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“What?” I demand.

“Honey—” Mom begins, but I cut her off with a raised hand. She’s a nice person, which means she’s really terrible at delivering bad news, all the candy-coating making you not notice the rotten center of the words coming out of her mouth. Dad has his uses, the deep practicality I inherited making even bitter truth a quick process.

“So what is it?” I ask him.

“The doctors are concerned that your heart condition is urgent enough for you to need a transplant,” he says.

My hands go up to my chest in reflex, fingers curling into small fists. “But that would mean Shanna—”

“Shhhhh,” Mom hisses at me, and gets up to close the door to my room. “Don’t.”

“Sasha,” Dad says carefully, using the same tone I’ve heard over the phone with people who made rather large income tax return errors. “You probably won’t last long without a heart transplant, and there are certain conditions you have to fulfill in order to be eligible for a donor organ.”

“You have to be healthy—other than your heart, of course,” Mom pipes up.

“Check,” I say, hands still covering my chest where I can feel my sister beating erratically, her tempo lost.

“You can’t abuse alcohol or drugs,” Dad says, avoiding my eyes.

“I don’t,” I say. “What? I don’t!” I insist when I see Mom frowning at the floor like maybe it had suggested otherwise.

“The last thing . . . honey,” she says. “You have to be mentally sound.”

“Check,” I repeat, daring them to contradict me.

They share another look before Dad clears his throat.

“There’s some concern about how you came to fall out the window,” he says. “But your mother and I talked, and we think we’ve managed to convince the doctors that it was an accident.”

“Okay,” I say, deciding not to tell him I already informed Amanda otherwise.

“It also means you can’t talk about what you think is going on with your heart,” Mom says. “To anyone.”

“I said something to the medics,” I admit.

Dad shrugs. “You were in shock.”

Mom nods in complete agreement. “If they suspect you’re not mentally competent, you won’t get a transplant and—”

“And I die,” I finish for her. “And if I do get a transplant, Shanna dies.” As do nights sitting on trestle bridges, and moonlit meetings with Isaac. Will I even have the memories of what we did together, if Shanna goes?

Mom sighs, looks to Dad for help.

“See that, right there?” He points at me, as if there’s an incriminating word bubble hanging over my head. “You can’t do that.”

“I’ve been doing some reading. . . .” Mom rustles in a bag at her side, pulling out some pages covered in her handwriting. I notice it’s a different bag than the one she put the heart structure brochure in, which makes me wonder if this is going to be like my childhood: music lesson bag, pool bag, a briefly used karate bag. Except now one has copies of my X-rays and the other a well-thumbed Diagnostic Stastistical Manual.

“Delusional disorder,” she begins, touching the tips of her fingers to the paper to following along, “is one of the less common psychotic dis—”

“Psychotic?” I yell just as a nurse sticks her head in my room.

“How are we feeling today?” she asks.

I’ve always hated using plural pronouns to reference a single person. It feels especially irritating right now since it might actually be accurate, even if I can’t convince anyone else of that fact.

“Psychotic,” I answer, repeating myself.

The nurse smiles as if I’d said just fine and pulls my covers back. “Let’s see about that echocardiogram,” she says, as if we were all curious about it in the first place.