Page 34

Jessica

“What’s the last thing you remember? Do you remember checking yourself in here?”

I pause, my breath still captive, ready to come out, but I have no words to deliver. I puff out an exhale, frustrated. “No.”

He frowns, and I hurry to speak.

“I mean, not yet. But I will. Now that I know who I am, the rest will come back. And you can call my mom, right? And see that she’s just fine, it’s all good, and I can go home?

” I bounce in the chair, and happiness swells in my chest at the thought.

Home. I know what home looks like. What our living room looks like, and my room, and the crooked picture in the hall from when Mom brought me home from the hospital— “Oh ...,” I say suddenly.

“Mom’s sick. Did I already tell you that?

She’s, um ... she’s going through treatments.

” My joy leaks out of me, and I try to plug the holes before it’s all gone.

“But she’s going to be fine. She says that she is.

And she’s doing pretty well. She’s trying really hard. ”

And she wasn’t dead. That must have been a hallucination of some drug I’d taken.

I probably went out that night, took some laced shit, and imagined the entire thing, then became convinced it was real.

I tell him this theory, and he nods slowly, his gaze holding on to me, and I hate the pity on his face.

The assumption that she is dead or dying, that I’m just a dumb girl who refuses to accept that my mommy will die—but people beat prognoses all the time. If anyone can beat this, she can.

She will.