I told her I’d taken it almost every day, which felt true, but wasn’t. “I felt like it was making me worse,” I eventually confessed.

“Aza, you’re an intelligent young woman. Surely you don’t think drinking hand sanitizer while hospitalized for a lacerated liver marks forward progress in your mental health journey.” I just stared at her. “As I’m sure they explained to you, drinking hand sanitizer is dangerous—not only because of the alcohol, but because it contains chemicals that when ingested can kill you. So we’re not moving forward with the idea that the medicine you stopped taking was making you worse.” She said it all so forcefully that I just nodded.

“And the second thing that happened is that you experienced in the accident a serious trauma, and this would be challenging for anyone.” I kept staring. “We need to get you on a different medication, one that works better for you, that you can tolerate, and that you’ll take.”

“None of them work.”

“None of them have worked yet,” she corrected.

—

Dr. Singh came by each morning, and then in the afternoon another doctor visited to assess my liver situation. Both were a relief if for no other reason than my omnipresent mother was forced to leave the room briefly.

On the last day, Dr. Singh sat down next to the side of my bed and placed a hand on my shoulder. She’d never touched me before. “I recognize that a hospital setting has probably not been great for your anxiety.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Do you feel you are a threat to yourself?”

“No,” I said. “I’m just really scared and having a lot of invasives.”

“Did you consume hand sanitizer yesterday?”

“No.”

“I’m not here to judge you, Aza. But I can only help if you’re being honest.”

“I am being honest. I haven’t.” For one thing, they’d taken the wall-mounted sanitizer station out of my room.

“Have you thought about it?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t have to be afraid of that thought. Thought is not action.”

“I can’t stop thinking about getting C. diff. I just want to be sure that I’m not . . .”

“Drinking hand sanitizer won’t help.”

“But what will help?”

“Time. Treatment. Taking your meds.”

“I feel like a noose is tightening around me and I want out, but struggling only cinches the knot. The spiral just keeps tightening, you know?”

She looked me dead in the eye. I thought she might cry or something, the way she was looking at me. “Aza, you’re going to survive this.”

—

Even after they let me go home, Dr. Singh still came to my house twice a week to check on my progress. I had switched to a different medication, which Mom made sure I took every morning, and I wasn’t allowed to get up except to go to the bathroom lest I re-lacerate my liver.

I was out of school for two weeks. Fourteen days of my life reduced to one sentence, because I can’t describe anything that happened during those days. It hurt, all the time, in a way language could not touch. It was boring. It was predictable. Like walking a maze you know has no solution. It’s easy enough to say what it was like, but impossible to say what it was.

Daisy and Davis both tried to visit, but I wanted to be alone, in bed. I didn’t read or watch TV; neither could adequately distract me. I just lay there, almost catatonic, as my mother hovered, perpetually near, breaking the silence every few minutes with a question-phrased-as-a-statement. Each day is a little better? You’re feeling okay? You’re improving? The inquisition of declarations.

I didn’t even turn on my phone for a while, a decision endorsed by Dr. Singh. When I finally did power it up, I felt an insoluble fear. I both wanted to find a lot of text messages and didn’t.

Turns out I had over thirty messages—not just from Daisy and Davis, although they had written, but also from Mychal and other friends, and even some teachers.

—

I returned to school on a Monday morning in early December. I wasn’t sure if the new medication was working, but I also wasn’t wondering whether to take it. I felt ready, like I had returned to the world—not my old self, but myself nonetheless.

Mom drove me to school. Harold had been totaled, and anyway, I was too scared of driving.

“Excited or nervous?” Mom asked me. She drove with both hands on the steering wheel, ten and two o’clock.

“Nervous,” I said.

“Your teachers, your friends, they all understand, Aza. They just want you well and will support you one hundred percent, and if they don’t, I will crush them.”

I smiled a little. “Everyone knows, is all. That I went crazy or whatever.”

“Oh, sweetie,” she said. “You didn’t go crazy. You’ve always been crazy.” Now I laughed, and she reached over to squeeze my wrist.

Daisy was waiting on the front steps. Mom stopped the car, and I got out, the weight of the backpack still tender against my ribs. It was a cold day, but the sun was bright even though it had just risen, and I kept blinking away the light. It had been a while since I’d spent much time outside.

Daisy looked different. Her face brighter somehow. It took me a second to realize she’d gotten a haircut, a just-under-the-chin bob that looked really good.

“Can I hug you without lacerating your liver?”

“I like the new hairstyle,” I said as we hugged.

“You’re sweet, but we both know it’s a disaster.”

“Listen,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”

“Me too, but we have forgiven each other and now we will live happily ever after.”

“Seriously, though,” I said. “I feel terrible about—”

“I do, too,” she said. “You gotta read my new story, man. It’s a fifteen-thousand-word apology set on postapocalyptic Jedha. What I want to say to you, Holmesy, is that yes, you are exhausting, and yes, being your friend is work. But you are also the most fascinating person I have ever known, and you are not like mustard. You are like pizza, which is the highest compliment I can pay a person.”

“I’m just really sorry, Daisy, for not being—”

“Jesus Christ, Holmesy, you can sure hold a grudge against yourself. You are my favorite person. I want to be buried next to you. We’ll have a shared tombstone. It’ll read, ‘Holmesy and Daisy: They did everything together, except the nasty.’ Anyway, how are you?” I shrugged. “Want me to keep talking?” I nodded. “You know how sometimes people will say, like, oh, she really loves the sound of her voice? I do seriously love the sound of my voice. I’ve got a voice for radio.” She turned and started walking up the stairs to get in line for the metal detectors. “So I know what you’re wondering: Daisy, are you still dating Mychal? Where’s your car? What happened to your hair? The answers are no, sold, and a cut became necessary after Elena intentionally put three pieces of chewed bubble gum in my hair while I was sleeping. It’s been a long two weeks, Holmesy. Should I elaborate?”

I nodded.

“With pleasure,” she answered as we cleared the metal detectors. “So with Mychal it really boiled down to my need to be young and wild and free—like, I had this near-death experience and then thought, Do I really want to waste my youth in a capital-R Relationship? And so I was, like, ‘Let’s see other people,’ and he was, like, ‘No,’ and I was, like, ‘Please,’ and he was, like, ‘I want to be in a monogamous relationship,’ and I was, like, ‘I just don’t want the weight of this, like, Thing dominating my life,’ and he was, like, ‘I’m not a thing,’ and then we broke up. I think technically he dumped me in the end, but it was one of those things where you’d need, like, a three-judge panel to determine who was technically at fault.

“Anyway, then with the car, it turns out that cars are expensive to own and also it turns out that they can hurt you, so I got a refund because I had it less than sixty days, and now I’m just going to Uber everywhere for the rest of my life, because then it’s kind of like I have every car, and also as a rich person I deserve to be chauffeured. Should I keep going?”