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“I guess I just wanted to tell you that I hope Layla makes it okay,” she says, her hand on the doorknob. “And I hope you don’t.”

She’s gone before I can tell her I understand why she feels that way, and honestly I’m learning to adjust to the fact that I might die.

As long as Shanna goes first.

thirty-five

She won’t go easily, my sister. She wants me to see what I’ll be missing without her and so as I descend into sleep she sends me Isaac, one of her memories tucked away that I didn’t get to take part in.

“Hey,” he says, the dark branches of a tree cast across his face in the moonlight. “You’re up late.”

“You texted me,” I remind him, crossing my arms over my then-unscarred chest, trying to replicate anger when I’m actually elated.

“Didn’t wake you up though, did I?” he asks, in a way that says he already knows the answer.

“No,” I admit, stepping closer so that he puts his arms around me, feels me shivering in the chill. He slides his jacket off and I take it gladly, listening to the old leather creak as it settles around me, adjusting itself to the fit of a new body.

“What’re you doing up?” he asks, lighting a fresh cigarette.

“Reading Shakespeare,” I answer, and he snorts, choking on a puff. “What? I’ve got a test on The Tempest tomorrow. What are you doing up?”

“Not reading Shakespeare,” he says, and steps closer to me, the exhale of smoke surrounding us both.

“You should try it,” I say, but I don’t know that the Bard holds any fascination for me in this moment either. All I want is Isaac, the play of his eyes over mine, the pull of my body toward his.

“Make me,” he says, and I lean forward, whispering a line into his ear, my hands sliding over his chest to follow the lines of his tattoos up to his mouth.

“‘This thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine,’” I say, sliding my fingers through his hair and pulling his mouth down to mine.

“Totally yours,” he says, right before our lips meet.

Karen wakes me up with dinner, her face the stiff flat line of a number five on the pain scale.

“I can’t get a hold of your case worker,” she says. “Power lines are down everywhere. Your parents will be coming in the morning.”

I poke the straw through my juice box.

“I’m not letting you out of this room,” she says.

“Good call,” I tell her, and chomp into a granola bar.

I thought she’d leave, but she settles onto my couch, measuring the depth of the snow on the ledge with her hand. It’s at least five inches, and that’s just what made it under the eaves to my sill.

“Layla’s in recovery,” Karen says, real quiet, her words almost not reaching me.

“Thanks for telling me.”

She doesn’t say anything else, so I start eating, trying to fill the empty hole left behind after I dumped everything I had onto Nadine.

“Why’d you do that?”

I don’t answer. My logic doesn’t need defending, and she would despise my goals in any case. Karen sighs and gets up from the couch, pulling the blood pressure cuff off the wall behind me. “Arm.”

I lift it, still eating with the other hand. Karen makes a notation in her laptop, then takes my temperature.

“Fever’s going down,” she says. “Figures.”

“So what was causing it?”