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full spectrum, A to Z . It was perfect.”
    Dad: “It just came to us. It was weirdly spiritual. We figured, who defies that?”
    This Aza-ness, though, contributed totally to my freakitude. For part of grade school, I went by Ava, because some teacher screwed it up, and I let her. Eventually, I was busted in a parent-teacher conference.
    Aza. For years, I thought that if I had to be a palindrome, make me kuulilennuteetunneliluuk . Which is the Estonian word for the part of the gun a bullet whizzes through on its way to kill you.
    If you’re gonna go there, go there all the way. Right?
    Instead, I’m the alphabet. Depending on your worldview and knowledge of the history of the alphabet, there could also be a silent & in there. The ampersand used to be the twenty-seventh letter. You’d recite your alphabet and at the end, you’d say X , Y , Z , & . So if you’re doing my name, it’s an alphabet loop, and that means that between Z and A , you get to add in an & too. Az(&)a.
    There’s an awesome thing about having that & in my name, as follows: the symbol itself is the Latin word for “and,” as in et , with its two letters twisted together. So, there’s an invisible extraterrestrial in my name.
    Jason and I discovered this five years ago and we were obsessed with my internal ET.
    I mean, how could you not be? “Phone home” and all of that.
    Do you see how I’m making this awesome and not just weird? Do you give me credit? This makes me feel slightly better some days. Other days, not so much.
    Today? Today sucks.
    There’s a rattle in my chest right now, and I’m pretending there isn’t, but something about the misery of maybelikelyprettydefinitely hallucinating again, something about the fact that I’m a test case for every new drug the market invents, puts me into such a miserable place that before I know it I’m sitting at the kitchen table with my entire family, crying my eyes out, and coughing simultaneously.
    They pack me off to the shower, where I sit on a stool in the steam, naked and bitter, inhaling water and trying to forget about the ship I saw, the words yelled out of the sky, trying to forget about everything, including sixteenth birthdays and parents and sadness.
    “You know you’re just special, baby,” my mom tells me as she’s closing my bedroom door. “We’re in this with you. You’re not alone. We love you.”
    “Even if I die?” I say, because I am weak. “Will you still love me even if I die?”
    My mom stands in the doorway. I see her trying to calm herself down enough to answer me. I can see her wanting to say “You’re not going to die,” but she doesn’t let herself, because that would be full-throttle lying.
    She’s making herself meet me in this stupid messed-up body that has not enough time and not enough stability. Greta’s gripping my doorframe hard, but her face says, Don’t worry . She swallows, and then smiles at me.
    “Even if you die,” she says. “Okay? We’ll love you forever and forever. Until the end of time.”
    Because I feel very very shitty, I think about saying “You won’t. When people die, you forget about them eventually. You have to. Time passes. Nothing’s that important,” but I don’t say it.
    My mom walks away, quietly.
    She thinks I don’t hear her crying in the hallway for an hour after I’m supposed to be asleep.
    She thinks I don’t hear her start the car and drive back to the lab because that’s all she knows how to do, the slow-research fix, inventing a cure for something no one even understands.
    I’d like my parents to not have to be constantly thinking about me and my issues. I have a vision of my mom and dad at a beach, drinking things with umbrellas in them.
    We’ve never been to a beach. They’ve never been on a vacation by themselves, because: me.
    So now I’m thinking halfheartedly about hitchhiking to some other city. Or stealing the car and driving there. I maybe-semi-kind-of-know how to drive. I learned