“Okay,” Amanda says. “You look in that hole there.”
There’s a jagged circle she’s made in the cardboard, a helpful duct tape arrow pointing at it. “It’s just like Brandy’s box with the inverted mirrors. So when you look in—”
“I’ll see my sister,” I finish for her.
“Do you want more lights on?”
I shake my head, the heart monitor beside me sending spiky waves across the screen as I lean forward.
And there she is, staring at me.
I wish there were more holes so that Amanda could see her too and know I’ve been right all along, so that my parents could look in and see their dead daughter, so that Isaac could see her face light up at the thought of him. I wish Nadine could stick her head in this box, see this face and deny her existence. I wish that Brooke could meet her and be her only friend. I wish Layla could meet her and convince her there is such a thing as love and that she was in it.
Shanna is gaunt, eyes sunk into deep hollows, her cheekbones starkly prominent. Her teeth have shredded her lips, her hair limp and lax around her face. I’m looking at a life unlived, one passed entirely in darkness, her skin hanging from bones like loose clothes.
“Sasha?” Amanda asks.
“I see her,” I say. “She’s dying.”
“Okay, I want you to stop now,” Amanda says, but I can’t. Shanna has locked eyes with me and won’t be moved. She’s angry about messages left unread, unanswered, a cord kicked loose by my foot, no matter what everyone else tries to say. I see it in her eyes. Eyes just like mine.
“That’s enough.” Amanda moves the box, and I scrape my chin on the edge of the cardboard. “Sorry,” she says, but she’s moving too quickly for it be a real apology, shoving the table out of the way and taking me by the hands.
“What are you doing?”
“I need you to get up now,” Amanda says, as if it’s perfectly reasonable. “I need you to come into the bathroom.”
“I don’t think—”
“Sasha, listen to me,” she interrupts. “You said you don’t want to leave this place and you said you would do this for me. Now it’s time to get up and come into the bathroom.”
I didn’t say that; I told her I would look into the box and that was all I promised. But she wants more from me now, and Sasha Stone would do the right thing, would do what she was being asked, would be a good girl.
And I am Sasha Stone, so I get up, the floor cold on my bare feet. Amanda grabs the IV tree and follows me, one wheel squeaking as I pull the bathroom door open. She reaches past me and flicks on the lights, my eyes closing automatically in response.
“Open your eyes, Sasha,” she says.
I don’t want to. I don’t want to, but she’s asking me to so it must be what I’m supposed to do. It must be the right thing, so I do it.
I do it and I see.
Shanna is here too, in the bathroom. She looks like death in this lighting, the hollow at the base of her throat deep like a gouge. Her eyebrows are even thinning, tiny hairs gone entirely where the scar passes through her face, a red, heavy scar with pinprick dots still healing on each side of it where she’s been sewn together again like a quilt.
My scar.
My face.
“Oh my God,” I say, hand reaching up to brush against cheekbones close to the surface of my skin. “It’s . . . that’s me.”
“Yes,” Amanda says, her eyes holding mine in the mirror, our reflections honest and true with each other. “It’s always been you.”
thirty-two
The word breakthrough has been very important in the past few days, one that Amanda keeps repeating and saying forcefully, even though she treats me like I might shatter while doing so. She’s been doing a lot of explaining, told me how I’ve used Shanna to allow myself a little room to “act out” without the guilt. She even said that the white things I’ve been pulling out of my gums aren’t reed splinters or my twin’s fetal bones—they’re mine. Apparently when your wisdom teeth are super deep your jaw gets chipped a lot while they’re digging the teeth out, and those bits work their way up to the surface. Amanda has an answer for everything; she even explained away whatever Nadine thought she heard when I was talking to Heath, asking the staff if they want to know what a conversation between a teenage boy and girl that uses the word absorbed is really about.
Nadine has kept a safe distance, Jo retreating back across whatever line exists between those two and the rest of us. Layla and Brandy have been supportive in the best way they know how—by keeping me up to date on deaths in the area.
“Shooting on the east side,” Layla says, scrolling on her tablet.
“Read it to us,” Brandy says, and Layla does, all of us getting a little excited when she gets to the part about it being execution style.
“Head shot, good for us.” Brandy pulls out her phone. “There a name?”
Layla finds it and Brandy shoots a text off to her buddy at the DMV. “What are our odds, Sasha?”
I glance over at them from the window, where a solid inch of snow has fallen to top off the three that settled from last night. “It’s impossible to say. There are just too many variables: blood type, Rh factor, tissue match, distance from donor to recipient, plus we don’t know where we fall on the donor list, so—”
“Yadda yadda, blah blah,” Brandy says, mimicking a hand puppet at me. “It’s a game. You don’t have to be right.”
That’s the thing though, I kind of do. All the time. But my friend wants me to say something so I’ll do what I’m supposed to. I’ve learned that.
“One in eight,” I say, making up anything to get her off my case.
“I’ll take those odds,” Layla says.
My phone vibrates in my lap, and I tilt it so I can read the message against the glare coming from the windows. It’s a new message from Brooke, waiting underneath the one that came in right before Amanda made me find my soul in a microwave box.
Assuming yu r dead. Pls spectrally instruct yur parents to give me my old phone back.
I’m here—doing better.
Snow day 2day. BORED. Send invasive procedure pics.
Snowing here too.
My thumbs hover over the screen, wanting to say more, thank Brooke for being a real friend. I’m not good with those moments though, even when they’re not face-to-face. Maybe I’ll get a transplant and ask them to film my surgery for her instead.
A piece of paper slides under Layla’s door, and Brandy snatches it up, waving it in the air. “Oohhh, TODAY AT THE CARDIAC CENTER!” she announces.
I groan, not even turning my head away from the storm outside. Snow is piling on the window ledge, each flake distinct until it smears into the next.
“There’s not a whole hell of a lot going on,” Brandy says, scanning the page. “‘Scrappy Over Scrabble,’” she reads. “‘Come to the common room to outwit fellow wordsters’—oh Jesus, never mind.”
“‘Outwit fellow wordsters’?” I repeat. “That’s a mouthful.”
“This bit must be in there just for us,” Brandy says, still reading. “‘Note: Please no actual scrapping.’”