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Amanda flips over a piece of paper. “Your first responders said that you fell out a window. Can you tell me if that’s true?”

“Are you even supposed to be talking to me?” I ask her, the first synapses waking up inside my head to fire in irritation. “I’m a minor.”

“I have permission from your parents to be here,” Amanda says. “They’re very worried about you, Sasha.”

“Where is here?” I ask, glancing around the room again. I appear to have it to myself, which is a blessing. I don’t think I could stand listening to someone else’s noises with only a length of curtain in between us.

“You’re in the trauma ward at Stillwell Hospital,” she says. “Life flight brought you here from county. They didn’t have the necessary equipment to—”

“Put me back together again?”

Amanda only looks away from me, back down at the file balanced on her knee. She’s even blushing a little, like maybe she shouldn’t have said that.

“How old are you?” I ask her.

“Twenty-two,” she says, as if the gulf between seventeen and twenty-two is a vast thing I can’t possibly comprehend.

“Did you always want to be a social worker?” I ask.

“We really should be talking about you instead,” she says, eyes still on the papers as if they might provide a question for her to blurt before I come up with another one.

“What kind of a degree do you have? Where did you go to school? How long does it take to get certified in what you do?”

I know the answers because it’s something Lilly considered. They are: associate’s, community college, and not long. Someone with that kind of pedigree is not going to sit upright while I’m on my back and grill me about my personal choices.

Amanda clears her throat, going for a do-over. “Your parents know I’m speaking with you, and they’re very concerned about your fall.”

She says fall like I’m supposed to correct her.

Someone who is being evasive would concoct a story of how it happened, impossibly, while brushing their hair, tripping on piled clothes, or while performing some complicated dance move that built up speed right before meeting resistance. But I’m not a liar, and I’m not ashamed of what I did.

Because I didn’t do it.

“I didn’t fall out the window; I jumped,” I say, watching as her pen scratches across the file still on her knee, the writing a sloppy mess she’ll have to type up later. I could offer her the little table on wheels by my bedside, meant to hold nothing more substantial than cups of Jell-O. But I don’t.

There’s a knock on the door so tentative it has to be a nurse and not a doctor. Amanda looks to me for approval before giving permission for her to enter. This nurse is wearing scrubs with superheroes all over them, a mix of DC and Marvel that would have Heath declaring blasphemy if I didn’t shoot him a death glare first. He and his friends have been banned from geek philosophy in my presence.

There’s a second stab in my middle, like the tree branch might have scraped across organs before they took it out, microscopic cells rebuilding what Mother Nature damaged in my fall from grace.

“Are you sure that I’m okay?” I ask the nurse, her mouth opening in no doubt what was going to be an obvious statement like, “Look who’s awake,” as if she or Amanda have narcolepsy and were surprised to find themselves conscious.

Instead of answering, the nurse glances to Amanda for guidance. To her credit there’s no good way to handle that question. I have more things inside of me right now than the last time Isaac came over, and by the feel of it, my right ear is about half an inch higher than my left. Also the only person who has entered my room so far is a mental health worker so the safe answer probably is that no, she’s not sure I’m okay. But you don’t just say that to someone.

You also don’t just call people female dogs, but I’ll bring that up with the interested parties later.

“How do you mean, Sasha?” Amanda asks, sparing the nurse.

I wave the question away, suddenly tired. My head feels like a half-full water balloon, the kind you can squeeze really hard on one side but the other bulges out, ready to burst. I can open only one eye, the other swollen and heavy, my pulse a distinct beat coursing through puffy flesh. The nurse smiles at me and hooks a bag of something clear into my IV.

“For the pain,” she says.

Pain. It was an echo when I woke up, a voice already spent in an empty room. But it’s been growing while I talked to Amanda. I settle into my pillow as my vision grows fuzzy, noticing the tiny professional frown on her face when the nurse glances at my heart monitor.

“What—” I begin.

“I need you to rate your pain on a scale of zero to ten,” she says, pulling a rectangle of cardboard from the plastic holder at the foot of my bed.

The diagram she’s holding shows a series of faces, the one on the far left the ubiquitous happy face seen on everything from denim jackets to bumper stickers. His smile flattens as the faces evolve on their journey to the right, heating from a mellow orange to a burning red, mouth a wide O of pain, eyes squeezed shut like bird tracks in the snow. I can’t help but notice that the red face with the number ten underneath it has a worn spot on its cheek from years of people touching it, maybe mistaking it for a cherry scratch and sniff.