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  “Better,” I say.

  He clears his throat. “Back to Magonia?” he says, not looking at me. “More proto-UFO theory?”

  I stare at his back. Shoulders = too high.

  “Maybe,” I say. And then I’m insanely brave because I keep talking. If this is it for me, if this is the last day I’m going to be alive? Why not be brave?

  “I want to go back to what we were doing before,” I say. “It was me who screwed that up.”

  I’m forced to blurt out the rest as fast as I can.

  “All-right-do-you-want-to-start-over-even-though-I’m-a-disaster?”

  Jason’s shoulders relax. His face softens. “You think you hold horrors for me . . . ,” he says, which is what he always says when I utter anything in this category.

  “But you hold no horrors,” I say, which is the correct response.

  Jason leans over the table, and I get myself ready to change our status, because OMG, I think I would desperately like to change our status, but Eli chooses that moment to bang her way into the kitchen, looking disgusted.

  It’s okay.

  I didn’t need to kiss him.

  I hadn’t been imagining kissing Jason under the surface of my brain for years, or anything.

  I feel a flash of rage at Eli, whose fault it isn’t.

  “Weather out there sucks it,” she says, and then looks at us, assessing, coolly. “Weather in here kind of sucks it too. I got rained on. Did you see the lightning?”

  She flicks a drop of rain off her shoulder. Only one. Possibly she just walked between raindrops. Me, I get drenched anytime there’s even fog.

  “Eli?” I say. “Do you think you could—”

  She must be reading my mind, because she’s instantly defensive.

  “This is my house too,” she says. “You can’t order me out of the kitchen.”

  “I wasn’t,” I say, cringing that she’s about to comment on what she almost walked in on.

  “You were about to try to,” she says, psychic, and sits down at the table. “It’s not happening. I’m hungry.”

  I leave Eli and Jason to eat éclairs. I go coughing into my freezing room.

  There are eleven hours until my procedure. I’m not counting them. I don’t need to count them because I’m totally not dying tomorrow.

  I take the piece of paper Jason gave me out of my pocket and stare at it. He’s not allowed to make me want to stay alive this way. I { } you more than [[[{{{(( ))}}}]]].

  and I’m both grinning and stupidly kind of crying—

  When the window opens. I put the note back, weirdly embarrassed.

  My mom was cleaning in futility, and didn’t latch it, maybe.

  I look out. It’s starting to snow, completely wrongly, right after that rain; it’s only November. The back lawn is covered already, a thin dusting of it, and it’s the kind of glowing darkish afternoon that snow makes happen. Like the snow is the surface of the moon. Like we’re here, and at the same time, in outer space. Which of course, we are. We’re all untethered, all flying around in the dark, the same as Mars and Venus, the same as the stars.

  I’m definitely not going to cry.

  The window creaks.

  I think about celestial junk. Maybe every planet in this solar system is discarded by giant hands. Each star a crumpled ball of paper, a love letter lit on fire, a smoldering bit of cigarette ash.

  A robin picks its red-breasted finicky way across the yard, considering the blades of grass sticking up out of the white. It cocks its head and looks at me for a long time.

  I turn forcibly away and rummage in my closet, packing my hospital bag. I can hear Jason and Eli blithering on in the kitchen, something about a hailstorm where the hail turned out to be, actually, a rain of frogs, each one frozen into a ball of ice. A rain of frogsicles is so Jason’s kind of thing.

  I hear a chirp much closer than it should be. When I turn around to close the window, the lawn is covered with birds. Maybe fifty of them. Robins, crows, and blue jays, seagulls, chickadees, and swallows.

  On my windowsill, there’s a bright yellow bird with a black beak and wings spread like it’s wearing a cape made of marigold petals.

  This is the one chirping.

  Here, it says. She is ready.

  No, it definitely does not say that. It’s a bird. It opens its beak and shrills, and the other birds look expectant. I try to shoo it off the sill. I have my fingers on the sash when all the birds turn their heads and look at me.

  Not just in the direction of me. No, there’s a flock of birds, out of season, sitting patiently in the snow, watching me. A hawk lands. An owl. None of the rest of the birds even look at them.

  And it’s insanity, right there, rain of frogs insanity, except that it’s rain of birds, and I’m shaking with cold and also with something else. The bird on the sill doesn’t move. It just looks at me.

  “Fly away!” I yell, coughing, freezing, but none of them move. They start to sing.

  To speak.

  All of them.

  Aza Ray.

  Inside my chest, I feel a weird rattle and then there’s something I can’t explain, a giant gap, inside my lungs. The little yellow bird looks me in the eyes. I cough.

  And then, out of fucking nowhere, the bird flies into my mouth.

  I can feel its tough little bones, its claws scratching at my teeth. I’m trying to scream but my mouth’s full of feathers. It’s pushing and its wings are opening in my mouth and then in my throat and I can’t breathe, and then it’s down my windpipe and speaking from inside my chest.

  Got her, sings the yellow bird. I can feel it in my left lung. Got her. I’m in. We’re ready.

  I scream. I can feel it whistling, beating its wings, and I think feather-feather-feather.

  Bird in my lung? BIRD IN MY LUNG? I’m hyperventilating.

  Out the window, in the clouds, I’m seeing—

  Oh my god, sails over the tree line, and rigging—dark figures on a deck. I’m crying and holding my chest and I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know what to do.

  Readyreadyreadygo the bird in my chest whistles and out on the lawn the rest of the birds look at me as though I have a clue what’s happening, and I’m thinking this is it this is dying and why didn’t anyone in any of the near-death books ever say there’d be a crowd of birds seeing you off? Where’s the white light? Where’s the peace and calm? Where’s the voice of God and the angelic-ness and the—

  A rope loops down, down, down out of the clouds and clearly I’m dreaming. It’s swinging through the sky outside my window, and there’s no air in here, no air anywhere—

  Readyreadyready my chest sings. The sky is full of hail and snow and wind. The birds on the lawn are taking flight, and they have the rope in their talons. I’m dizzy. I’m gasping. I’m—

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  I come to in redwhiteandblue emergency lights, wrapped in heat blankets, snow coming down hard outside the windows. I’m in the back of the ambulance with my dad, Jason, and Eli.

  I try to sit up but I’m strapped down. I have a mask on my face. I want to cough. I want to talk. I want to tear it off.

  “You had a seizure,” the paramedic tells me, speaking slowly, as though I’m not me, as though I don’t know everything about this already. I’m a professional patient, even if I have no idea how I got here, no idea who this paramedic is, no idea where the ambulance is taking me, or why.

  My chest is still.

  The bird is still?

  “There were birds in your room—a lot of them,” Eli says, her voice shaking. “I heard them screaming, so I came in.” She looks completely terrified.

  Jason’s fingers are wrapped around mine very tightly.

  What just happened?

  I can’t really feel my hand in the real world at all, but I can feel Jason’s. I want to shake my fi
ngers out of his grasp. I feel like he’s holding me somewhere I don’t want to be. And that’s not okay. It’s Jason. I want him to hold my hand.

  My dad’s crying, but he’s got my other hand.

  “Don’t worry, Az,” he says. “They’re helping you breathe. That’s why you had the seizure. You’re okay. It’s okay. Mom was at the lab but she’s on her way.”

  Everything looks as though I’m seeing it from the bottom of a swimming pool.

  “It was like you were drowning,” Jason says, so quietly I almost don’t hear him. “You were completely blue, and you weren’t breathing. Your chest was . . . spasming and making this sound I’ve never heard before. I gave you mouth-to-mouth.”

  I look at his mouth. It touched mine. I think about the note he gave me. It’s still in my pocket.

  I blink a couple of times for yeah, I get it. But I don’t. I remember the bird—god, the bird—and I jerk and try to sit up again. I have to get it out.

  I wonder if I’m having a heart attack. My lungs feel crushed and full of something all at once.

  “I have the letters in my backpack,” Eli says, her voice not quite her voice. “The I-love-you lists, and the apologies. But I never made mine. Now I will, okay? I’m making one for you right now, because I’m sorry for all the times I pretended you weren’t my sister and said we weren’t related, and the time I stole your sweater and the time I made fun of you because you coughed so hard I told people you swallowed your phone—”

  I look at Jason. I look at him and I don’t know how but for a moment I forget the bird and I say { }.

  “Aza, are you listening?” my dad asks me, and there’s panic in his voice. More than panic. “CAN YOU HEAR ME?”

  I look at Eli, and say { }.

  “I’m sorry, Aza! I didn’t mean any of anything I ever did wrong!” Eli is crying now, and talking as fast as she can. She’s apologizing for things she didn’t even do.

  I look at my dad, and say {{ }}. I try to give him extra for my mom.

  My dad is fading out. All I can see are my own eyelashes and my own eyelids, and somehow, also, my own brain, all the pathways inside it, everything dark and narrow, and getting narrower, bookshelves closing in, books crushed, falling into muddled piles, pages crushed, words mangled, and me, running through it all, trying to get out before the walls collapse.

  I feel the entire inside of my body folding up, some kind of awful origami. I thought it would hurt, but the pain I’ve been feeling forever and ever is actually something that’s ceasing to matter to me, just like my bones no longer matter to me, and I inhale, and exhale, and

  Bird in my chest

  Bird in my chest

  Ships in the sky

  Last moments before dying

  Like this, the last moments of this, storm, bird, confused, cold can’t talk can’t tell anyone I love them can’t—

  How far are we from the hospital?

  I stretch my head and try to look into the front. The driver has red hair. He glances at me.

  We swerve.

  I hear Eli sobbing. I hear Jason talking fast to me. I can feel his breath on my ear. I’m watching the driver, and the ambulance skids, and I see the guy twisting the wheel. Shoving it hard.

  We spin slowly in a circle in the middle of a frozen road. Everyone’s screaming but me, because I can’t. I’m trying to breathe, to stay, but I’m not staying.

  I’m going.

  The windows of the ambulance are freezing over, and here’s my family, and here I am, on this gurney, and it doesn’t matter as much as I thought it did.

  Life and death aren’t as different from each other as I thought they were. This isn’t like walking into a new country. This is walking into a new room in the same house. This is sharing a hallway and the same row of framed family pictures, but there’s a glass wall between.

  I’m right here. And not.

  If this is it, then I’m ready. I’m dark matter. The universe inside me is full of something, and science can’t even shine a light on it. I feel like I’m mostly made of mysteries.

  Inside my chest, I hear the whistling of a little bird, something singing me to sleep.

  The ambulance is stopped, lights and sirens still on, ice beneath our tires, and the EMT in the back with us radios for a helicopter, her voice panicky, “Emergency . . .”

  The red-haired medic runs out and looks up at the sky. “Signaling,” he shouts. He goes into the white, and all around him is a halo of snow.

  I’m an ocean with a giant squid inside it. There’s a bird buffeting, flying around and banging hard against my ribs.

  “Pneumonia,” the paramedic says.

  “Aza, don’t,” my dad says, an order. “DO NOT DO THIS.”

  I want to listen.

  I look at my dad. I’m looking at myself, and what I was is starting not to matter to me at all.

  Where am I going?

  Readyreadyready says the bird in me. And someone outside answers Readyreadyready.

  Something hits my chest, hard, and then it’s gone. My chest? Is it even mine? Then, no, I see, it’s the medic using crash pads on my heart.

  Jason says, “You don’t have to die.”

  Eli’s talking fast into her cell phone.

  “Mommy-you-have-to-get-here-now-right-now-hurry-I-don’t-know-I-don’t-know-what-happened-it’s-really-bad—”

  I hear my mom through the phone, telling Eli it’ll be okay, and she sounds so certain that I almost think it will be, that there’s something I don’t know, but then Eli says, wailing,

  “But it’s already not okay!”

  Readyreadyready

  The crash pads hit me again, hard, at chest level. Eli’s put her phone to my ear.

  I can hear my mom.

  I hear her take a deep breath. I hear her pushing words out, and I can almost see her, for a second, the look on her face, her hand pressed to her own heart, the other in a fist.

  “You can go if you have to go,” my mom says, and her voice shakes, but she’s solid. She says it again, so I’ll know. “You can go if you have to go, okay, baby? Don’t wait for me. I love you, you’re mine, you’ll always be mine, and this is going to be okay, you’re safe, baby, you’re safe—”

  I’m hearing my mom talking, feeling her in my ear and not in my ear at the same time.

  There’s a blast of cold air and the redheaded medic comes back in.

  “Chopper’s coming,” he mutters to the other paramedic, and pushes himself into the space beside me. “Get the girl’s family to move back.”

  He pushes the other medic away, too hard. She winces. His hands are working on me in ways that make no sense.

  I feel something slide into my skin, near my left lung. It’s a cut, but it’s different from any cut I’ve ever felt before. Pain or release? I feel myself dividing, right where my tilted lungs are, right where my ribs have always been wrong.

  “What are you doing?” I hear my dad say.

  “Sir, you’re getting in the way of an emergency procedure. We’re trying to keep her breathing. Stay back.”

  “Calm down,” the female medic says. “It’s okay, it’s going to be okay.”

  She’s trying to keep my dad from looking at what’s happening, but I catch a glimpse of his face, his eyes.

  I have no voice. I’m trying to say no.

  The man’s tying a rope to me, I can feel it, around my chest, but I can’t see it.

  “I’m making an incision for her to breathe. Please, sir, move back now,” the medic says.

  “This isn’t it,” Jason says urgently. “This isn’t happening. Don’t let it, Aza. They’re going to find a way to— Oh my god.”

  He sobs. The paramedic’s looking down at me and I’m looking up at him. He’s has his hand in my shirt pocket, and he’s taking something out of it. The note—

  There’s pressure on my neck and there’s still no pain. There’s a splitting, something falling off, and that feeling of a rope around my chest, and my bod
y is halfway on the gurney and halfway with me, standing up, watching.

  “I’ll find you,” Jason says, and I hear him. I hear him. I trust him.

  The lights flicker. I hear a giant impact up in the sky, and there’s an explosion, fire, the smell of smoke and ozone. Something snags me and pulls hard, out the ambulance doors, outside, and my dad is swearing, and Jason’s still telling the girl on the gurney he’s not letting her go, and Eli’s screaming, and then

  the

  s

  i

  r

  e

  n

  s

  S T O P.

  And after that? There’s nothing.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706798 214808651328230. One day, two days, three days, four days, five days later.

  This is what I want to do: I want to pick up my phone and call Aza. I want to hear her voice.

  “Why are you calling me?” she’ll say. “I hate the phone. Text or show up. How long is this gonna take? Are you here yet? Get here.”

  But this is what Aza’s new number is like: 66470938446095505822317253594081284811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819644288109756659334461284756482337867831652712019091456485669234603486104543266482133936072602491. Onward infinitely, no answer. Dial, dial, dial.

  I’m back to old habits. Recite, recite, recite. Not so that anyone can hear.

  This is an old thing, and supposedly conquered.

  Not conquered, turns out.

  41273724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511609433057270365759591953092186117381932611793105118548 0744623799627495.

  I know more pi than that. She knows even more than I do. But at some point in the memorization of pi I’m definitely going to pass the point she stopped at. It’ll be the same as driving past her on a road, not seeing her hitchhiking. Which is about as crap as anything I can think of, in a universe of, at this point, unimaginable crap.

  I’m not sleeping. I’m not fine. There are things I’m never going to want to talk about.