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under the couch. She made me go wash my hands while she watched, and then inspected them. “It’s Ben Nicholas’s blood,” I kept telling her. “Not mine.” But she wouldn’t listen.
    Next, she told me to open my mouth and stick out my tongue and say, “Ahhh.”
    Finally, she checked my forehead with her hand.
    “You’re not feverish.”
    “I already told her, Lyss,” Daddy shouted from the other room, “the rabbit just ripped a claw is all. Probably caught it on the wire in his cage. That’s where the blood came from.” I heard him pick up his keys and jangle them as he left, slamming the door and leaving a trail of burnt metal smell floating in the air behind him.
    “You’re not driving with Daddy today?” I asked.
    Mama’s face scrunched up tight. “I have to stop off somewhere before I go in. A friend’s.” And she pushed me out of the bathroom and closed the door so she could finish getting ready. I hung around for a minute to see if she was okay, but then I left in a hurry in case she started crying.
    After Miss Ronica arrived, I heard them talking quietly at the front door. They both looked at me and stopped when I came out of the kitchen, so I realized that Miss Ronica must have gotten the call from the animal hospital. I hurried to my room because I was afraid of getting the shot in my tummy.
    I kept expecting Mama to start screaming, since I’d been bitten by a sick bat. But then I heard the front door close and her car start and I knew she was gone without even saying goodbye. A moment later Miss Ronica was coming in to check on me. She took a look at my ankle and proclaimed it healed, which confused me.
    It certainly didn’t look all that bad, a bit puffy, maybe, but definitely nowheres near as horrible as it felt. She smiled and shook her head, and her cheerfulness took me by surprise, such that when she asked how I was doing, I automatically said okay, even though I felt like I was going to be sick to my stomach.
    One thing I knew: it was obvious she couldn’t smell the sickness building inside of me. She couldn’t smell it on Ben Nicholas, neither. None of them could. That’s because it was the rabies which made me be able to smell it.
    For the rest of the day, neither of us said another word about yesterday. We just pretended everything was all right. And if she noticed that Ben Nicholas spent most of the morning on his side in the long, shady grass beneath the slide, she didn’t mention it.
    But I certainly noticed. How could I not? He was breathing very quickly, his mouth open and his tongue sticking out. I put a dish of cold water and a carrot next to him, but although he drank a little, he didn’t eat. Later, after lunch, I put the carrot back in the refrigerator before going back outside with him.
    Only once did Miss Ronica ask me to come inside. I was lying beneath the slide, holding Ben Nicholas to my aching stomach and digging a small hole in the dirt with the same stick from yesterday, just in case I needed to be sick. The ache in my heel was nearly unbearable by then and my head was pounding, too.
    “It’s too hot out there, Cassie. I don’t want you to overheat.”
    “I’m in the shade.”
    “Cassie—”
    “I’m fine.”
    Silence. Then: “Suit yourself. I don’t know why you always have to be so stubborn.”
    But I wasn’t being stubborn. I wasn’t not trying harder, either, like she said I should. I was freezing to death.
    And so was Ben Nicholas.

    Most of the memories from that day onward are broken, the pieces scattered like torn up paper. As hard as I try to fit them together, I can’t. Some of them have gone missing. The rest don’t seem to fit very well with each other. Still, I hold onto them. I don’t want to
    lose
    forget something important.

    “Mama?”
    I tried to shift my legs but couldn’t move them. They felt heavy and hot. My whole body did.
    “It’s me, honey.” She smiled down and wiped the hair from my eyes with her fingers.
    I