That’s Greta for you. She’s quick. What’s the point in resisting?
Besides, the pills seem to help.
They said, when I was two, that I’d be lucky to make it to six. When I was six, they said I’d be lucky to make it to ten. When I was ten, people were bewildered, and so they said sixteen.
And here comes sixteen, moving swiftly toward us.
So now, when I’m rushed to the hospital, my family has a full procedure to deal with things we’re unwilling to talk about. We actually wrote them down, just in case. My mom thinks this will make it somehow less problematic, the whole major-concerns-over-dying thing.
I have, for example, a written apology from her for the time she spanked me when I was five and I gasped and wheezed my way into a brief coma. I forgive those things. They aren’t even things. But she insists I have to carry the paper if I need to go to the hospital anyway.
My mom has a written apology from me for the entire category of brutal sarcasm. Eli has one entitled Excessive Bitchiness, Hogging of Parental Attention by Repeatedly Being Sick Unto Death but Not Actually Dying, and Variant Category: Theft of Clothing.
The one to my dad runs more along the lines of Things I Wasn’t Very Interested In, Parts 1-36.
My mom’s been—for the last many years—doing a side project alongside her normal work. She’s breeding a mouse, a kind of super mouse, which in theory will be invulnerable to various inhalable environmental toxins. It’s based on an original badass Chicagoan lab mouse, which had a breathing mutation. The plan is that the new mouse breed will have a mutation that makes them able to flip their nostrils closed and reduce their need for air, at least temporarily, combined with some various invulnerabilities to all sorts of plague vectors.
The mouse is meant to be a drug-developing step. It’s supposed to help drug companies end up with a drug that might make people who can’t breathe normal air very well figure out how to deal with it better. People like me, obviously. But there are other applications, which at least have made people willing to fund the research. If someone, for example, sets off a bomb with nerve gas? This mouse should be able to react fairly calmly, for an hour or so, which may or may not give the gas time to disperse. Originally my mom tried to make a joke about war-mice, riffing on the dormouse from Alice in Wonderland.
War-mouse. Joke fail.
My mom isn’t a supporter of war anything. She never wanted to do military applications for her research. Because obviously, for everyone you’d protect with a war-mouse drug (civilians, kids, teachers, anyone who is stuck in a war zone and at the mercy of a chemical attack) you’re also creating a version in which the attacking soldiers could potentially make themselves invulnerable to poisons they were pumping into the civilian air.
Which is to say, my mom is in massive conflict all day long. All she wanted was to create some kind of asthma drug, done large, something that would help the entire category of lung problems, emphysema, asthma, Azaray. But instead, she’s stuck developing the war-mice.
Eli’s also at the table, snipping off the bottom one-eighth inch of her hair with a pair of scissors she’s sharpened herself on the knife sharpener. She’s precise. I don’t know how she manages it, but when she’s done, the whole thing hangs like a smooth blond sheet of paper—her ends impeccably straight.
We look nothing alike. My hair’s black and knotted and my eyes, though blue, are navy blue with some gold and red swimming beneath the surface. Eli’s are the color of a barely-there sky. If this were a fairy tale, she’d straight up be the good sister, and I’d be the wicked one.
“Item One,” Eli says, without bothering to acknowledge my elder-sister superiority. “You heard thunder. We all heard thunder. I heard it from algebra. Item Two. You saw clouds. Which we all also saw. It was a storm. Item Three. You hallucinated a ship, because you’re basically side-effecting and fevery.
“There’s no way the storm spoke to you,” she concludes. “Also, there was no loudspeaker yelling your name. Just FYI.”
Possibly I got somewhat high-pitched in Mr. Grimm’s class. Possibly a scene was caused. Possibly I am known for drama. Possibly Eli is known for her amazing unhysterical nature. Even though she’s fourteen and has every right to be out of control with wrath and what used to be known as humors.
No. Even-keeled, Eli. She got her period last year and was like, Right, fine. She went straight to ballet class in a leotard, and there were no problems.
I myself have never gotten my period, which I’m actually not too upset about. Postpone the misery, I say. It’s because I’m too skinny, and have no luck gaining weight.
Clarification: by “too skinny,” I don’t mean Sexy Goth Girl in Need of Flowery Dress and Lipstick to Become Girl Who Was Always Secretly Pretty but We Never Saw It till Now. I mean: dead girl walking. Corpse-style skin, and sometimes when I cough, it’s way gross. Just saying.
I’m not sure what happened today either. My dad had to come and fetch me from the principal’s office after I screamed a couple of words regarding liberty and self-determination and window blinds. Mr. Grimm gave me a look, and told me I knew where to go. Nurse’s office or principal’s office. I rotate.
My dad met me, sympathetic even as we were both chided. There is an attempt being made to treat me not like a freak, but like everyone else. Meaning no special anything.
Beyond the special everything already in place, of course.
For example, there’s a buddy system, which means there’s presumably always someone sideways-watching my progress through the halls in case I fall down choking. I have no particular faith in this fail-safe. Couldn’t tell you who was on Aza Duty today.