by Erin Stewart
“Did you write that?” I ask.
Piper looks up at me, annoyed.
“Did you even listen to my Fire Mix? It’s the main line from that Atticus song—my anthem?” She arches her back slightly so the wings move with her shoulder blades. “I’m officially a phoenix.”
She tells me how Asad took her to a tattoo parlor after school yesterday. A niggling feeling works its way into my chest, and I’m not sure if I’m more jealous of Asad for going with her or of Piper for hanging out with Asad.
“I would have gone with you.”
“Except you don’t drive. And I distinctly remember you saying that you would never intentionally scar your body. Besides, Asad’s such a chump, he’ll do anything for anyone,” she says. “So what do you think?”
I touch the warm pink skin around the ink.
“I think it looks painful.”
“I’ve been through worse,” she says. “It’s good, though, right? Now even if I can’t walk, I can fly.”
“You’re going to walk.”
She flinches slightly when I touch the wing of the phoenix.
“You have to walk because I’m going to get up on a stage, and you’re going to give me a standing ovation.”
She cranes her neck to look at me.
“Someone’s been drinking the BS therapy Kool-Aid,” she says. “Next you’ll be telling me you’ve found your new normal.”
I kneel on the floor, picking up the biggest shards of glass with my pincer hand and dumping them in the trash.
“Not yet. But for the first time in a long time, I hope it even exists.” I smooth the volleyball picture on Piper’s desk. “I had to learn to walk again, too, you know. After the coma and after they plucked off my big toe. Both times, I wanted to give up. Know why I didn’t?”
“Because your spine wasn’t broken?”
“Because I wasn’t going to add walking to the list of things I lost in the fire.”
I leave out the part about Nurse Linda, with her thick Southern accent and her boobs as enormous as her attitude, trying to make me walk for weeks. I also don’t mention how excruciating those first steps were, the blood rushing to fill veins and capillaries that had lain dormant for months, like someone poured fire straight into my bloodstream and whooshed it downward in a burst of searing life.
“The point is, I believed I could do it, and I believe in you, too.”
Piper looks at me like I’ve grown a second head.
“Could I speak with Ava, please? You know, my glass-is-half-empty friend who throws a kick-ass pity party. Is she available? Because I don’t know this Little Miss Sunshine with rainbows shooting out her butt.”
Piper’s smirk falls the instant the door flings open. She tugs her shirt down as her mom strides into the room, but it’s too late.
Her mom jerks up Piper’s tank top. “On your spine? Seriously? After what the doctors said yesterday and you go stick needles in your spine? Are you trying to kill me? Or yourself?”
Piper tugs down her shirt.
“It’s my body.”
This doesn’t seem like a satisfactory answer to her mom, who starts to yell for someone named Frank, who stumbles into the room with bleary eyes and pillow-tousled hair.
“Look. Just look at what your daughter did to herself now.” She pulls up the shirt again despite Piper’s best efforts to keep it down. He looks at her with vacant eyes and then turns back toward the hallway.
“Wake me when she gets an infection.”
Her mom says it’s time for me to leave. Piper wiggles herself down to her chair and wheels me to the front door. Her mom stands in the hallway, arms folded, and I feel like I’m watching one of Dad’s National Geographic shows where two alpha females are about to embark on an epic battle for the pride lands.
“Life’s not a musical, right?” Piper says as I walk down the ramp, careful not to slip on the dusting of late-winter snow that’s started falling.
“Trust me, Piper. Things are going to work out, I just—”
I turn around, but she doesn’t hear me.
She’s already closed the door.
April 3
I walked for the first time
because someone else died.
Morbid, I know.
But true.
Nurse Linda tried to get me on my feet every day.
"Not today," I'd say.
"Then when?" she'd say.
"When I'm ready."
"I won't hold my breath."
And repeat.
Then, Bobby died.
Screams woke me in the night.
"He stopped fighting," Linda said.
I'd hardly known him.
The mummy next door.
White coats wheeled Bobby away.
A white sheet covered his face.
A woman clutched his "personal belongings."
I didn't know he was right there next to me
giving up.
I didn't want to give up.
I wanted to fight—
So I started with this:
I would not be wheeled out
in the middle of the night,
an anonymous face under a white sheet.
I would walk out
on my own two feet.
When Linda came in the next day,
I was already on the edge of my bed.
"I'm ready."
26
I have less than a week to prep for my audition.
Cora helps me practice, telling me to feel the lyrics and let the words sing through me. I remind her it’s high school, not Broadway.
“I’m sorry, I’m just so happy you asked me.” She plays a scale on the piano. “You’ve been so busy since going back to school. I started to feel pretty useless around here.”
“Useless? You’re a one-woman pep squad.”
She laughs. I leave out the part where I only asked for her help because Piper is indefinitely grounded for her tattoo treachery. So Cora helps me practice my audition.
When I sing it for Cora, she stops playing midsong to grab a tissue.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s just…Glenn used to sing that to Sara when she was little. I guess your grandmother used to sing it to him.”
A flash of memory takes me back to my bedroom, Mom stroking my arm.
“My mom sang it to me.” I sit down on the piano bench next to Cora. She dabs at the bottom of her eyelids, careful not to smudge her mascara.
“You sound just like her.”
“I do?” I tap a key lightly with my finger, trying to remember the exact pitch of her voice. “Sometimes I worry I’m forgetting. Like one day I’m going to wake up and her voice will just be gone. She’ll be gone.”
Cora taps a key in time with mine.
“Me too.”
“I do have a voice mail she left me,” I say. “A deeply profound message about deodorant.”
Cora laughs and grabs her phone off the top of the piano. Sara pops up on her screen in a shaky, selfie video.
“Mom. Pick me up at the south entrance today,” she says. “Don’t forget. Sooouth. Opposite of north. You’ll know it’s me because I’ll look like this—” Sara makes a ridiculous duckface with her lips in a mock-sexy pout. “Also, you gave birth to me, so there’s that.”
The video stops, freezing Sara as she blows a kiss into the camera.
“You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve watched that,” Cora says.
I can’t help smiling.
“I bet I would.”
She lost a daughter. I lost a mother. But as we sit there side by side, the differences don’t matter.
Pain is pain.
Cora starts playing again, and I finish the chorus, her notes and mine min
gling in the air, and for once, it feels like we’re singing the same song.
* * *
On the day of the audition, Piper skips volleyball to wait with me outside the auditorium. She hasn’t donned her compression garments since the tattoo, and her tops get progressively smaller by the day. It’s easy now to see her scars and her phoenix wings, flapping through the hallways like she might fly away any second.
“Aren’t you worried about how they’ll look?” I point to the scars on her arm that will probably heal all puffy without the tight grip of her garments.
She shrugs. “I’m gonna be messed up no matter what.” She looks at my bandana like it’s a betrayal. “Still no wig, huh?”
“Kenzie said I looked like a Troll doll.”
Piper groans.
“She’s the troll, and since when do we care what she thinks?”
Inside the stage door, a girl does a truly horrible falsetto at the top of her register. Asad waves as he comes down the hallway.
He squats down where I’m sitting on the floor, leaning against Piper’s wheelchair, trying to get through my history homework while I wait. Out of his backpack, he produces Dorothy’s ruby-red shoes.
“A little good-luck charm for your audition?” His black eyes capture mine. “Click your heels three times and all that jazz?”
I take the shoes and run my fingers over the bedazzled surface. Stupid Asad with his dimply smile and thoughtful gestures, constantly punching holes in my foolproof no-more-boys-for-Ava plan.
When he smiles at me like that, an insidious thought creeps in—the same barely budding idea that started when Dr. Sharp lifted my eyes: maybe after this surgery, getting on the stage won’t be the only thing that comes off my list of Things I Lost in the Fire.
Piper stiffens next to me, tossing the shoes back at Asad.
“Ava doesn’t need luck.”
But when they call my name, Piper yells at me to wait. She unclasps her phoenix necklace and beckons for me to lean down. “I have my ink wings now anyway.”
“Wait. Is this a moment of genuine Piper affection?” I say.
She pretends to punch me in the shoulder. “Yeah, I’m all broken up about it.” She wipes away fake tears. “Just look, Asad, our little girl’s all grown up.”
Asad puts one hand down on Piper’s shoulder and his other across his heart. I pick up the ruby shoes from the floor and stuff them into my bag.
A little luck never hurt anyone.
A semicircle of casting directors awaits me on the stage: Tony sits on an elevated director’s chair between a middle-aged woman who is apparently the drama adviser and the girl playing the part of the Wicked Witch. Kenzie stands in front of them, hand on hip, ready to do an audition scene together with me as Glinda and her as Dorothy.
She hands me a script and we run through about ten lines. Then, it’s time to sing.
I stand in front of the circle, trying to ignore the icy looks from Kenzie, who clearly hasn’t forgiven or forgotten my involvement in Asad’s curtain bombing. I’m singing a cappella, which makes me feel even more alone and naked.
The only way I’m doing this is to shut out the eyes staring at me, so I close my own, swallowing the growing lump in my throat. Just like in the debridement tank, I detach from my body, and before I know it, I’m whispering the final lines.
Birds fly over the rainbow
Why, then,
Oh, why
Can’t I?
My final note lingers in the air when I open my eyes. The drama teacher holds her glasses as she swipes a tissue under her eyes in a way that makes me feel even more exposed.
Tony breaks the hush, clattering his clipboard to the floor. I’m pretty sure he also swears under his breath by the way the teacher shushes him.
“Well, I’m sorry, but I’m pissed,” he says. He turns to me, like I owe him an explanation. “Why didn’t you try out at the actual auditions? I would have given you the le—”
Kenzie stands up abruptly, cutting him off midword.
“He’ll let you know,” she says to me curtly. Tony continues to speak in hushed, hot tones to the teacher as I gather up my stuff.
If my life were a musical, this would be the scene where the judges and I break into a choreographed dance. They’d lift me on their shoulders while actual bluebirds soared over rainbowed skies.
Instead, Kenzie swings the door open and gestures for me to leave.
Life is not a musical.
* * *
Piper and I are sitting on the curb, waiting for our rides, when Tony comes up behind us.
“Ava?”
“Yeah.” I stand up but still only come to his chest.
“The part is yours,” he says. “It’s not a huge role, of course, but it will be good experience for next year when you try out at the real auditions.”
I smile and shake my head.
“One step at a time.”
“So are you in?” He sticks out his hand. “And you do realize you can’t sing with your eyes closed in the play, though, right?”
“Definitely,” I say, shaking his hand. “I’m in.”
Piper shrieks so loud I have to shush her.
I stop him as he turns to leave.
“Just so you know, I’m having surgery. On my eyes. So by opening night, things will be a little…better.”
Tony’s lips slope downward beneath his goatee into the same miffed expression from the audition room.
“With that voice, no one’s going to be thinking about your face,” he says. “And neither should you.”
Piper slaps my butt after Tony walks away. I shield my eyes from the slanting afternoon light so I can see more than her silhouette. She’s smiling wide, bigger than I’ve seen her smile in a while, actually.
So even though I’m terrified about what I’ve just agreed to, I slap on a smile, too.
“You know what this means, don’t you?” I say.
“That Kenzie’s gonna have a coronary?”
“That. And you have seven weeks to perfect your standing ovation.”
27
Tony assigns the girl with the pixie hair to run lines with me for the next few weeks at rehearsal. Her name is Sage and she has the exact same temperament as a Labradoodle—bouncy, energetic, and so eager to please that you kind of want to turn a hose on her.
Turns out, when she’s not in Kenzie’s shadow, she’s nice and way too enthusiastic about helping me learn my lines. She says she’s glad to be doing something other than sitting around as Kenzie’s understudy.
“She likes me as her backup so she doesn’t have to worry about someone poisoning her lunch to get her part,” she says.
Lethal lunch? What kind of drama have I jumped into here? On the stage, Asad hammers together Dorothy’s farmhouse. Part of me wishes I were still black-shirted, helping behind the curtains and swapping old-school Broadway lines instead of learning my own.
But with Sage’s endless energy as my guide, I learn my songs (a hyperactive version of “Welcome to Munchkinland” and a cheesy-to-the-max song called “Already Home”) in a few weeks, and melt into the flow of rehearsal. Taking my mark, reading my lines, everything comes whooshing back to me like a wake-up call from my old life. Even Kenzie stays mostly out of my way, minus the occasional snide remark about how much I’m “improving” or how I’m “trying real hard.”
Sage tells me Kenzie fumed for a week over Asad’s curtain-plummeting trick.
“Not that we didn’t deserve it,” she says. She smiles genuinely, sitting cross-legged on the stage. “Of course, it doesn’t help that you stole her friend or that Tony’s been telling everyone you should have been Dorothy.”
She leans in closer to me, her eyes darting around for spies.
“Before the accident, she wasn’t quite
so—”
“Demonic?” I offer.
“Intense,” Sage whispers. “I guess that crash kind of changed all of us.”
She pulls up her sleeve, showing a thick, wrinkled purply line wrapping around her forearm.
“You were in the car, too?”
“Yeah. Piper got it the worst, obviously. But we all have scars.”
* * *
As the surgery date nears on my calendar and the ground outside begins to thaw, I feel more like myself than I have since I woke up. Cora even tells me one night during lotioning hour that I’ve been singing in the shower. I mutter an embarrassed apology, but she just laughs.
“Don’t you dare stop,” she says. “It’s nice to have music in this house again.”
One afternoon in mid-April, Piper and I huddle over a round table in the library during study hall. She’s whizzing through her precalculus homework, and I’m trying to figure out how to write a five-page paper about a five-line sonnet for English, when Asad slaps a flyer down on the table between us.
“Saturday night, ladies. Drama event of the season.”
A girl at the table next to us whispers, “Shhh…”
Piper shushes her back and snaps up the paper, takes one look and pushes it toward Asad, shaking her head.
“I’m not really in a partying kind of mood,” she says. “Especially one at Kenzie’s house.”
Piper hasn’t been in the mood for anything lately. Like yesterday, when a boy in the hall whistled and made some bestiality joke about her bird tattoo, she barely noticed. I mean, she rammed her wheelchair into his calf, but her heart wasn’t in it.
I pick up the flyer. PRESHOW SOIREE. This party could be just the thing to bring back the go-ahead-I-dare-ya, middle-finger-to-the-universe Piper, who would go to the party for no other reason than to screw with Kenzie.