He leaned forward and shook his head, but didn’t quite deny it. “Honestly, so little is known about the brain. So little.” If he meant that to be reassuring, he failed. Coming from a neurologist, that statement was downright horrifying.

I asked for clarification. “So, I’m not going to die?”

Dr. Logan clasped his hands together and looked up, as if expecting an answer from above. Receiving none, he sighed and said, “Not today.”

I didn’t believe any of it. He continued. “I don’t know how you’re functional with this widespread trauma. It’s as if other areas of your brain are compensating for the damage.”

Mom tapped her heel on the floor twice as fast as she spoke. “So”—tap, tap, tap—“she’s going to be fine.” Tap, tap, tap. She placed a hand on my forehead.

Dr. Logan grinned, a closed-mouth smile revealing nothing. “We’ll start rehab as soon as the paperwork clears. We’ll know more then.”

Dad blew a clump of hair out of his eyes. He was blond, like me, with no signs of gray yet. Right then, with his hair shaggy and his clothes scruffy, he looked almost like a cool parent. That would be a lie.

The only other times I’d seen my father with messy hair was on vacation, and that was only if Mom forgot to pack his hair gel. Every other morning he slicked his hair back, put on his loafers and tie, and set out to work at his accounting company. That was my real father. This rumpled man at my hospital bed was an imposter.

Dad used to work for a large CPA firm, traveling most weekdays to conduct audits. He quit when I was in elementary school and opened his own firm in the next town over. It was just him and his secretary, and nobody in our part of Maine earned enough money to make him rich, but it paid the bills and he was home every night. That was enough for him.

“Will this all be covered by insurance?” he asked. Now that sounded more like the father I knew.

“You’ll have to speak to central billing.” Dr. Logan slid the images down and stacked his files on the counter.

I scratched at an itch on the side of my head. I wondered if I was scratching the surface of the damaged part of my brain or the newly rewired part. Maybe it was the buzzing. Maybe everything was so screwed up that neurons fired randomly, telling me things itched when they, in fact, did not.

“I’m okay,” I said to the room, even though my body was pulling apart in every direction, even though my brain scan lit up like the sky on the Fourth of July. “I’m okay,” I said again, because if I said it enough, maybe it’d be true.

Mom kept tapping and Dad stared out the window, probably running numbers in his head. Dr. Logan looked at me, but he wasn’t looking in my eyes. He looked a few inches higher, where the medical anomaly resided, and slowly backed out of the room.

Decker came in as soon as the doctor left and dumped the contents of his backpack at the foot of my bed. Dad took Mom by the elbow and led her out of the room, whispering into her ear.

Decker didn’t seem to notice the lingering tension in the room. “Cards,” he said, throwing a handful of get-well-soon cards onto my lap.

“Food.” He set three burgers and two cartons of fries on the bedside table and swiveled it over my lap.

I tore my eyes away from the white screen, now off, that labeled me as damaged. Decker hadn’t seen it. I smiled at him. “Who gets the third burger?” I asked. He grinned and inched the burger in question closer to his side.

“And, as per your request, homework.” He stacked three textbooks next to my feet. “For the record, I think you’re crazy. Nobody expects you to do your schoolwork.”

Decker was right. As the potentially dead, occasionally comatose, definite miracle, I was given more than enough slack. But I still had a decent shot at valedictorian. As of today, I was only one school week behind. I could catch up. “What’s the work?” I asked.

Decker shrugged and took a massive bite out of his burger. “Janna’s coming later.”

“Oh.” I was somewhat surprised it was her and not someone else from my classes. Janna and I had been in the same general social circle since elementary school and we sat at the same lunch table, but mostly we were friends in the way that people are when they’re friends with the same people.

She was also Carson’s younger sister. Janna shared her brother’s main features: green eyes, blond curls, wicked smile. Unfortunately for Janna, her eyes were smaller than Carson’s, her curls were unmanageable, and her front teeth were spaced too far apart. And unlike Carson, who was only in our class because he had to repeat third grade, Janna was smart. Really smart. Currently second-in-the-class smart. Which might also explain why we never became close.