Several mornings later, Tom, Andrew, and Hannah’s parents came to visit. This was unusual, especially since it was a Friday – Hannah’s father was supposed to be at work, and her mother had Moe and Gulliver to look after. Still, there they were. Hannah noticed that her parents’ faces seemed more drawn than the last time she’d seen them. Tom and Andrew lagged a few feet behind them, looking tired and put out.

“Hi,” said Hannah, sliding off her bed to greet them. A funny pain rippled through her temples; she rubbed her head and winced. It would be all she needed to get the flu during her last few days here.

“Good morning,” said her parents in unexpected unison.

She put her hands on her hips.

“You guys are acting weird,” she said. “Are you okay?”

All four members of her family nodded quickly.

“We just – we love you, Hannah,” said her mother, in a strained voice. “We want to make sure you know that.”

“Okay.”

“You do know that, right?”

There were tears at the corners of her mother’s eyes. Hannah stared.

“Yes.”

“How are you feeling?” said her father.

“Fine.”

The crease in his forehead got deeper. “You don’t feel sick? No headache? Nothing hurts?”

Hannah thought about her head and the way it had begun to throb. She thought about Dr. Trapp and the things he’d asked her, and about the way Aina had told him she was craving meat. (Meat. In the last couple of days, Hannah had started dreaming about it during the more tedious moments alone in her room. Great slabs of steak and salty ham sandwiches and steaming bowls of her mother’s chicken curry…)

“I said I’m fine.” She strolled up to her father and slapped him on the shoulder, which was the highest part of his body that she could reach. “Be normal. I get to leave in three days, so you should be happy.”

“Sorry,” said her father. He managed a small smile. “Long week, that’s all. Can we sit down? Have a little family time?”

“Okay,” said Hannah cautiously.

She peered again at Tom and Andrew. Andrew was looking at the floor, where his fingers were lightly tapping up and down, making soft clicking noises against the tile. Tom was watching Hannah. When he saw that she had noticed him, he pressed his lips together.

“Hannah,” said her father slowly. “This might be a different kind of day for you.”

Her mother gave a forceful nod, opened her mouth, and then shut it abruptly.

Her father took her mother’s hand and held it. “We wanted to let you know – together, as a family –that if things are – maybe not the way you expect them to be – if they’re a little harder than you expect them to be – that we love you very much and we – we don’t want you to be afraid. Because you’re safe.” He paused. “You’re safe and you always will be. Can you remember that?”

Hannah bounced her knees from side to side and looked at each member of her family in turn. Each of them had their most serious face on – even Tom, whose serious face looked like he was trying to swallow his tongue.

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess.”

“Good,” said her father. “We want you to know that we’ll be thinking of you. For the rest of the day, and the night, too.” He looked down. “You really aren’t in any pain?”

“No.”

She was sure that if she mentioned her headache, something terrible would happen.

It was only after they left that Hannah realized neither of her brothers had said a word to her. Not once, not the entire time they’d been there. Her parents were one thing – but for Andrew to be acting like this… and especially, especially Tom…

Whatever her parents had been thinking, Hannah thought, Tom and Andrew were thinking it too. And they were keeping it from her. Even though they knew how she felt about secrets. Even though Tom had promised to help her find out what the secret was.

She didn’t know what to do, so she stomped around the room until the nurses yelled at her to stop.

***

By five o’clock, her headache had grown much worse. Hannah wanted to get into bed, but she knew instinctively that it was what the nurses expected. They had wanted her to be sick, these last few days. She would have had to be an idiot not to have noticed them watching for it.

Eventually, they came in with her dinner. By this point, Hannah was so annoyed that she didn’t bother asking why all of them needed to deliver her meatless lasagna together. Hannah picked at it with her fork. It resembled the kind of muck she imagined you’d see in a swamp.

“You have to eat all of that,” said Aina. “You’ll be hungry later if you don’t. And if I were you, I would not want to be hungry later.”

“I won’t be hungry later and I’m not hungry now.”

“You will be hungry later. Eat it.”

The three nurses sat and watched until Hannah dug out a hunk of plasticky cheese and put it in her mouth. She gagged as she swallowed.

Meanwhile, Aina’s phone buzzed, and all three nurses jumped.

“He’s coming,” said Leah softly. “We’d better get her ready.”

Hannah put down the lasagna bowl and glared. The pain in her head escalated.

“Get me ready for what?”

“Nothing to worry about,” said Erin. “It’s – Dr. Trapp is coming to see you. The two of you are going on a little trip.”

Hannah’s heart started to pound. The conversation she’d overheard – the things the nurses had discussed –

Lervis… who’s going to take her there… with any luck, she’ll be gone by September…

“I’m not going.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Aina. “It’s nothing bad. He has a treat for you, that’s all. A surprise. You’ll see.”

Hannah’s head hurt so much that it took her a minute to notice when Dr. Trapp entered the room.

“So,” he boomed, scribbling in his notepad. “Is the little lady ready?”

“All set,” said Erin, giving Hannah a small shove. She stumbled and nearly fell into Dr. Trapp, but he didn’t seem to mind; he merely took her hand and began to lead her out of the room. Hannah thought about resisting – Dr. Trapp was the last person in the world she wanted to hold hands with. But she could tell by the strength with which he gripped her arm that she had no choice. Her head hurt too much to make a fuss, and she knew he was much stronger than she was.

He took her into an elevator and then out through the parking lot, where an ambulance was waiting for them. Hannah climbed meekly inside, wondering in spite of herself what DEFIBRILLATOR was supposed to mean. Dr. Trapp sat beside her, scribbling in his notebook at a feverish pace.

It took half an hour to get wherever they were going. In that time, the pain in Hannah’s head increased to a blurry kind of awful that made her clutch at it every time the ambulance hit a bump. She glanced at Dr. Trapp a few times, to see if he’d noticed.

He had. He was writing it down.

Eventually, the ambulance drove into a tiny parking lot behind an ugly concrete building. It was alone on its street: there were no other buildings around. Instead there was a scrubby brown field and an endless stretch of road.

Dr. Trapp took Hannah’s hand again and helped her out into the balmy summer air. She shivered.

He showed her to the door of the building and gave her a gentle push inside, thrusting them into what looked like a hotel lobby. There were uncomfortable-looking couches in varying shades of brown, a few gossip magazines, and a coffee-stained table containing a bowl of ancient-looking apples.

Dr. Trapp muttered a few words to a woman in a heavy navy blue uniform. She frowned at him.

“There are only forty minutes to go, you know,” she said, rather coldly. “Punctuality is of the essence, here.”

“Sorry,” said Dr. Trapp, although he didn’t look sorry at all. “She had some fascinating latent symptoms. First time, and all that.” He gestured to Hannah. “Are you ready for your surprise?”

She had forgotten there was supposed to be a surprise.

“Room Fourteen, right at the front,” said the uniformed woman, and she ushered Hannah and Dr. Trapp forward. They moved through a maze of dark hallways until they reached a stout metal door. The woman pulled a key from a lanyard around her neck, twisted it in the keyhole, and swung the door open. Then she bent down, so that she was close to Hannah’s height.

“I’m going to give you a present,” she said.

She took Hannah’s right arm and snapped a metal band inset with a glowing red light around her wrist. Hannah peered at it, puzzled; she didn’t think it was very pretty.

“Is it my surprise?” she said.

“Only the first part. If you can be a good girl and stay in this room right here, I’ll come back with the rest of it. It might take a while to get ready, though, so you’ll have to be patient.”

Hannah looked at her. Her eyes seemed bigger than normal people’s. She wanted so badly to be able to think, but everything upwards of her shoulders ached and her heart seemed to be beating at five times its normal rate and she didn’t understand why Dr. Trapp had taken her here.

“I don’t feel good,” Hannah admitted at last. “I think maybe I should go back to the hospital.”

“Well, we’ll get you back there real soon,” said the woman. “Now go on in. It’ll only be a few minutes, I promise. That’s a good girl.”

Dr. Trapp gave her an encouraging smile. Hannah stepped through the door.

The room was small and bare. There was a light bulb hanging from the ceiling, but the glow it emitted was so faint that the room was completely in shadow. The floor was gray concrete, and although it was clean, it was also covered in angry-looking scratch marks. The walls were even worse: the paint had been chipped off in dramatic, uneven patches, and a sizable chunk had been gouged out of one of them. In the back, there was a small pillow beneath a folded gray blanket. There was no furniture.

Hannah looked uncertainly at the woman and Dr. Trapp, and clutched the side of her head.

“Go,” said the woman, gesturing toward the blanket. “Make yourself comfortable. Your surprise is on the way.”

Usually, Hannah would have asked question after question until she was sure she knew what was going on. What kind of surprise could they possibly give her in a place like this? Why didn’t they seem to care that she was sick? On any other day, Hannah thought, she’d be furious. She’d have yelled at them. She’d have made them explain.

But her head hurt so badly, and she hadn’t sat down since the ambulance.

She shuffled over to the corner, pulled the blanket over herself, and curled up against the pillow. It smelled musty, but at least it was soft.

“Back in two ticks,” said the woman, and she closed the door.

Hannah spent the next few minutes lying on the floor, eyes closed, trying to gather her thoughts. Despite her head and her exhaustion and the way the room kept spinning, she could not shake the feeling that she had been incredibly stupid about something.

This, she thought suddenly.

Her shadow stretched onto the opposite wall, enormous and eerie against the concrete. Her conversation with her family, hours before, drifted into her head, and then she knew.

There was never going to be a surprise.

She’d been tricked; she knew it as surely as she knew her own name. She was here – wherever here was – because Dr. Trapp had decided she should be; because the nurses had wanted him to take her away; because they hated her, for reasons Hannah might now never learn. They’d planned it for weeks. How had she not known, from the conversation she’d overheard? Her parents had known. Tom and Andrew had known today, even if they hadn’t before. Everyone had known, except her.

Hannah’s breathing intensified; she gnawed at her knuckles and forced herself up. Her legs protested at being stood on, but she made herself get to the door. She’d have to run for it. It would be hard, since she felt so awful, but she could do it – she was sure she could. The uniformed woman surely wouldn’t be able to catch her. Hannah could even beat Tom at races, sometimes.

She took a deep breath and pulled the doorknob –

It was locked.

Panic shot into Hannah’s chest. She kicked at the door with all her might, yelling as loudly as she could, screaming Dr. Trapp’s name, and then the nurses’, just in case. She hurled herself into it, in case she was strong enough to break it down. She knew she wasn’t. She could feel herself growing weaker by the second.

Eventually she curled back into her corner and cried and cried and held her head as the room tilted on its axis.

They couldn’t leave her here forever. But they might keep her locked up until September, like the nurses had said. Hannah imagined what that would be like, to be confined to this room, this darkness, far away from her parents and brothers and everything she loved. Her heart beat faster. Her head kept aching. Her limbs – her limbs started twitching, started burning deep inside her bones –

She suddenly realized that she was hungrier than she had ever been in her life. During her first few days in the hospital she couldn’t stand the sight of food. Now all she wanted was a hamburger. The kind where they put two beef patties inside instead of one. The kind that made juice dribble down her chin when she bit into it.

“Please,” she begged the room, in full knowledge that no one could hear her. “Please – somebody – help me –”

Her body began to move of its own accord. It hurt and it changed and it twisted and then she found she couldn’t say anything at all.

Not anymore.