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reduced the pain and made breathing easier. The blood on my face had dried, and my lips and cheeks felt stiff and swollen. A series of black glass doors that read EMERGENCY slid open for us, and signs for check-in led into a brightly lit waiting room with rows of padded chairs and tables, where a few old people sat quietly reading. There were almost no signs of other people’s emergencies except for a small boy who sat beside his parents holding a white compress stained with blood to his head. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked my sister when we sat down across from him.
    â€œI’m just fine,” Jenny said. She took off her puffy winter coat, which she did right away whenever she entered a place because she hated to appear fat. She wore a pink sweater and white Levi’s, clothes that looked new and expensive despite the fact that my mother had bought them secondhand. For some reason, clothes always looked new when Jenny wore them. She was a pretty girl with long curly hair that reached the small of her back. She made sure a strand or two hung down the side of her face, aware that this gave her what she called “girl appeal,” which meant something like sex appeal, though as a fourteen-year-old freshman in high school, she hadn’t yet developed. She was still too flat to need bras and didn’t have much shape in her hips. All the same, she acted like an adolescent girl, sealing herself away for hours in the bathroom, arguing with my mother about how a young girl should wear her hair, and reading women’s magazines, one of which she picked up now and opened while she talked to the boy across from her.
    â€œThey’re going to have to use a needle,” the kid said. “I need stitches and I might have a concussion.”
    â€œOuch,” Jenny said, though she didn’t of course really feel his pain. She’d just said that to be a charming, conversational girl, which she often tried to be. On the front of her magazine, a woman looked out at us, her eyes blue and hungry, and her hair flung back and wind tossed. “My brother’s hurt, too. He did something to his shoulder. He dislocated it, we think.” TWENTY TIPS FOR GIRLS WITH THIN LIPS , the front of her magazine said. I understood then why the woman on the cover was pursing her red, glossy mouth into a whistle; she was showing the world how full her lips were, how full a woman’s lips should be. The kid asked what dislocating a shoulder meant and Jenny did something fancy with her fingers and made a popping sound with her mouth to illustrate the idea. “It’s when your arm gets pulled out of joint.”
    The little kid looked at me, his eyes swollen from tears, and I think he saw in my face exactly what I saw in his: the fear of what had happened to us and the fear of what would soon happen—the needles, the stitches, the doctors and nurses using incomprehensible words. I also knew that Jenny, unhurt and determined to be pleasant and social while also fingering through her magazine, did not understand the first thing about our fear, and I wished that she were hurt, too, cut or stung or poisoned or anything that would keep her from saying the terribly kind and untrue thing she said next. “You’ll be okay, I’m sure. You won’t even remember it happened to you tomorrow.”
    A man came into the room and called the kid’s name, which made him panic. He dropped his bloody bandage and flailed his arms when his father picked him up and said, “No! I won’t go! I won’t!” though he was easily carried beyond the flapping double doors, and I listened for his voice until I could no longer hear it. The same man returned and called my mother and father and me to a desk where he gave my father a clipboard of paperwork and a pen with the name of the hospital— THE RICHMOND CLINICS —written on it, which for some reason made me feel better about the