The real emergency this afternoon wasn’t my near faint at Ada’s, which I’ve since—thankfully—recovered from (more or less). The real emergency is unfolding right now on the dining room table, loaded down with large plastic mailers. No doubt, the rest of my sun-blocking wardrobe bought on extra-super-special-clearance has arrived. I can only imagine what these will look like. (Puce! Tan! Mustard!)

Let me pass out now.

My parents have a different plan, of course. As soon as the house alarm alerts that Josh and I have come home, they emerge from the kitchen, Dad clenching a (filched) Minecraft Creeper cookie, snagged from the batch I decorated last night for the bake sale. I’m too preoccupied by this imminent parental crisis to grill Dad on how much inventory he’s consumed.

“What’s wrong?” Mom asks, eyes boring into every visible pore on my skin.

“Nothing,” I start to say, because it’s true (more or less). I feel eighty percent better now, but I know my pat answer will never satisfy my parents. To conserve energy, I sink onto the plush sofa in the living room and tell them, “What I mean is, I feel a lot better now. And I already talked to Dr. Anderson.” See? Crisis handled by yours truly, no parental intervention needed.

“About what?” Dad flicks off the light switch as if a single moment under the lights will kill me. Thirty minutes ago, it felt like the one above me at Ada’s just might. Even though I feel mostly better, I sag against the back of the couch and bask in the darkness, blessed darkness, that now floods the living room.

“You’re red.” Mom stands in front of me and asks, “Do we need to take you back to Children’s?”

“No!” I sigh, and straighten immediately. Of course my parents would choose this day to leave work at the exact same time. I make a note to tell Josh that pre-crisis cognition is the superpower Persephone ought to have—the ability to sniff out a crisis before it even happens.

“We were at Ada’s,” I tell my parents, “and I just had a … thing.”

“A thing? What kind of thing?” Mom asks, snatching her water glass from the dining table and shoving it at me. “Drink.”

“Mom.”

Dad directs the question at Josh. “What kind of thing?”

Josh responds to my parents easily as if he’s known them his whole life, “Viola felt a little sick. So I drove her home while she called her doctor.”

“Oh, honey,” Mom says, sitting next to me.

“Then she started feeling a lot better,” Josh continues, “but her car’s still parked there. I can drive one of you back to pick it up?”

“That’d be great, later,” says Dad before dropping into the armchair across from me. “How are you feeling, kiddo?”

“Fine, now.” Except that Josh is standing by himself. So I scoot to make room for him and pat the empty spot on my other side.

“We should call Dr. Anderson,” Mom suggests, already pulling out her phone.

“Already done,” I repeat with, I admit, satisfaction that grows when my parents look stunned. “I read the information that Dr. Anderson gave us at the hospital”—(correction: finally read the information, after exiling the sheet to the crumble-covered bottom of my messenger bag)—“then I called him to fact-check, and he agreed that maybe driving could have triggered my … episode. So I’ll use all my birthday and Christmas money that I’ve saved up to tint the windows. He agreed that made sense, and he’d be happy to sign whatever medical form I need to turn in to the state. I’ll ask Auntie Ruth, who can do the work. Done.”

My parents exchange a look, half-impressed, but still mostly anxious. What more can I say to reassure them? Josh squeezes my hand. That unexpected touch so completely blindsides me, so completely distracts me, I literally have to catch my breath.

Despite my plan, Mom still embarks on her own fact-finding mission. “How much time did you spend outside?”

I sigh. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“I walked, like, a couple of steps, then I drove,” I say. “And then we were inside at Ada’s for about an hour. I wore a bunch of layers, and I had my hat on, too. Everything UPF 50.”

“Hmm.” Dad’s leg fidgets up and down.

What now? Seriously, what now? Whatever plans my parents are conspiring, Dad just says, “Well, you should go rest now. I’ll get your car with Josh.”

To his credit, Josh looks like he wants to say a thousand things to me, but not one of them is panic to be driving alone with my dad in his pickup. Out of nowhere, Mom does her “oh!” thing and tears out of the living room for reasons unknown. Thankfully, Dad follows her, leaving the two of us alone.

“Doing okay, Ultra?” Josh asks.

“Mortified.”

“Don’t be. My parents can’t say two sentences without getting into a fight. It’s, like, tension, all the time. Yours are actually partners, like, they really work together. I mean, not just work work, but—”

“Parenting together? Nagging together? Publicly humiliating together?”

“Caring.” His hand touches my knee. Then stays on my knee. That touch, that nickname, accomplish what ten hours of sleep, followed by gallons of chai tea could never do: They vanquish all signs of weariness.

My own words, I don’t trust, not when my insides are warm and discombobulated. So I simply hope he’s engaged in the same silent planning as me. Why, yes, kiss me, Thor. To prod him to this logical conclusion, I look straight into his eyes and hold his gaze, one second, then two. My lips part. His eyes dip to my mouth. I sigh. And there it is: The Moment. Anticipation itself has weight and heft and four dimensions: here, now, you, me. In The Moment, time itself becomes part of the kiss, a prelude to our yes. Josh leans in; I do, too. I can almost feel the kiss before it happens: now, now, now.

And then, wouldn’t you know it, my parents clatter down the hall before returning to the living room, deforesting The Moment of any sign or sigh of life. In our own silent partnership, Josh and I rear from each other at the same time.

“Ta-da!” Mom says, brandishing a zippered pink pouch of an emergency kit. An emergency kit. She bestows said emergency kit on Josh. “For you.”

I.

Kid.

You.

Not.

“Talk later,” Josh says to me, gamely holding the kit bulging with I’m-afraid-to-know-what.

As soon as Dad and Josh leave, Mom plunks herself down on the sofa, unintentionally bouncing me on the seat cushion like we’ve hit a pothole. I stifle a groan because only now do I notice that my body does, in fact, hurt.

“He seems like a great boy. See, honey?” Mom smiles radiantly bright, inflicting damage without even meaning it. (An emergency kit!) She says, “See? Not everything needs to change.”

But everything has. I feel it deep in my bones, which now ache like I’ve aged eighty years.