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IDENTITY<br />
CARLA’S BARELY IN the door before I’m on her with the letter. She reads it and her eyes<br />
widen with each sentence.<br />
She grips my forearm. “Where did you get this?”<br />
“Keep reading,” I say. The charts and measurements will mean more to her than they<br />
did to me.<br />
I watch her face and try to understand what is happening in my world. I’d expected her<br />
to dismiss the letter out of hand just as Mom did, but her reaction is…different.<br />
“Have you shown this to your mother?”<br />
I nod, mute.<br />
“What did she say?”<br />
“That it was a mistake.” I’m whispering, hiding from the sound of my own voice.<br />
She searches my face for a long time. “We need to find out,” she says.<br />
“Find out what?”<br />
“If it’s true or not.”<br />
“How could it be true? That would mean—”<br />
“Shh, shh. We don’t know anything yet.”<br />
We don’t know anything? Of course we do. We know that I’m sick. That I’m not<br />
allowed to leave my house on pain of death. I’ve always known this. It is who I am.<br />
“What’s going on?” I demand. “What are you hiding from me?”<br />
“No, no. I’m not hiding anything.”<br />
“What does this mean?”<br />
She sighs, and it is long and deep and weary. “I swear I don’t know anything. But<br />
sometimes I suspect.”<br />
“Suspect what?”<br />
“Sometimes I think maybe your mama’s not quite right. Maybe she never recovered<br />
from what happened to your papa and brother.”<br />
The oxygen in the room is replaced by something else, something thin and notbreathable.<br />
Time does slow down now and I get a kind of tunnel vision. The walls are<br />
much too close and Carla recedes away from me, a small figure at the end of a very long<br />
hallway. Tunnel vision gives way to vertigo. I’m unsteady on my feet and then nauseous.<br />
I run to the bathroom and dry heave into the sink. Carla comes in as I’m splashing<br />
water on my face.<br />
She puts her hand on my back and I sink under the weight of it. I’m insubstantial. I’m