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back at my parents’ house, tucked into the twin bed in my old room.
    Despite my dad’s repeated threats to turn it into a gym, my room hadn’t changed since I’d last inhabited it, aside from being scrupulously clean. The same lightly flowered blue and yellow wallpaper adorned the walls, the same mix of childhood favorites and textbooks filled the bookshelves, the same well-worn antiques passed down from my great grandmother furnished the room. Even my bedspread was the same, a cheery hodgepodge of bright colors that looked like something Andy Warhol might have designed after some major partying. It goes without saying that my mother hated it.
    Next to me on the bedside table lay a steaming tray of soup and toast triangles. The food remained untouched until my mother came in and started spooning chicken soup down my throat. I gagged and tried to push her away, but she was relentless, and stayed until I had finished the lot. Only then did she let me sleep, promising—threatening?—to wake me up in an hour or two for hot chocolate.
    “You look like a crushed insect,” she said, brushing away my feeble protests to be left alone. “If you don’t eat, you’ll get even sicker. And you are not ruining Christmas for the rest of us because you are too stubborn to eat a little soup.” Soothing, almost, my mother’s particular brand of love and guilt.
    Almost before she turned off the light and closed the door lightly behind her I fell back asleep, but it was not the peaceful, dead-to-the-world sleep I usually had when I came home. I dreamt of darkness, of long passageways, and oddly, since I had forced him out of my thoughts, of Will. Actually, that part of the dream wasn’t so bad. Not so bad at all.
    By the day after Christmas, I had chicken soup coming out my eyeballs and was feeling well enough to be anxious that school was starting up again in less than a week. I had a scant six days left of my two-week vacation, at least three of which would have to be devoted to catching up on grading and prepping the last topic of the semester— moon phases , the highlight of every thirteen-year-old’s life. A little voice in the back of my head reminded me I also had the semester exam to write, but I managed to ignore it.
    Figuring on at least one day of procrastination left me with basically tomorrow to cram in the great vacation I had planned. I needed to get out of my parents’ house right away.
    My mother came in my room with a breakfast tray and unaccountably agreed. I should have known something was up when she further announced that she had taken the morning off from her frighteningly successful real estate business to take me home. (She could sell ice cubes to Eskimos, as the saying goes, though frankly she would never waste her time with something so low commission.) She even helped me pack.
    I dozed in the car, awakening when she shut off the engine to the facade of a building I’d never seen before. I blinked. “This is not my apartment,” I said brilliantly.
    “I made an appointment with Dr. Nagata for your face.”
    I opened my mouth automatically to protest her highhandedness, but the words never came out. I was worried about my skin, too. It hadn’t cleared up and the red scaly rash had spread to my hands and neck. It was spreading so fast I could swear it had gotten worse in the car.
    After a careful examination, and a bunch of tests to which I was too tired to pay any more than the vaguest attention, Dr. Nagata ordered me to stand outside on the sunny landing. He stood with me, watching my face and his watch with equal concentration. “Umm, hmm,” he concluded after a couple of minutes. “Just as I thought.” He escorted me back into the private room and bade me sit.
    Regarding me over his half glasses with that stern compassion doctors do so well, he told me the problem, explaining the results and implications of all the tests he’d done.
    He misread my blank, disbelieving stare as confusion and