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then. “Well, let me try to catch her and check,” Mom says, reaching for her phone. “I have thirty minutes to return them.”
    I smack my forehead. “You know what? Never mind. They didn’t see Into the Woods. They saw The Fast and the Furious part twelve, or whatever. You know. Same thing, pretty much.” Mom looks confused, then exasperated as I tip my bowl to loudly guzzle the pink milk.
    “Maeve, stop that. You’re not six anymore.” She turns back to her laptop, brow furrowed. “Oh, for God’s sake, I just checked my email. How can there be so many already?”
    I put down my bowl and grab a napkin, because all of a sudden my nose is running. I wipe it without thinking much more than It’s kind of early for allergies, but when I lower my hand—oh.
    Oh my God.
    I get up without a word, the napkin clutched in my fist, and go to our first-floor bathroom. I can feel wetness continuing to gather beneath my nose, and even before I look in the mirror I know what I’ll see. Pale face, tense mouth, dazed eyes—and a tiny river of bright red blood dripping from each nostril.
    The dread hits so hard and so fast that it feels as if someone’s Tasered me: there’s a moment of cold shock and then I’m a trembling, twitching mess, shaking so hard that I can barely keep the napkin pressed to my nose. Red seeps into its cheery pattern as my heart bangs against my rib cage, the frantic beat echoing in my ears. My eyes in the mirror won’t stop blinking, keeping perfect time to the two-word sentence rattling through my brain.
    It’s back. It’s back. It’s back.
    Every time my leukemia has ever returned, it’s started with a nosebleed.
    I imagine walking into the kitchen and showing the bloody napkin to my mother, and all the air leaves my lungs. I can’t watch her face do that thing again—that thing where she’s like a time-lapse movie, aging twenty years in twenty seconds. She’ll call my dad, and when he comes back to the house, all his cheeriness from this morning will be gone. He’ll be wearing that expression that I hate more than anything, because I know the internal prayer that accompanies it. I heard him once after I’d nearly died when I was eight, the words in Spanish barely a whisper as he sat with his head bowed next to my hospital bed. “Por favor, Dios, llévame a mi en su lugar. Yo por ella. Por favor.” Even though I was barely conscious, I thought, No, God, don’t listen, because I reject any prayer that has my dad asking to take my place.
    If I show my mother this napkin, we’ll have to climb back on the testing carousel. They’ll start with the least invasive and least painful, but eventually you have to do them all. Then we’ll sit in Dr. Gutierrez’s office, staring at his thin, worried face while he weighs the pros and cons of equally horrible treatment options and reminds us that every time it comes back, it’s harder to treat and we must adjust accordingly. And finally we’ll pick our poison, followed by months of losing weight, losing hair, losing energy, losing time. Losing hope.
    I told myself the last time, when I was thirteen, that I would never do it again.
    My nose has stopped bleeding. I examine the napkin with my best effort at clinical detachment. There’s not that much blood, really. Maybe it’s just dry air; it’s February, after all. Sometimes a nosebleed is just a nosebleed, and there’s no need to send people into a frenzy about it. My pulse slows as I press my lips together and inhale deeply, hearing nothing but air. I drop the napkin into the toilet and flush quickly so I don’t have to watch thin threads of my blood fan into the water. Then I pull a Kleenex from the box on top of the toilet and wet it, wiping away the last traces of red.
    “It’s fine,” I tell my reflection, gripping the sides of the sink. “Everything is fine.”
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    Bayview High’s new gossip game sent two texts this morning: an alert that the next player would be contacted