The third time Paul died was in the middle of Maggie’s school musical

Brave and smart and idiotic and trusting and head-of-fluff girls die. All the time. In horrible ways. The world is cruel.

“Every time, it’s the same. A man hands me a golden scarab.”

It was in that moment at thirteen—eyes on what predated me, fear in my heart and breath knocked out my lungs—that I came closest to being like God.

“My dad is pretty nuts too,” I said. “He thinks I’m going to be a C-E-O. He thinks that See-Eo is a word in the dictionary that means: ‘guy who funds his gambling addiction.’”

I stop crying in the hospital lobby, because there I am confronted with companions in wailing I cannot compete with. Women crying, squeezing snot from their noses with their thumb and forefinger and flinging it at the ground.