JOANNA DEMKIEWICZ

Sunday 
I am sixteen and have been told not to worry. The nurse Tracy explains how to use the morphine button. I simply press. Pressing the button feels like playing god. It’s red like Red Delicious and catches slightly every time I press. Click-k. Absence of pain. 
 	Tracy tells me to call her when I need to use the bedpan. To call her, I press another button. My hands are free for button pushing, otherwise I am completely immobile, with four IVs anchoring me to the floor of the Intensive Care Unit. My left arm is the Main Event. It’s wrapped in gauze and elevated onto a side table next to my bed. My hospital gown is as thin as an eyelid, and my nipples poke out like finger guns. This is my new look, and as I’ve always been taught, you have to work with what you have.  
 	I am told that I am at a teaching hospital, which means that baby-faced doctors-in-training randomly invade my corner. They look like they are my age, like they just put on a costume and messy hair. But I know they are smarter than me. They have a purpose in life. Each time they barge in, the doctor ushers everyone around my bed, and they discuss My Rare Condition. If Tracy is checking my IVs, she is asked to leave; there’s not enough room. Some of the students ask questions. Many of them are thrown off by my age. “You’re the best-looking patient in the ICU!” more than a couple tell me, like we are old friends. One of them tells me we have the same name. “Ryann,” she says slowly, pointing to her chest like she is speaking to a chimpanzee, or a baby. Eventually they always shuffle off, and I follow their voices to the next patient, and the next room, until I can only hear the beeping from my heart monitor. The thing is, I haven’t been able to look in a mirror. 
 	Tracy tells me I’m on a “liquid diet” because of all the drugs I’m on. We play a game where I ask if a particular food item is on the menu. 
 	“Hamburger.” 
 	“Nope.” 
 	“SpaghettiOs.” 
 	“I don’t think so.” 
 	“What about… marshmallows.” 
 	Tracy’s eyebrows squish. “I’ll have to check.” 
 	I ask Tracy what she eats, and I’m confused about her hours. “When do you leave work?” I ask, after she tells me her favorite flavor of the hospital cafeteria Jell-O is cherry. She says she has twelve hour shifts. Sometimes after a shift, she’ll walk across the highway to Just Nailz and get her acrylics touched up, and then fall asleep in the chair while getting her feet done. I imagine the women there placing a blanket across her chest after her chin bobs to her sternum. I ask her when was the last time she did that. She says last week. I ask her what color her toes are. She says Georgia Peach. 
 	When my mom comes during visiting hours, I ask her to bring nail polish next time. “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, I think it’s called,” I tell her. “Ok,” she says, but I can tell that she won’t. My nails are bare because of my upcoming dance recital—no color on our fingers or toes is allowed, even nude. I realize, now, that I will not be there, because I missed rehearsal yesterday, and I will miss tomorrow, too. This means I can decorate myself with fire. 
 	My mom has recently checked into the Ronald McDonald House, and her face is oily, slippery. Her boss has let her take all of her vacation time at once so she can be close to me, instead of driving back and forth. She grabs my free hand and tells me about her new temporary home. There are “no clowns” and she has housemates—other families with terminally ill or critically sick children. It’s fifteen dollars a night per guest. Someone made eggs and bacon this morning in the shared kitchen area, and one mother did yoga in the common room. My mom says that she tried to relax but instead walked the exterior of the hospital four or five times, she can’t remember. Then she tells me that my oldest friend Beatrix is visiting on Wednesday. I realize— 
 	“How long will I be here?” I ask. 
 	My mom pauses, poker face. She tells me, and I nod. The TV is playing reruns of old shows. Barbara Eden is asking her Master what he would like for supper. Her eyelashes are cartoonishly long, longer than any performance lashes I’ve ever worn. My mom is telling me about the actor Larry Hagman who plays astronaut Major Tony Nelson, and how he retaliated against blasé scripts by showing up on set in a gorilla costume. We laugh. Then she tells me that one day, while shooting a scene for the first season, the director quietly excused everyone off the set while Barbara Eden was locked inside an oversized perfume bottle. He idled in silence, waiting for her to realize that she had been abandoned, and then he recorded her screaming for help. He used the audio of her screams in another episode, so authentic. My mom tells me this and then shifts in her chair to a new position: her wrists joining each other in embrace, a feline with crossed paws. 
 	It doesn’t take much effort for me to fall asleep without warning. I think it must be the morphine.  


Monday  
Dr. Bishop is like the supposed victim of a snipe hunt: invisible. I don’t see him, I am only reminded of our initial meeting in the Emergency Room before I was admitted into the Intensive Care Unit. Dr. Bishop is a vascular surgeon, his office in another orbit. The only doctors I see are the ones in rotation, the ones who cart around eager students in scrubs.  
 	Tracy is wearing blue eyeshadow today, and she is asking me a lot of questions. I notice that I can answer a question, but I don’t always remember what the question was once I’ve finished my response. Memory is like trying to capture a cloud and convince someone nearby that it looks like a lion in profile, no a helicopter, no a bouquet of cauliflower. Tracy asks me what I am smiling about, and I tell her that I’m actually in a lot of pain, but that it’s far away, like an itch that you try to resolve by digging harder into your skin. There’s no point of contact for you to touch the itch to make it disappear. Tracy reminds me about the button. 
 	It’s official: When my mom comes during visiting hours today, she calls my dance coach Mary on her cell so we can explain why I won’t be in the recital. I insist on telling her myself. I don’t feel it coming, but I cry as I tell Mary this, or I think I’m crying because my face is wet and my mom looks very sad at me. I’ve never spoken to Mary on the phone, and she sounds younger, less harried. She tells me that my understudy Stephanie has been practicing her triple pirouettes and she’s confident the solo will be lovely. Then she asks if Stephanie could use my headwear since I won’t need it this year. 
 	“If we order the crown for her now, it’ll never arrive in time,” she says. “You don’t mind, yeah?” 
 	“I don’t—” I say. My mom slips the phone from my fingers, takes it off speaker and finishes the conversation in the hallway. 
 	I don’t think my crown will fit on Stephanie’s head, simply because her hair is bigger, thick like a helmet. I don’t think her triple pirouettes cause a glare like mine do. I don’t think she gets her neck around in time to make it a perfect spin. I don’t think she thinks about her body the way I do mid-pirouette, which is to say I imagine it expanding, taking up space, instead of what Mary tells us to imagine, which is that we are contained. I don’t think I explained my situation correctly to Mary just now—so, there’s this intruder inside of me, and it could destroy me.   


Wednesday 
I am told that I have been in this bed for longer than three days. I try to count sunsets and sunrises backwards and then I laugh. There are no windows! Tracy asks why I’m laughing and I tell her. She laughs with me, and then we’re both in on the joke. 
 	Of course it’s been more than three days. Yesterday after my mom left, Tracy and two other nurses changed my bedsheets for the first time, and I experienced the limit to morphine. I’m not allowed to be removed from my bed, so they changed the sheets as I lay there. The two other nurses cooed and shushed while carefully rocking my body to the left side as Tracy pulled the fitted sheets from under me and replaced them with starchy white ones, jostling me slightly as she worked. The nurse with the bowl cut was only gently holding my right calf as Tracy yanked on the bottom part of the bed, and my foot and ankle followed the dirty sheets as she removed them, I thought for good, I thought goodbye, foot! Pain distorts clarity, I realized, after it was too late, after I’d already slipped outside of myself, joining the mobbing crows above my head. I became only what I felt. I was, for a long moment, only Pain. After this, I slept for a very long time. 
 	Dr. Bishop will operate on me in a few days. But in preparation, I am wheeled to another floor of the hospital to the Interventional Radiology unit, where I am operated on every day. These trips widen the lens of my world. We go in an elevator. We pass a receptionist named Janet. We roll down long hallways where people in sneakers are walking to their appointments. Depending on timing, we sometimes pause next to a floor-length window, which looks out into the hospital’s main garden. We do this today and catcall the electric blue cornflowers and the big-lipped peonies, pink and vulnerable like an animal’s belly.  
 	These surgeries are “minor” and so I am conscious during them. The doctors wear masks. I never see their faces, but I’m convinced today that the main doctor in green is hot. His skin is tan and smooth like wax paper. He tells me he missed me, and then he and a masked nurse banter. I think this procedure takes an hour, but I don’t know. There is an anesthesiologist sitting on a stool next to me, talking to me and asking me if I feel anything. I imagine she manipulates my anesthesia like a movie pilot in a set-designed cockpit, inexplicably flipping levers and switches. I spend my time on the brink of consciousness, washing in and out of myself, focusing on the pimply ceiling and the ghosts tugging on my arm. It’s over before anyone says, “It’s almost over.” I hear the masked doctors update Tracy on their progress. Something about “shifting the stent,” something about the “implant in my subclavian vein.”  
 	On the way back to the ICU, Tracy and I play our game. 
 	“Corndogs.” 
 	“Nope.” 
 	“Red Lobster.” 
 	“Ha!” 
 	“Butter.” 
 	“Actually…” 
 	When we return to my room, visiting hours are about to begin. I now have a roommate, Robert, a farmer who suffocated in a grain bin but was pulled out and flown to the hospital by emergency responders. When Robert’s family visits, they speak to him in loud, intentional sentences. He is in a coma. His brother doubts Robert can hear them. His wife warns his brother that Robert can hear his doubts. They pray around his bed. I can’t see them behind the flimsy curtain, but I know they are bowing their heads.  
 	Because I am “a regular,” the nurses let my mom in early. She’s already sitting in her chair underneath the TV when Tracy and I roll in. 
 	We sit silently for awhile, and Tracy takes a blood sample by unclipping one of my IVs and letting blood run from the tube into a capsule. My mouth waters as the red blood snakes down. It reminds me of 7-Eleven ICEEs, of pulling the lever and watching the cherry descend into my cup. When Tracy does this, my mom stares at the wall and wrings her fingers like they are wet. 
         Trix visits today. She tries to climb into bed with me, but my mom pulls her back by her shoulders after she jostles me. She scoots a chair next to my bed and updates me on gossip. Her storytelling is so animated, and I fixate on her gestures, like I’m waiting for the end of a magic trick scarf. She drapes herself along the side of my bed, and I notice how pliable her body is, how it seems as if I could fold it into an accordion. I remember my body being like this, like it could stretch as if there were no limit.  
         Trix tells me that she’s in charge of collecting my homework while I’m out sick. “There’s a lot! But don’t worry,” she whispers, “I’m going to get you all the answers.” She holds up a word-of-the day flip calendar from my English teacher Ms. Storms, who knows how much I like words. I like that there are so many of them. “Today’s word is ‘knackered,’” Trix says, imitating a teacher’s voice. She laughs. “Knackered!” Her face suddenly turns serious. “You must be really knackered,” she says, then places the calendar on my stomach so I can look at it.  
         Tracy walks in and suggests that Trix braid my hair the way her hair is braided: in alternating strips across the top of her head. She looks like the pioneer American Girl Doll, and my mouth moistens at the thought of someone touching my head. My mom and Tracy help prop me up with pillows, and Trix asks Tracy about her favorite makeup brands as she weaves pieces of my greasy hair together. 
 	Before she leaves, she tells me about all the disorders she’s learning about in her AP Psychology class. She’s already read ahead to the Sociology section, and her eyes widen to moons when she tells us about her reading. 
 	“So in like the forties, or fifties, or something, there was this sociologist named Talcott Parsons. So, Parsons was basically this dude who believed in functionality—like everyone has a role in society, and they should stick to that role. So when a person gets sick, he basically argued that being sick was um, what’s the word, deviant, like a form of deviance, like you chose to go against your role, or society, or whatever. So, there’s also what he called like the ‘physician’s role’ I think, and it’s essentially the concept that society has created a role for a doctor to make sure you get better, and you, like, give up your regular rights to yourself and your body by being sick, and it’s the doctor’s role to, like, make you better, whatever that means, er, whatever it takes. So, like, basically the theory claims you have no rights.” 
         Trix’s eyes jump between me and my mom. “It’s messed up!” she says. “How these dudes established theories, and like, how people just believed them to be true. Alsooo did you know there’s a psychological disorder that compels you to eat your own flesh?” 
         Visiting hours end, and Trix floats away, giving Robert an embarrassed wave as she walks through the door. She seems to take all the air with her when she leaves. I am exhausted from my stillness and from all the listening.  
 	“I’m so happy you girls have each other,” my mom says, her palm distributing grease along my forehead. I think of the last time we were all together, at the Dairy Queen drive-thru, giggling in my mom’s hand-me-down Honda. Trix was telling my mom about how mad our choir director Wally got when all the show choir girls braided their ponytail wigs together. We laughed between bites of cheesecake ice cream, then hissed when our brains began to freeze. Later that night, my mom agreed to let me spend Saturday evening—what should have been mother-daughter night—with Trix at the mall. We were actually planning to shotgun beers at Harmony Faulken’s barn party, maybe flash the boys behind Harmony’s dad’s tractors. But plans changed. Instead, I was rushed to the closest city with an ER, not able to breathe, my left arm a dummy arm, hot and purple, a phantom lead foot pressing down on my chest. 
  

Thursday 
In the morning, Tracy brings me two drawings from the children’s wing of the hospital: a sunset and a sunrise, but I cannot differentiate the two. She hangs them on the bare wall next to my bed. One drawing was made using crayons, the other with thick, bleeding markers. These are my new friends. We nap the morning away together. 
 	I wake and feel my bladder. Before I call Tracy for the bedpan, I have a fleetingly sober moment. How the fuck did I get here? Inching my hand closer to the call button is a great effort, like my hand is trapped in a mirage. I accept the fact that I can’t use my brain, but then I realize that I can’t use my body either. Or wait—it was the other way around first. I begin to laugh. 
 	Tracy enters, her head cocked to the side. “You are always laughing, my sweet Ryann,” she says, shaking her head. “Did I give you laughing gas on accident?” 
 	Tracy gently lifts my pelvis and slides the bedpan underneath me. The bedpan is the color of beige from fifty years ago, or maybe the inside of an organ. While I pee I focus on the crescent of Tracy’s nails, which are gently attached to me, making marks on me. When I’m finished and she pulls the pan out from under me, I pretend the marks she made are tattoos. Little moth wings. 
 	Tracy leaves, and a band of student doctors file in for another lesson. The teaching physician, a broad-shouldered man with thick, curly blonde hair and bristly eyelashes, smiles at me as he talks to his students about My Rare Condition. This performance is clockwork; I tune it out. Curly Hair moves so he’s standing at the center of my bed. He raises my blanket and gown to expose my left thigh, also exposing my vagina. “Whoops!” He says and covers me back up. “Usually with this condition, the stent is in the upper thigh. Apologies,” he says to me and winks. He turns the students’ attention to my left arm, which is elevated and sitting atop a flat surface, wrapped to the approximate size of Popeye’s forearm. There are two lines running out of the gauze, leading to monitors that squawk loudly. I do mental gymnastics to try to understand how Dr. Curly Hair missed my arm—the loudest extremity in the room—and went straight for the thigh, but I’m too tired to understand mistakes. They discuss My Rare Condition with serious tones while their eyes slide onto every part of my body but my face. Then they are gone. 
 	I lie still and mentally tally how many strangers have seen my naked body in the last few days of my new life here. I think of my first pubic hair, and how I plucked it with my mom’s tweezers. I plucked them all until I dared try her razor. After that, I was always smooth. 
 	When Trix asked me if I would show her a few months later, I did. “I want to look like Julia,” she told me, referring to one of the older ballerinas. Julia is completely shaven. We know this because all of the ballerinas change costumes in the same dank locker room during recitals. The year Trix and I dance to Judy Garland’s “April Showers,” we notice Julia’s bare vagina as she changes into her final costume, a white one-piece tutu that has a complicated pattern of straps on the back. I remember she asked me to help her untwist two of the elastic straps before she went to dip her toes in rosin. After the recital that evening, I walked through the parking lot to my mom’s car and saw Julia and her best friend Rebecca with a group of older boys. Julia was wearing a puffy coat over her costume, and their booming laughs echoed through the enclosed lot. The tulle from her skirt was tucked into the backside of her leotard, making her tutu into a rabbit tail poof. The boys took turns slapping her butt as she and Rebecca skittered and squealed. 
 	I fall asleep and dream that I’m lying in a bed that is the size of a hotel pool, wedged between pillows that are actually my dogs. Dr. Bishop’s back is turned, and he is discussing something with a large group of people. It’s a stage of people. It’s him surrounded by people on a stage. I say something, but no one turns to look at me. I say it again. I shout. I scream, and blood sprays onto my dogs. They lick their paws. I glance down and notice my tits and skin have been completely removed, and I’m bleeding out. Tracy appears, wearing a prom dress, her hair wet, and her face creased with layers of bronzer the wrong shade for her face. “Isn’t it nice?” she says to me. “You can say anything you want! FUCK YOU!” she screams, and then gives me a wink. She pronounces her “K” like Wally taught us—the movement begins in the diaphragm and ends in the back of the throat. My blood tastes like a pecan pie my mom once made. A dancer from the next county over named Beth is twirling on the corner of the stage, her spins so exact I never see her face. 
 	When I emerge from this dream, I hear shuffling around Robert’s bed. Nurses are calling his name loudly, bumping my pellucid curtain, their bodies like faces from a parallel universe. I understand what they are doing. Robert is awake. He is moaning. He has survived. And now they are telling him to hold tight, the doctor is coming. 
  

Friday 
My mom is late for visiting hours, but I only know because she announces, “I’m late” when she arrives, flushed, pacing at the foot of my bed. Robert’s family has already come and gone, as Robert was moved during visiting hours to another wing of the hospital, a wing for people in recovery. My mom apologizes for being late, says she’s been on with the insurance company, then trails off. I tell her that it’s ok, don’t worry, I’ve been watching Judge Judy. 
 	“Where’s Robert?” she asks with a sharp intake of breath. 
 	Tracy glides in and touches my mom’s shoulder. “He woke from his coma,” she says, smiling from ear to ear. “He’s doing much better now.” 
 	Visiting hours are in the afternoon, I know, and I’ve been spending my morning having a power breakfast of morphine and tapioca. Judge Judy has been yelling at two women, Kelly and Kayla, for their violent behavior toward one another. I get why they’re in trouble, but I’m on their side. Judge Judy is hammering them, just biting their heads off. In fact, from one camera angle, it looks like she could fit their heads into her gaping mouth. The former part of my breakfast has been making the edges a bit fuzzier than usual, and I don’t notice, at first, that my mom is crying. 
 	“He’s gonna be ok,” she whispers to Tracy, a single tear jumping ship. 
 	Tracy takes both of my mom’s shoulders now, the pink of her acrylics blinding me. She’s speaking to my mom firmly, and her body seems to balloon above my mom, my mom’s shoulders bowing inward, almost disappearing entirely. I notice, for the first time, how small my mom really is, her limbs like ribbons. Her elegant but tired fingers. The endless length of her neck. Tracy is saying something about “your daughter,” something about how “she’s in the best care for this.” She says this as she leads my mom out into the hallway. 
 	I realize they are talking about me. I think back to the moment in the ER when the doctor told us it was very bad. The nurses made a sign for my ER door, warning everyone of My Rare Condition. I was not allowed to walk, I was not allowed to be touched until Dr. Bishop arrived.  
 	In the ER, I lay on the crusty paper bed and thought about Beth from Delaware County. We’d competed in dance competitions together since we were six. I thought about how earlier in the year she had collapsed while crossing the street. Our dance team sent her mom flowers. The newspaper said her best friend had been with her when it happened, had let out a wail that a local witness first thought was some kind of animal. We had competed against each other in a regional show the week before it happened. I beat her by two points, and she gave me a hug instead of a handshake when they announced the results. 
         I might die just like Beth died, except here in this room, with the peeling ceiling. I think about the ER, when the ER doctor told us about the blood clot the length of a pencil in my arm, and the blood clots in my lungs, and I think about how my mom told him, crying, that a girl we knew had just died from a blood clot, so how could this happen—to two girls—why did this happen to my daughter? And how he said, again, “It’s very rare,” and then slipped out of the room. 
         I want to talk to Beth. I want to ask her if she knows that she is dead. I want to tell her that no one talks about how she died, just that she is dead. I feel fury for her. I want to survive this for her, so I can look everyone in the face and tell them they are all cowards for not grieving her more, for not writing newspaper stories about the gruesome way a special girl could just die. All of you, fucking cowards!!! 
 	Beth had competed with “Cell Block Tango,” a song choice I applauded due to its slower, more challenging count and due to the controversy it created among the dance moms. I played it safe with “You Make Me Feel So Young.” I wore tiny shorts and a top hat, which I think pleased the judges, plus the way I curved my neck toward them during my barrel turn. I remember Beth’s routine included pantomiming: Beth pulling the noose taut on her neck; Beth sashaying into a kitchen knife; Beth crumbling to the floor, mocking her boyfriend’s death by arsenic. Her face was round and glassy like a compass, her spins a manifesto. 
 	My thumb finds the red button just as my mom walks in, led by Tracy and a woman I have not yet met. My mom’s face is flushed and glistening. They are Charlie’s Angels. No. They are Charlie’s Angels except they are just Angels. The woman I have not yet met is my surgical anesthesiologist. She pumps my fingers and says that she is here to tell me everything, except what I don’t want to know. 
  	I say something I don’t remember, and they all laugh, so I find it’s okay to laugh, too. Tracy pencils in my vitals, and tells me I’m looking good, sister. The thing is, I still haven’t been able to look in a mirror, but I feel safe enough to fall asleep surrounded by these women. When I wake up in an hour, my mom will be talking to my grandma, who will spend the night with her at the Ronald McDonald House. They’ll both wear socks to bed, and they’ll whisper to each other until one of them falls asleep. When I wake up tomorrow, Tracy will be there to softly hoist my hips upward as I release into the flat bucket, and then she’ll deliver me to the operating wing of the hospital, where Dr. Bishop will cut me open and cut out my rib to rid me of danger. Pul-mo-nary em-bo-lism. Deep vein throm-bo-sis. The syllables will anchor my tongue to my throat and my throat to my neck and my neck to my bed, my keeper. I won’t remember how I got there. I won’t feel the many hands on me, the scalpel, the saw, the tube in my throat. I won’t know about deliverance, yet, not then, but later.  


Saturday 
I am sixteen and feel like shit. I have a new body, with a hole in it, and the nurse with the spikey hair needs me to stand so he can wheel me to Imaging, where they’re going to take a picture of their work. Dr. Bishop operated on me for four hours, and now I’m in a recovery room with a framed imitation of “Starry Night” hanging at the foot of my bed. My sunset is gone. My sunrise is gone. My morphine is gone. I don’t remember saying goodbye to Tracy. No one asked me if I wanted to be here. 
 	Spikey Hair guides me by my elbow into a sunken wheelchair, where I’m certain I’ll be swallowed and disappear. We whiz down a hallway, and I’m dizzied by the passing scenery: a series of Pop Art prints, the anxious Lichtensteins beaming; a toddler escaping from her mother; a section of our journey framed by lime green walls, the most offensive color I’ve ever seen. I guess I’m mumbling because Spikey Hair reassures me that we’re almost there. Then he puts on my brake and leaves me sitting in a hallway. 
 	I have a memory of being wheeled to the operating room. It was just like in the movies, passing ceiling tiles and the under-chins of strangers. The doctors carry on conversations around me, through me, never to me. I wonder where I am, if I am even here. I slipped under so quickly I didn’t realize it was happening. Now I am here. From there to here. 
 	Spikey Hair returns to wheel me into the Imaging room, where they take a picture of the lung that had been invaded with blood clots, the ones that scared the ER doctor, the ones that drained all the color from my mom’s face. He scoots me back to my Starry bed, and after that I sleep for a very long time, dreaming of nothing, or maybe of absence. 
 	Later, a physical therapist shows me exercises to get my arm back to normal. “You’ll bounce back,” he says with an airy grin. A nurse with plastic fingers appears to remove my catheter, which was inserted during surgery. She tugs and it’s over but I remember, fleetingly, when Tracy and the other nurses changed my sheets in the ICU, and how I imagined my body then as wooly, cotton candy. A doctor glides in to report that my X-ray came back just as they wanted it: no more first rib obstructing blood from entering the subclavian vein in my arm. It’s gone! We learn that tendons and tissues and miscellaneous body things will grow into the space where my rib used to be. Also the clots in my lungs, he says, will eventually disintegrate, over time. Oh. He’s ecstatic, dismissive, and I’ve stopped wondering where Dr. Bishop is. “You can finally get outta here!” he dazzles with his smile and then he is gone. My mom brings me a burger to celebrate, and its tinny, distant taste is too much for me. I force a croak, which is meant to be a laugh. “Is there any pudding?” My friends visit, and their chatter is disorienting. The recital was a bust, they tell me. I guess my crown popped off Stephanie’s head halfway through the second movement and Tessa slipped on it and bruised her tailbone. “Karma!” Trix shouts, but I’m not sure what karma means anymore. They leave and I don’t miss them. I float through the rest of the day in stillness and in quiet. 
          Then it is tomorrow, and my mom is pulling the car up to the curb, and I am wearing pants, and a bra to silence my tits, to contain me. Out of my hospital gown, I feel in disguise. I think to myself, so this is what it’s like to have a body. I finally know, or I know too soon. People rush past me. Doctors look beyond me. I pass a mirror in the lobby of the hospital, and I touch my face to make sure she does the same. I look her in the eyes and promise to keep our secret.