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hand on my shoulder. I could feel that she was putting pressure on it, and that she didn’t need to stand with all her weight because I was there.
    Then Loga came in to the hospital for a while, and we were all talking to her about stuff when she stopped for a second because the girls’ favorite feedcast,
Oh? Wow! Thing!,
was on. They were all like, “Tell us what’s happening, tell us what’s happening,” so we all gathered around her in our little gowns, and she sat there cross-legged on the bed and told us, “Okay, so like now Greg’s walking in, and he’s . . . omigod, he’s completely malfunctioning — he’s completely in mal, and Steph is crying on the sofa. Okay, so she goes . . .” And she told us the story of what was happening as it happened, and we all sat there, smiling. I never heard Loga tell a story this good before, and she even used her hands and stuff, and her eyes were vacant like she was seeing some other world, which I guess she was. “Jackie is sitting on the front of the boat? And he holds his hand up, and he’s going . . . he’s going . . . omigod, he goes, ‘Organelle, I always loved you from when we first went sailing.’”
    Quendy was like, “Oh, god! This is so romantic!”
    “Oh, meg. Big meg. You can feel the breeze on your skin. It’s warm, like those nights, you know, when we’re like — we’re like, ‘We’re always going to be young.’ The breeze is like that. I wish you could feel it.” We all shivered. She said, “You can smell the salt. The moon’s out. It’s high above everything, and soft.”
    Quendy actually cried one tear.
    Violet and I looked at each other. We didn’t look away.
    We still were like that, looking into each other’s eyes and all, when the doctor came in and was like,
What the hell had happened in the examination room, what’s with all the needles?
and he was upgrading to homicidal and going all,
Da da da professional care unit, da da da dangerous and costly da da infection da da da,
etc. Luckily, Link’s mom heard him yelling at us, and she’s a complete dragon, so she gave him a piece of her mind. She told him that we were all suffering from a very stressful experience and we weren’t used to these kinds of stresses and he had to understand that we had to have our fun, too. I still felt kind of bad about it, because we made a big mess, and Violet was completely meg blushing, but at least we didn’t get like shoved into orbit on cybergurneys or something.
    I liked being just a few beds away from her. We could wave. We all talked about old music, like from when we were little, and all the stupid bands they had back then, and the stupid fashions we liked in middle school, like the year when the big fashion from L.A. and shit was that everyone wanted to dress like they were in an elderly convalescent home, there was this weird nostalgic chic for that, so we all remembered having stretch pants and velour tops, and Calista had even bought one of those stupid accessory walkers at Weatherbee & Crotch. There were those stupid ads for having your pants pulled up like around your chest. Violet said she still had a cane at home.
    When we were eating dinner, sitting on her bed side by side, she said to me, “This is fun.”
    “It weirdly is,” I said.
    “Maybe these are our salad days.”
    “Huh?”
    “You know. Happy.”
    “What’s happy about a salad?”
    She shrugged. “Ranch,” she said.

Violet was off someplace talking to the doctor. I say “someplace” because we were using the examination room to blow needles at the anatomical guy’s basket.
    Link and Calista were standing real close by the vibrating bath, and I realized that they had probably decided to hook up. It looked like Calista was getting over Link being so stupid, which was brag, because he’s a nice guy. Quendy sat there on the table, glaring at them.
    Violet came back from the doctor. She was all intense looking. I asked what was wrong. She said she’d found a