As Melinda pushed me to my first and last occupational therapy appointment, another nurse was pushing a woman in a wheelchair out of the room. I waved. “So, was it therapeutic?” Hospital humor.

When we passed each other, I noticed her head was wrapped in gauze and drool hung from her chin. She turned her head in my general direction, but I looked away.

I wondered if she envied me. Then I wondered if she still had the capacity for envy. Maybe she didn’t even know how damaged she was. And in a moment of panic, I wondered if I was the same. I touched my hand to my chin, just to check.

No drool. No, I was the miracle. The fluke. The anomaly. Me, the uncoordinated, physically inept, potential valedictorian. Me, nearly drowned, hypothermic, broken-ribbed. Me, Delaney Maxwell, alive.

Chapter 3

I slept in a ball, curled on my side, knees to my chest, arms wrapped around my legs. Holding myself together. I was being tugged apart and there was an itch in the center of my brain, like the buzz from the wall unit. Only the wall unit was off. I scratched at my head, but it was buried too deep. And then the tugging grew to a pull. The itch in my brain tormented me. I squeezed my eyes shut and rolled my head around.

The tugging was still in multiple directions, but the pull—that was specific. In the hall. Dead left. I gave up trying to sleep. I slipped out of the sheets, planted my bare feet on the floor, and padded out of my room. The pull sharpened, and I followed it. And the itch in the center of my brain spread. It spread outward, down through my neck, radiating across my shoulders. It flowed down my arms, into the tips of my fingers.

And my fingers, unable to contain it or fight it, started twitching. They vibrated at an unnatural speed and jerked at odd angles as I walked down the hall. Which should have bothered me if I could’ve concentrated enough to think about it. But I couldn’t. All I could think of was the door at the end of the hall, how it called to me, how it held some answer to a question I hadn’t thought of yet.

But when I reached it, I had to go farther. I pushed open the door and saw a person lying flat on a hospital bed. A person; that’s as specific as it gets. Old or young, man or woman—I couldn’t tell. Its head was shaved and a tube snaked from the back of its skull. It was gray and wrinkled and swollen all at once. I stepped closer, letting the door swing shut behind me. My feet were cold on the hard floor, and I shifted from foot to foot. The person started to tremble. Gently at first, like a shiver; then jerky, like my fingers; then all-out convulsions—shaking the bed and the surrounding machines. And then the alarms sounded. Doctors and nurses barged into the room, pushed past me, and shouted orders at each other.

“Get the paddles!” someone cried.

“What’s wrong?” I yelled.

A nurse tried to force me out of the room without looking at me. “You can’t be in here.”

“What’s happening to me?”

Dr. Logan rushed into the doorway. “Delaney? What are you doing here?”

“Charging!” someone called. I turned to see a doctor shocking the patient’s heart, the body arching upward in response, the alarm still constant.

“What’s wrong with me?” I said.

From where Dr. Logan stood, not much was wrong with me. But something was seriously wrong with the person on the bed.

“Get her out of here!” someone screamed.

Dr. Logan gripped my shoulders and pulled me out of the room. “What? What’s wrong with you?”

I couldn’t figure out how to describe the itch and the pull and the confusion. I couldn’t. So I raised my arms and showed him my hands, the unrelenting twitching, as tears rolled down my face.

Dr. Logan put a hand on my back, persuading me down the hall, but I didn’t move. So he picked me up, like Dad might’ve done, and carried me back to my room. And as he set me on my bed, the itch retreated up my arms and through my neck. My hands stilled. The itch in my brain faded to a buzz, then to nothing. The pull was gone. All that remained was the gentle tugging from all sides that I’d almost grown to expect. I sat in bed, staring alternately from my still hands to the open door. Dr. Logan flipped through my chart and scribbled on an empty page. He ordered me a sleeping pill and sat with me until I slept.

He was still there in the morning. Maybe he left sometime in the night and came back again. But he was here now. And so were my parents.

“Seizure.” Dr. Logan’s voice was heavy, weighed down by years of disease diagnoses.

“Excuse me?” I said.

He sat up straighter. “I believe you’re having seizures.” This time, it sounded like a cure.