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    I was insufferable. I was a teenager.
    Life-or-death decisions fall into the hands of a food-allergic adolescent. As when you hand your Volvo keys over to a sixteen-year-old, it’s invariable that accidents, even tragedies, are going to happen. A survey of one registry of food-induced anaphylaxis indicated that 69 percent of fatalities in a given year were victims between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one.
    Say a teenager is heading out for a basketball game. He’s wearing mesh shorts and a T-shirt, with his wallet and keys on a chain. He figures,
Where would I keep an EpiPen? Besides, I won’t be eating anyway
. Then the players get swept along to a postgame pizza party. He’s starved for carbs and surrounded by his buddies, and he doesn’t want to be the weird guy asking if someone made absolutely sure there are no anchovies on the pie. So he thinks,
To hell with it, I’ve had pizza before
. He takes a bite.
    In one study sponsored by the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network, 54 percent of a pool of teenagers with severe allergies indicated purposefully ingesting a food known to containat least a tiny amount of an allergen. Nearly half of those kids cited the rationale “It looked good and I wanted to eat it.”
    Most parents know to expect Superman Syndrome from their kids. According to that study, the good news is that teenagers with allergies, unlike most, know they’re vulnerable. The bad news is, many don’t care—at least, not enough to sit at the peanut-free lunch table or teach their friends how to use an EpiPen or wear jeans with pockets roomy enough for an inhaler. In an earlier study, the same team of doctors found that teenagers said that the hardest part of living with food allergies was “social isolation.” Their parents cited the most difficult issue as “fear of death.”
    I was worried about both. I rolled my eyes when my mother suggested that I wear a MedicAlert bracelet (“They’ve gotten much more fashionable!”). But underneath the surliness, I couldn’t shake that nutritionist’s curse from years earlier. I was tired of eating baked chicken and boiled vegetables, tired of having to be careful all the time, tired of being broken. Shots hadn’t fixed me. Was I unfixable? Was I unfit to survive?
    This was the mid-1990s. It would be another ten years before a team of American psychologists ran a series of experiments on the neuropsychiatric effects of allergy, with grant support from the National Institute of Mental Health, NARSAD, and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. The scientists induced allergies to pollen and chicken egg in rats and mice. The test subjects were placed in an “open arena,” akin to releasing a human onto an empty basketball court, and their motions were tracked. With controls in place for physical activity, an animal’s confidence was measured by its willingness to venture into the center space. The allergy-ridden subjects chose to runalong the walls of the arena, while normal creatures ventured out into the open.
    â€œLittle Mouse” had been one teacher’s nickname for me in middle school, after she’d noticed I always ate bread from the inside out, nibbling my way around potentially egg-brushed crusts. The little mouse had grown into a teenager with an overdeveloped sense of mortality. I was an anxious creature, clinging to the walls of my arena.
    High-strung teenagers are no more rare than rebellious ones. But the X factor of my adolescence, the ingredient that threatened to turn the cocktail toxic, was Benadryl. Benadryl was my ostensible savior—the one thing that could stave off a reaction without requiring a trip to the hospital—and so we had it stashed everywhere. At least six pills in my purse; in my mother’s purse; in my locker; in the glove compartment of the car.
    The maximum safe dosage of Benadryl within a