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a bottomless soul who could eat a whole loaf of bread in ten minutes and still have room for more.
    I hated myself.
    I could not tell you what made me go into the bathroom that was attached to my room—wallpaper spotted with pink roses, shaped soaps curled in dishes next to the sink—and stick my finger down my throat. Maybe it was because I could feel the toxic stuff seeping into my bloodstream, and I wanted it out. Maybe it was punishment. Maybe it was because I wanted to control one part of me that had been uncontrollable, so the rest of me would fall into line. Rats can’t throw up, you’d told me once; it popped into my head now. With one hand holding up my hair, I vomited into the toilet until I was flushed and sweating and empty and relieved to learn that, yes, I could do this one thing right, even if it made me feel worse than I had before. With my stomach cinching and bile bitter on the back of my tongue, I felt horrible—but this time there was a physical reason I could point to.
    Weak and wobbly, I stumbled back to my borrowed bed and reached for the television remote. My eyes felt like sandpaper and my throat ached, but I could not fall asleep. Instead I flipped through the cable channels, through home decorating shows and cartoons and late-night talk shows and Iron Chef cooking contests. It was on Nick at Nite, twenty-two minutes into The Dick Van Dyke Show, that the old Disney World commercial came on—like a joke, a tease, a warning. It felt like a punch in the gut: there was Tinker Bell, there were the happy people; there was the family that could have been us on the teacup ride.
    What if my parents never came back?
    What if you didn’t get better?
    What if I had to stay here forever?
    When I started to sob, I stuffed the corner of the pillow deep into my mouth so Mrs. Ward wouldn’t hear. I hit the mute button on the television remote, and I watched the family at Disney World going round in circles.
    Sean
    It’s funny, isn’t it, how you can be 100 percent sure of your opinion on something until it happens to you. Like arresting someone—people who aren’t in law enforcement think it’s appalling to know that, even with probable cause, mistakes are made. If that’s the case, you unarrest the person and tell him you were just doing what you had to. Better that than take the risk of letting a criminal walk free, I’ve always said, and to hell with civil libertarians who wouldn’t know a perp if he spit in their faces. This was what I believed, heart and soul, until I was carted down to the Lake Buena Vista PD on suspicion of child abuse. One look at your X-rays, at the dozens of healing fractures, at the curvature of your lower right arm where it should have been straight—and the doctors went ballistic and called DCF. Dr. Rosenblad had given us a note years ago that should have served as a Get Out of Jail Free card, because lots of parents with OI kids are accused of child abuse when the case history isn’t known—and Charlotte’s always carried it around in the minivan, just in case. But today, with everything we had to remember to pack for the trip, the letter was forgotten, and what we got instead was a trip to the police station for interrogation.
    “This is bullshit,” I yelled. “My daughter fell down in public. There were at least ten witnesses. Why aren’t you dragging them in? Don’t you guys have real cases to keep you busy around here?”
    I’d been alternating between playing good cop and bad cop, but as it turned out, neither worked when you were up against another officer from an unfamiliar jurisdiction. It was nearly midnight on Saturday—which meant that it could be Monday before this was sorted out with Dr. Rosenblad. I hadn’t seen Charlotte since they’d brought us
to the station to be questioned—in cases like this, we’d separate the parents so that they had less of a chance to fabricate a story. The problem was, even the truth sounded crazy. A kid slips on