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angle. “So … why are you here?”
    I stammer through “Motor … spatial”—I make a motion with my hands like teasing out a Jenga puzzle piece—“issues.”
    â€œOh.” Pink shrugs and begins to set up the bag of radioactive fluid to stick in my arm. I’m startled to see that it’s bright blue, and I’m now a little scared.
    Pink tells me to lie down, not to move. After she links my arm to this bag of fluid that I really don’t want inside me, she turns the lights off and tells me to close my eyes and stay calm. This is my penultimate test; everyone keeps poking me and prodding me and telling me I have cancer or a rare neurological condition but that I must stay still and remain calm.
    My youngest sister, Marni, is the only one available to pick me up after my PET scan.
    Getting Marni to agree to give me a ride is like physically ripping a train off the tracks with your bare arms. She is eighteen and has better things to do than pick up her twenty-six-year-old sister from the hospital. I’m certain that she’ll be late and quietly seething. Things have been tense between us since earlier this summer, when I spotted something anatomically amiss under her shirt and blurted out “Are your nipples pierced?” in front of our mom. But here, in this dark closet, I must not think unnerving thoughts. I can feel the cold neon poison traveling through my circuitry. I am tired, weepy, scared, detached, and amused, and I am doing my best to remain calm.
    Pink returns to flip on the lights. She walks me into a large room with a machine shaped like a doughnut and explains that I am to lie still inside it on a plastic plank as they take pictures of my brain. The blue tracer will highlight in the images the parts of my brain that are working.
    I already know what it is that I don’t know: how long an hour is, how wide a doorway, how to find the peanut butter in the supermarket, how to calculate a tip, how to tie my shoes correctly, how to get back home without getting lost on the way. How do you explain how long an hour is to someone? How do you describe the passage of sixty minutes; two sitcoms or maybe one cable drama? What can you get done in an hour? How long is an hour to wait? Have I been at the hospital for more than an hour this afternoon?
    What I do know: an hour is usually too far to drive somewhere last minute. It’s not enough time to get much schoolwork done. It’s very, very, very late if you were supposed to meet someone the hour beforehand. It’s the amount of time I give myself to get ready in the morning. Sometimes it’s too much time to get ready; sometimes it’s not enough.
    Standing outside of the glass doors of the hospital while waiting for Marni to pick me up, I watch a woman wheel her IV drip bag through the small rose garden by the parking lot. She repeatedly navigates her cigarette between a maze of crisscrossing tubes and into her mouth.

 
    June 13, 2007
    Neuropsychiatric Inventory
    This is the same battery of tests that I’ve been given since elementary school, copying shapes, defining vocabulary words, some basic math, a few memory games. They’re supposed to measure concentration, reasoning, problem solving, and memory. When I was younger, the tests weren’t explained much beyond the reassurance that it’s all to help make school easier for me, so I shouldn’t be nervous about them. The eraser on my pencil always tears through the same rough brown scratch paper that I’m given every time to figure out the arithmetic problems on. I still remember the pride that I felt during my first round of exams in elementary school when the tester held up a picture of an Asian-style building, asking me to name it, and “pagoda” jumped out of my mouth.
    It usually takes a couple days to complete the tests, but today we’re going to get them done in one long day. I’ve never been