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tiny clay skeleton balanced there.
    A little dead woman, top-heavy in a hat dripping sparkling flowers, bony smile, empty black eyes. I feel the heat and color drain from my face.
    “You have the best day!” he says. “The Day of the Angels!” My blank silence confuses him. “ Días de los Muertos —the Day of the Dead! Your birthday, the Day of the Dead!” He moves the skeleton closer to my face. “ La Catrina —she is you, this is you, Our Lady, the patron saint of death!”
    I accept the skeleton, hold it in a loose fist.
    I have the unsettling sensation of seeing this scene outside myself—it’s a movie, my entire life revealing itself at once in all its predestined glory in real time, in this moment.
    Patron saint.
    Of course.
    Creepy death/birth? Check. Living in a graveyard? Check. Kai and Emily and oh sure, born on the Day of the Dead? The Day of the Flipping Dead? Check. Check! Check!
    And that makes … everything. Every single moment I’ve been alive is directly related to and for the sole purpose of celebrating, defining, facilitating death.
    All around me people get sick, they drop like flies, and I remain untouched.
    Proximity to me is poison.
    Patron saint. Of death.
    I belong in a graveyard. I’ll never get out of here.
    “Thank you,” I barely whisper. “Excuse me.”
    And then I walk.
    Away from Wade’s calling to me to get the hell back here, where the shinola do you think you’re going? I walk and walk and think. First about how Wade’s reports of Dario’s English are about as ignorant as his insistence on Dario’s having “just gotten here”; a year isn’t “just,” and obviously the guy speaks pretty good English, easily better than Wade himself, who tends to split infinitives, mix metaphors, and double his negatives like nobody’s business.
    And second, I think about how Dario has given me so much more than a stupid skeleton; thanks to him I can stop being baffled about the seemingly random losses and sadness and deathiness I leave in my wake.
    Not random at all.
    Patron saint.
    Fantastic.
    I toss the skeleton into the wicker wastebasket in my closet, crawl back into my unmade bed, and lie awake in my clothes for a long, long time until Wade bangs on the door and demands to know “What the Bo Jangles is wrong with you? Get out here!”
    “Get lost,” I hear Kai tell him, and he grumbles off. She unlocks the door with a bobby pin and barges in against my weary protests.
    “Birthday lunch, let’s go!” She jumps on my mattress.
    I pull the covers up over my face.
    “And oh, PS,” she whispers, lying beside me. “Did you meet him?”
    I nod.
    “I like him! He seems very … like he knows what he’s doing. Dad better cool it so he’ll stay.”
    I close my eyes.
    “All right, so get up. Mama Dicarlo is waiting!”
    “Can’t.” I duck back beneath the blankets. “I don’t feel good.”
    She pulls the covers away, presses her slender wrist to my forehead.
    “You feel fine.”
    “I don’t feel hot, I feel awful. ”
    “Just power through.”
    I shake my head. “I don’t want it.”
    “What, lunch? So we’ll stay home, that’s all right—cake for dinner! Presents!”
    The house smells like chocolate. I shake my head.
    “Leigh!”
    “I don’t want it. Just let me sleep.”
    “You don’t want what ?”
    “Anything. Any of it. A birthday.”
    She squints at me, searching the horizon for the ship of what I actually mean.
    “You don’t want your birthday ?”
    I curl like a shrimp.
    “Why?” And right on cue, her lovely almond-shaped bright blue eyes brim with tears.
    Even before the leukemia unintentionally depleted Wade and Meredith’s entire supply of patience and empathy for anyone but themselves and her, Kai has always been a big crier. They may roll their eyes at my “theatrics,” but “sensitive” Kai can cry whenever, wherever, about whatever, however much she wants to. Which is pretty much all the time about everything.
    Go to her for