Hazel’s POVThe days in the hospital moved strangely. Not fast, not slow. Just long in a way that made the afternoon feel like it belonged to a different day entirely, and the night feel like it had no end.I was there for two full days before the doctor came in on the morning of the third, checked my chart, pressed two fingers below my collarbone, and said I could go.Maya came the first afternoon. She brought her mother’s soup in the same flask she had carried the last time, holding it out with both hands like it was something fragile. She sat in the chair beside the bed and talked—not about anything that mattered, or at least not anything she thought I needed to worry about right then. She talked about school, about a boy in her statistics class, about a teacher who had started wearing the same shoes every single day. She kept it light, and I let her. The suspension didn’t come up. I didn’t bring it up, and she didn’t either, and that was the kindest thing she could have done for m
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