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“I think it’s in the pile of clothes on the floor,” I tell him.

“I guess you better go get it then,” he says, rolling over to pin me to the bed.

“You get it,” I tell him.

Neither of us gets it.

I walk Isaac to the back door afterward, where there’s a bit of lingering and kissing despite the cold rain starting to fall. I say something about him riding all the way back home in the weather but he shrugs it off, tells me it’s worth it and disappears into the dark like the antihero I have to remind myself he is. There’s a light coming from under Layla’s door, so I keep my promise, knocking before slipping into her room.

“Hey.” She looks up from her book, eyes heavy with the sleep she’s denying herself as she waits up for me.

“Hey,” I say back, trying to keep my tone light as I take the chair by her bed.

Layla looks awful. I didn’t know black people could go pale, but she definitely isn’t her normal skin tone, and her fingers are trembling in a way I don’t like as she sets aside her bodice-ripper paperback.

“So, dish,” she says, but I shake my head.

“You sure? You . . . sorry, but you look rough.”

“Says the girl with half her face sewn back on,” she shoots back.

“Which should carry even more weight,” I say.

“Meh.” She waves aside my concern. “I stayed up too late last night. Had to see if the heroine got her hero. Same story tonight, just in real life.”

“If you’re sure . . .”

“Yep, but first things first. Did you take care of the dirty laundry?”

“Literally and figuratively,” I nod.

“Okay.” She leans back in her bed, eyes closed. “Tell me your love story. What’s his name? How did you meet?”

I start slow, telling her about how my sister fell for him first, but I might be following suit. Her eyes get big and I know she assumes that’s why my twin threw me out a window, and I let her think it. I talk about Heath and our antiseptic relationship, how nothing he ever did touched me—and I mean that in all the ways.

Layla smiles at that. “So this Isaac, he your first?”

“Yeah,” I say, laying claim to it. “You ever?”

She smirks. “I wish. Mom’s been helicoptering me since I was in fifth grade. Even if there was a boy interested in having sex with a flat-chested girl who might die right in the middle, he’d also have to be okay with my mom standing right there with a defibrillator.”

I snort—there’s no other word for it—and Layla laughs along with me, though it leaves her short of breath.

“There’s somebody though, right?” I ask, and Layla shrugs, her stick-thin shoulders poking against the blanket as she does.

“Maybe there’s a boy,” she says. “Maybe I met him at a camp for kids like me, the kind where you don’t go for long hikes or do trust falls, because we were all fragile things. Maybe we write each other letters instead of texting, so that we’ve each got something that the other actually touched, in case it’s the last one that’ll come. Maybe he got his heart, and it’s a fine, strong one. Maybe he’s waiting on me so that we can meet again someday, the same people we were before, but now with more time ahead of us than what’s behind. Maybe that’s why I haven’t decided to die just yet. Maybe that’s my love story.”

“Yeah,” I say, thinking about my life, two stark columns of good and bad, yes and no. “Yeah, maybe.”

twenty-five

I could die today.

Technically I could die any day, for no reason at all, so it seems like the chances will be much higher when my veins are full of chemicals, my senses unresponsive, and my torso splayed open like the frog I dissected in seventh grade.

Mom and Dad do a great job of not talking about it when they pick me up from the cardiac center, grabbing my bag like we’re going on a camping trip, except this one happens all indoors and under sterile conditions. Nobody says this could be the last time I am outside, this could be the last time I ride in a car, this could be the last time I bite my fingernails, this could be the last time I take a drink of water.

But I’m thinking it with every small thing, all the little insignificant moments that make up an hour, a day, a life. All those things I took from Shanna with a kick of my fetal foot, tearing her umbilical cord away from her body and making sure she never had any of those moments. Until she took them back from me. A life for a life. I’m angry with my sister and her crappy heart, but I’m worried about her too. I don’t know how the LVAD will affect her, if it will give her strength or sap what she has left.