I find her by the community-center roundabout, streaky mascara dried on her cheeks and the front wheels of her chair teetering precariously over the curb. I slow-clap as I plop down next to her.
“Wow. You will do anything to win therapy points. You should see Dr. Layne in there scribbling furiously on her clipboard.”
The corner of Piper’s lips lift reluctantly, but her eyes stay trained on the ground as she rocks her wheels over the curb until they’re just about to fall, and then snaps them backward.
“Don’t you have things you’re tired of talking about?” she asks.
Across the parking lot, Cora watches us from the driver’s seat of Glenn’s truck, probably trying to figure out why I’m sitting on the curb with a tearstained Piper instead of “recovering.”
“I just can’t believe you were ever friends with Snartface McGee.”
Piper wipes her face with the back of her zebra compression garments.
“Since fourth grade.” Piper turns to me, her eyes almost as pink as her sleeves. “But now she’s erased me, along with the memory of what she did.”
“What did she do?”
Piper continues to stare at the mountains now bathed in pink-hued shadows as the sun goes down behind us. Sitting at the base of her wheelchair, I can see the burns on her neck more clearly, the way they wave upward toward her face like a plume of smoke from a candle.
“This,” she says, pointing to her leg. “Well, technically, the streetlight she hit broke my leg.”
“Kenzie was the one driving?”
Piper nods. “Yeah. Crossed the median. Plowed into a pole.”
She tells me how she and Kenzie used to be inseparable, and how Kenzie had a few too many drinks on New Year’s Eve and crashed driving home. She didn’t visit Piper in the hospital, and when Piper went back to school, Kenzie turned their friends against her and looked right through her in the halls.
“She full-on ghosted me,” she says.
I shake my head in confusion.
“Wait, so if it was her fault, why does she hate you?”
“Who knows? Guilt? I became this constant reminder she didn’t want around anymore.”
The guilt of the healthy. The first time my old friends visited me in the unit, I felt it.
I was burned.
They were not.
A river of guilt between us.
I flick a jagged rock in the street with the big toe on my left hand.
“Trust me. I get it.”
“I should have known she’d take it out on you,” Piper says. “It probably kills her that I’m not alone anymore.” She holds out the golden bird charm dangling from a black rope around her neck, outlining the bird’s wings with her thumb.
“It’s cheesy, I know, but I wear this phoenix to remind myself that I can rise above all this. Just like in that song I played you, I can soar above everything—this chair, these burns, my friends cutting me out.” Piper rubs the phoenix between her fingers, her eyes still locked on the mountains. “I want to move on and never look back.”
I follow her gaze. Is it possible to move on so easily, forging ahead unhindered by yesterday’s scars? I stretch out my fingers in front of me, the tight tissue resisting.
What if you can’t escape the scars?
“You know what I think?” she says, suddenly sitting up straighter in her wheelchair. “I think we need to focus on the new part of Laynie’s new normal.”
I pick at the cuff of my compression garments where my fingers stick out, nervously waiting to hear the rest of her idea. The last time Piper got that “I’ve got a great plan” look in her eyes, I ended up on a stage, playing the starring role of leper in a circle of trust.
“Like what?”
Piper tilts her head back, thinking, her tongue clicking on the roof of her mouth. She turns to me decisively.
“Yearbook photos are next week. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Umm…if you’re thinking that there is absolutely a zero percent chance I’m getting in front of a camera, then yes.”
Piper rocks back and forth on the wheels of her chair, dismissing my protest.
“You have to have a yearbook picture. And I’m going to help you.” She claps excitedly. “That’s right—a makeover!”
Everything in me wants to tell Piper no. Why in the world would I want to commemorate this year with a yearbook photo just begging to be defaced with zombie blood dripping from my mouth or a Freddy Krueger fedora? God took a permanent marker and already went to town.
But the prospect of a picture-day makeover has eclipsed Piper’s anger, and I can’t bring myself to say no when she motions for me to kneel by her chair. She turns my head left, then right, studying my face.
“Lost cause, right?” I say.
“Not at all, dahling,” she says in a mock Southern drawl. “I don’t believe in lost causes, but I do believe in makeup.”
I shake my head. “No way. No makeup. Unless you’re going for an escaped-killer-clown vibe.”
Piper squinches up her face and clasps her fingers together, begging. “Not even mascara?”
I point to my eyes. “No eyelashes.”
Piper sighs heavily and yanks the bandana off before I can stop her.
“Then our first task is this mess you call hair.”
My right hand hides my head while I grab for my bandana with my toe-hand. Piper’s eyes land on the spot where my ear should be but says nothing about my missing pieces.
“Well, you can’t be photographed like this.” She shakes the bandana at me. “Or wearing this fashion faux pas.”
I snatch again at the bandana in vain.
“Exactly. Now you see the beauty of my no-photographs policy.”
“Not so fast.”
She nods toward Cora, who is doing a super-duper clandestine job of acting like she’s not watching us. She’s even killed her engine and rolled down her window to aid her eavesdropping.
“Will your aunt take us somewhere?”
Cora pulls up to the curb when I wave her over. Envelopes and hospital bills with big red FINAL NOTICE declarations screaming from the top of the page cover the passenger seat.
“You girls okay?”
“We need a ride,” Piper says.
“Where to?” Cora asks, gathering up all the paperwork.
Piper grins mischievously at me.
“To get Ava some new hair.”