Fighting For Normal

“Sloane.”The way Dad said it was the tell. Not the sharp version, not the one that meant I was late or had left something in the driveway. The careful one. The one he used when he already had a read on the situation and was giving me the first move.I took a bite of egg.“I’ve had a slight fever. Two days, nothing serious. I was going to say something if it hadn’t cleared up by this morning.”He didn’t answer right away. The range hood was off, which meant he’d been up long enough to not need the noise anymore. His case file was open beside the stove, coffee still steaming next to it. Bernard was sprawled across the floor between the island and the range, occupying more tile than seemed geometrically possible, thumping his tail without bothering to lift his head.The kitchen smelled like coffee and something herby from the eggs, which meant Dad had actually looked at the spice shelf instead of defaulting to salt. The pendant lights were on over the island, warm and low. Outside the wi

Stetson was already in the hallway when I opened my door.Basketball shorts, old soccer tournament shirt, hair flat on one side. His phone was in his hand but he wasn’t looking at it. He was looking at me. The hallway was dark, the only light coming from the thin line under Dad and Pops’ door at the end of the hall, which meant someone was already awake in there, which meant I hadn’t been as quiet as I thought.“How long?” he asked.“I don’t know. A while.”He looked at my left leg. I was shifting my weight without meaning to and he caught it the way he always caught things, before he’d fully processed what he was seeing. “How bad?”“Bad enough.”He turned and knocked on Dad and Pops’ door, two knocks, and pushed it open.The ER at 2am was a different world. Fluorescent and cold, moving at two speeds at once, urgent in some places and completely stalled in others. The waiting area was full of people wearing the same expression, that glaze that sets in when you’ve been there long enough

Pops said yes to the truck without asking why.Which meant Noelle got the passenger seat and Chandler and I were in the back, which was fine. That was just how it sorted. It had nothing to do with anything.The drive-in was twenty minutes outside town, past the point where the streetlights gave up and the sky opened the way it only did when you got far enough from everything. Emory drove himself and Maekynzie and Tinsley in his mom’s Subaru and somehow beat us there, which he credited to superior navigation and which Maekynzie credited to two yellow lights.The lot was already half-full when we pulled in, cars and trucks nosed up to the low speaker poles, lawn chairs and blankets arranged in beds and on hoods. It smelled like popcorn and cut grass and gasoline and that outdoor-night smell that didn’t have a name but meant summer was still trying. Two kids in front of us were arguing about which spot had the best angle on the screen. An older couple had a full folding table set up besid

The PET scan required fasting from midnight. Pops had offered to skip breakfast.I told him not to.He cracked the egg shells with more force than necessary. The skillet hissed. The coffee pot gurgled. I sat at the counter with my hands around a glass of water and watched him cook and neither of us said anything about why I wasn’t eating.The PET tech tightened the strap across my waist and told me to hold still.I held still.The tracer injection had been twenty minutes ago, cold going in, and now my whole body felt slightly removed from itself, like someone had turned the volume down on my nerve endings without touching the dial. There was a metallic taste at the back of my throat that the tech had told me was normal. It didn’t taste normal. It tasted like the inside of a machine.The table slid forward. The ring of the scanner circled me and I stared at the black curve above and let my mind go blank, which was the closest I could get to peace in a room like this. My left leg ached f

The pizza arrived at seven and the room was already loud.Noelle had claimed my bed, which she always did, and was currently using my pillow to argue a point she’d been making for the last ten minutes about something that had happened in Emory’s Environmental Science class on Friday. Emory was on the floor with his back against the bed frame disputing every single detail with the energy of someone who had been waiting all week to dispute it, sandy hair towel-dried and called done the way it always was. Maekynzie was cross-legged by the window doing something with her hair that required both hands and a specific kind of concentration she apparently couldn’t apply to the conversation at the same time, chocolate curls pulled through her fingers in sections, which hadn’t stopped her from having opinions about it. Tinsley was near the door with a throw blanket pulled around her shoulders, contributing exactly one comment per five minutes, each one somehow landing harder than everything else