I was dead. That’s what she said. My heart stopped beating. Blood sat stagnant. My body turned blue. But I came back.

Janna let go of my hand and fished her cell phone out of her bag. She scrolled through her call history. “Look.” She pointed at the two outgoing calls to 911.

Time between calls, time underwater, time without air: eleven minutes.

A lot can happen in eleven minutes. Decker can run two miles easily in eleven minutes. I once wrote an English essay in ten. No lie. And God knows Carson Levine can talk a girl out of her clothes in half that time.

Eleven minutes might as well be eternity underwater. According to the lessons from health class, it only takes three minutes without air for loss of consciousness. Permanent brain damage begins at four minutes. And then, when the oxygen runs out, full cardiac arrest occurs. Death is possible at five minutes. Probable at seven. Definite at ten.

Decker pulled me out at eleven.

“I shouldn’t be alive,” I told Decker when he came back later that evening.

“You were in ice-cold water,” Decker said. “It slows the body’s metabolism. So you don’t use that much oxygen. Or something.” Decker wasn’t in the running for valedictorian. He was a different kind of smart. Decker once joked that he would become a famous entrepreneur and I would be his best employee. I had smacked him over the head with my notebook at the time, but deep down I feared he was right.

I looked at him, wide-eyed.

Decker smiled sheepishly. “I looked it up. After you . . . Before you . . . I looked it up. I just had to know if there was any chance. If there was something. Anything.” Then he pulled at a string on the sleeve of his sweatshirt and watched as the fabric unraveled.

“Then how come everyone’s acting like I shouldn’t be alive?”

“Because it’s rare. I mean, really, really rare. Like snow in August.”

“That’s never happened.”

“No, I guess not. But it’s not impossible, right?”

Decker’s parents came with him Sunday. But they spent most of the time comforting my parents, which was odd, considering I was the one in the hospital bed. I was stressed about missing another week of school, but the doctors were more concerned with the alleged brain damage. So I spent the day getting X-rayed and scanned and imaged again, and when everything turned up the same—that is, not any better, but not any worse—Dr. Logan shrugged. Really. He shrugged. And everyone continued like I was fine, which was, actually, perfectly fine with me.

But when no one was looking, I saw Dr. Logan watching me. Like he knew, deep down, that I was far from fine.

So on Monday morning, while the world went on being normal, I started rehab. It didn’t last long. Turns out, I didn’t have much need for any rehabilitation. Apparently I needed to go to rehab to find out I didn’t need rehab. It sounded like a Catch-22, but I wasn’t sure since my English class started that book while I was comatose. It was high on my to-do list.

At first, the rehab came to me. A thin woman with a nonexistent chin stood at the end of my bed one morning with flash cards. Without introduction, she said, “Identify the following objects.”

I complied. One after another, I recited, “Apple. House. Airplane. Table. Cat.” And then I paused. I squinted and strained my head forward.

“Can you see all right?”

“Yes.” I tilted my head to the right.

The chinless woman’s eyes glistened. “It’s okay if you can’t remember.”

“I can’t tell if it’s a pickle or a zucchini,” I explained.

She exhaled, signed some paperwork, and left the room. I never saw her again.

My physical therapy sessions began in my room, too. I was stretched and flexed and pulled and bent until my leg muscles remembered how to respond to my commands. Which was eerie because at first they didn’t listen, but they didn’t just lay there either. My toes would point instead of flex, and my knees would bend instead of straighten, and sometimes when I was drawing letters with my feet, they would spell something else entirely. Something I couldn’t quite read. Like something else was sending the commands. Something stronger.

Though I finally managed to walk the next morning, the nurses on duty still insisted on using a wheelchair to escort me to my therapy sessions. The physical therapy room unnerved me. Treadmills and exercise bikes lined the far wall. Weight machines loomed in the middle of the room. Thankfully, nobody asked me to actually exercise.

Again, I followed commands and completed coordination drills. I touched my right hand to my left hip bone, my left hand to my nose. I wiggled my toes. I did the Hokey Pokey. While my therapist filled out paperwork, I settled back into the wheelchair and looked around. A man struggled to hold himself upright on what looked like parallel bars. His lower body, encased in braces, followed stubbornly behind. I swung my legs in my wheelchair, which was more a prop than a necessity. I kept my eyes down until someone wheeled me back to my room.