomes.