“Roz!” I scream, and rise to my feet, but my sister is long gone.
Heart thumping, I spin around in a panicked circle and find myself not in the savanna anymore, but inside the canvas tent I’ve been sharing with Auntie Ruth. A lion roars breathtakingly close, prowling outside the tent.
“I’ve got everything under control.” Auntie Ruth unzips the tent and shoves me out. “You’ll be safe.”
Then I see my hands: red, blistered, molting. For once, Auntie Ruth is wrong. I am safe nowhere.
…
“Viola! Viola! Wake up!” A calloused hand jostles me roughly as if my shoulder is an oar. “Where is it?”
I bat weakly at the death grip, but Darth Vader breathes down on me. The Force—my force—does nothing to set me free from my little sister. How did she know that I lost her camera?
“It’s in the grass. I’ll find your camera,” I tell her, yearning to be back in the fading dream. Braving the predators in the Serengeti is preferable to being mauled by Roz.
“Stop faking it!” Shake! “Mom and Dad aren’t even here to see your act.”
I crack my eyes open to check the time on my bedside table: a few minutes after five in the morning. I groan and close my eyes again. Senior year—and crew practice, criminally early the entire school year—cannot possibly have started already.
Every single syllable is a sound of outrage, as Roz demands, “I got to go.”
But I don’t.
“I’m not feeling great,” I tell her. “You’re going to have to ask Mom or Dad to drive you.”
“They can’t. They’re already at work.”
I angle a look at her. “Seriously? On our first day of school?”
Roz sighs. “They had to head back down to Portland first thing this morning for the client they had to bail on yesterday for you. They only found out this morning. Something about global pandemics? How am I supposed to know?”
Fine, if my doctor wants me to hide from the light, I will. I throw the covers over my head. Let Roz find her own way to crew. I’m sleeping through the day. “Well, then, you’re going to have to take the bus. If you go now, you can probably still make it.”
“I’m telling Mom and Dad that you’re really sick.”
“That’s because I really am sick.”
“Yeah? What do you think they’re going to do if they know you can’t get out of bed?”
Slowly, I lower the comforter and feel the slap of cool air, cold truth, and icy smugness.
“I need a latte before crew. And dinner with the team tonight.” The blackmailer holds out her oar-hardened hand. “Debit card.”
Buying Roz’s silence is a small price to pay. “My bag’s under the desk. You know, you could always get your license and drive yourself to crew.”
“Why should I?” (You are at my beck and call.)
It’s true. Six days a week, I am my sister’s personal and unpaid chauffeur, hauling thirty minutes north to the school’s boathouse up in Kenmore at five thirty in the morning. Such is the price of driving privileges and parents who work around the clock since global crises wait for no one.
Without another word, Roz flicks on the overhead light and charges to my messenger bag, where she rummages for my wallet and pockets the debit card. My books, notebook, emergency kit, and makeup bag lie on the ground, detritus from Hurricane Rosalind.
“Hey!” I call as I follow her out my door. “Umm. Mess.”
Roz waves a hand carelessly in the air; it’s never her mess to clean.
The truth is: I’m unsteady on my feet, not that I’d admit this to myself, much less my parents. Sighing, I tug on a T-shirt since it’s supposed to be hot again today. With my hair pulled into a ponytail, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. I’ll have plenty of time to do my makeup in the car while I wait for school to start, but my makeup bag bulges suspiciously. I unzip the pink case. My favorite foundation and concealer that I splurged on with my birthday money are gone. In their place are tubes of sunscreen and an SPF-infused foundation brand I’ve never heard of and will probably clog my finicky pores.
“Mom!” I yell, even though I know she’s not home. “Honestly!”
I dig into my trash can. Of course all my things are gone. Grumbling, as I’m about to bend down to repack my messenger bag, I spot the good luck present (scare tactics) my parents have left on my desk: a stack of printouts—full-color—from the Mayo Clinic’s website, featuring men and women with photosensitivity, their bumpy, burned skin. The angry red rashes. The chains of blisters. There is only one place for these pages. I gather them up for the garbage can and see my hands.
My hands. It’d be impossible to miss them. Blotchy and red, but how? I haven’t even left my bedroom since getting home yesterday. I can only imagine what my face looks like.
Duty calls me away from this nightmare.
From the front door, Roz hollers, “Hurry up. Seat races this morning. Today’s important for me.”
…
At the boathouse, Roz slips out of our ancient silver Subaru station wagon with her Liberty Prep duffel bag before I can even put the car into park. Within an instant, her posse of muscular friends surrounds her as if she’s the senior and I’m the sophomore.
Normally, I head to Auntie Ruth’s auto shop after dropping off Roz, not just because little else is open at this hour—not the Northgate Library or Cloud City Coffee. But because she is the refuge of cool, more like a big sister who’s planning our next trail run than an adult watching over me. Plus, like me, Auntie Ruth appreciates a quiet, early, and caffeinated start to the day.
But: the dream. Auntie Ruth had pushed me—shoved me!—outside the tent to the lions. Lions with pointy incisors made to rip through skin and scissor-sharp carnassials to tear through muscles—the perfect killing tool. (Yes, I did study up before the safari.) It may have been a dream, but it feels a smidge too close to her shoving our graduation travel plans off the calendar and into my parents’ perfect killing tool of a crisis management plan.
So I drive toward school instead, but even as I pull into the empty parking lot, reserved for seniors, images of humiliation keep dancing in my head: There’s me, fainting at MoPOP in front of strangers. There’s me, hamburger-facing it in front of Josh. There’s me, abandoning my bake-sale stand, not that anyone cares. Not even Aminta.
Still.
My hands tighten on the steering wheel before I turn off the ignition. I don’t need or want to see a flaming red version of myself, so I studiously avoid the rearview mirror. What I crave right now is the quiet of a trail run—each step demanding every bit of your concentration so you don’t trip on a rock or a branch and break a leg out in the woods. But that’s not happening right now.
Instead, I can soothe myself with research. According to Lee & Li, knowledge empowers. Data makes you capable of making a good decision in hard circumstances. Say, a catastrophic flood with a thousand competing needs, all urgent. Or a murky situation, like not knowing what the hell is going on with your body. The flimsy page that the doctor handed to me isn’t particularly illuminating.
Not to worry; I intend to find out everything for myself. Thanks to the battalion of generous, insomniac parents who work around the clock at Amazon and Microsoft, my school radiates with Wi-Fi power, even out here in the parking lot. I pull out my Mac.
…
(NOT SO) FUN FACTS ABOUT PHOTOSENSITIVITY
Fact 1: Photosensitivity is sometimes called an allergy to the sun. (Yes, the star that’s at the center of our solar system. The star that gives off heat and makes things grow. The star that gets you hot enough to dive off the sketchy platform at the public beach three blocks away on Lake Washington. That sun.)
Fact 2: There are also a bunch of different disorders that cause serious photosensitivity, not just the pretty common and temporary photosensitivity you get from taking malaria meds. Pinpointing which disorder is difficult. (Trust me, I tried. But after reading about erythropoietic protoporphyria—which causes
sun sensitivity, not to mention severe stomach pain, vomiting, constipation, and oh, yeah, personality changes—I got too scared to play diagnosis roulette.)
Fact 3: The most common symptoms of being allergic to the sun are:
Redness: check!
Itching or pain: check!
Tiny raised bumps that can appear from face to toe: Are you kidding me?
Blisters: seriously?
Scaling, crusting, or bleeding of said blisters that will take up to six days to heal: no comment.
And then sometimes—for the lucky few—you’ll feel like you have the flu, go into anaphylactic shock, pass out, and possibly even die.
Possibly even die (in extremely rare cases) (rare, meaning not occurring extremely often) (rare, meaning that it does occur sometimes).
Possibly. Even. Die. (Excuse me, did or did not Dr. Anderson say that photosensitivity was generally not a fatal condition?)
“Generally nonfatal” and “in extremely rare cases” mean possibly even die.
…
For the first time, I wonder if I’ll be holding a bake sale for myself. I want to throw up at the thought. But when I wasn’t looking, cars have surrounded mine in a cave of metal.
Welcome, senior year.
It’s the early afternoon and there’s one more class before my free period, then I can call it a day and tell my parents, See? Nothing has changed. In the hall, a jock double takes at the sight of me, then another. Self-conscious, I wrap my arms around each other, rubbing the itchy hives that now blotch my forearms. These raised bumps are supposed to fade within a couple of hours. Still waiting. And how on earth did I get them after being sequestered inside my car and then the back row, the darkest row, in all my classrooms: calculus, Spanish, and the senior seminar I’ve waited four years to take—Asian American literature to explore my roots.
No matter. New plan: I’ll borrow a sweatshirt from the lost-and-found and hide my arms, but halfway to the front office, I realize it’s the first day of school. I want to weep. Nothing’s been lost—at least nothing that anyone realizes is missing.
I take a deep breath before I approach the double doors, leading to the square. I’ll need to run across it to get to the science building, all of a minute, max, in the sun. That couldn’t possibly make me worse, could it? I hug myself tighter, then spy familiar khaki coveralls.
Just the person I need. “Aminta!” I call, hurrying to her.
My best friend turns around, but her huge smile contorts into horror. Her wavy hair bobs around her shoulders, like she herself is my life buoy, as she runs to me. “Oh, my gosh, Viola! What happened?”
I duck my head fast at her (loud) alarm, which I know is drawing more stares. Aminta shrugs out of her blue satin jacket and holds it out to me. My first instinct is to tell her no, I don’t need it, but I do. Gratefully, I slip it on, welcoming how the billowy fabric swallows me whole.
She asks, “Should you even be here?”
“I’m okay.”
“I don’t know.”
Me, either, to tell you the truth. As if my mom knows how my skin is erupting, she texts me roughly a billion heart emojis, and then a symphony of pings:
Mom: Are you okay?!
Mom: Please check in.
Mom: Now.
Mom: Update, please.
Mom: Skin status report, please.
Mom: Love you, honey!
Before I can even complain about my text-happy Mom to Aminta, let alone share all the gory details about photosensitivity that I’ve researched, Caresse, the new treasurer of Geeks for Good, strides down the hall toward us. She is a blur of purple bohemian skirt that she’s designed and sewed. Every little part of me wants to surge ahead of this moment, this conversation, this attention, but: my future. I say as much. “So we’re good for Friday’s makeup bake sale, right?”
When I tug my hair out from under the messenger strap, they both get a good look at my hands, one now bubbling with an ice floe of a blister. Aminta actually flings her hand up to her mouth.
“You need to go to the doctor,” Aminta orders me. “I’ll drive you.”
“Yeah,” says Caresse, scrutinizing me like she’s on a scientific expedition, discovering a new subspecies of teen girl in the wilds of Liberty Prep. She brushes back her black dreads. “Those are hives. An oatmeal bath could help.”
Aminta pulls out her phone. “I’m calling your parents.”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Auntie Ruth, then.”
“I’m good.”
“Well, there is no way we’re having the bake sale on Friday,” says Caresse like she’s the official Bake-Sale Coordinator, not me.
When I start to protest, Aminta cuts in, “Next Friday, maybe, if your skin clears up by then. Are you sure I can’t call your parents?”
“Ack, I got to get to class.” I rush out the double doors of Jacobsen Hall as if I’m heading to physiology in Robinson-Iqbal across the square. Once outside, I dash to the senior parking lot to the side of the school. My quick escape is foiled by my messenger bag, which spills onto the gravel. Everything falls out. Everything.
Of course it does.
“Honestly?” I yell as I bend down to pick up my daily planner, splayed open to a hidden note I’d never seen, marking up the very last page.
“SET YOUR LIFE ON FIRE.”
—Rumi
Auntie Ruth’s handwriting feels intrusive when she herself torched our travel plans. The sun is taking care of my skin. What else could possibly be burned?
Another safari nightmare wakes me from my post-dinner, post-first-day-of-school nap. Unable to sleep and needing to cook something, anything, I creep down the hall past the wall of family photos from our trips to Disneyland, tiptoeing by Roz’s bedroom, where she’s bunkered down for her mandatory ten hours of sleep for crew.
Personally, I don’t understand comfort eating, being more of a comfort cooker myself. Bread bakers can talk all they want about the solace they find in the yeasty smell filling their home. I like baking, too, obviously, but soup is my specialty. I know, weird. For me, there’s satisfaction in seeing vats of my homemade soup poured into matching mason jars, all lined up in nice, neat, nourishing rows. On Sunday, the Seahawks are playing the LA Rams. I’d originally planned for Moroccan lamb stew, a kissing cousin to soup. (Rams, lambs, get it?) But lamb is expensive, and anyhow, baa baa black sheep and all. So instead, in honor of LA vegan, antifood, calorie-protesting types, I now plan to prep a test batch of weight-loss soup (aka cabbage). Tomorrow, I’ll guinea-pig it on my family for dinner.
The kitchen is too dark to read the recipes I’d printed out earlier. So I flick on the pendant lights over the island.
“Honey, turn off the lights,” Dad says, his voice low but urgent.
I jump as if I’ve been caught sneaking out of the house instead of into the pantry. “You scared me! When did you guys get home?”
While we may not attend church faithfully, my parents honor their quality time religiously, always shutting down work at seven every night with the caveat that they will only respond to true life-threatening emergencies (there must be blood). So tiny alarm bells jangle when I find both of them sitting at command central in the dark breakfast nook, kitty-corner to each other, and not just holding hands. It’s a couple minutes past eleven, and the kitchen table is covered edge-to-edge with papers, pens, and every device known to modern man so they can mainline the news as if this is normal. So much for Mom’s lectures on good sleep hygiene.
“You were sleeping,” Dad says, setting down his phone. “We didn’t want to wake you.”
“How are you feeling, honey?” Mom asks, her green eyes racing over my body and braking on my bare arms. “Hives! When did you get hives? Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I put aloe vera on them just the way I researched, and they’re going away,” I assure her, annoyed when she leaps out of the breakfast nook anyway to inspect my skin herself. My self-sufficiency doesn’t stop Dad either.
He barrels blindly past me, keeping his eyes on the overhead lights as if he doesn’t trust them. I sidestep out of his way. “What’re you doing?”
“Turning off the lights.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. I haven’t had the time to change out the light bulbs yet.”
“If we change them out,” Mom says, frowning as she lowers her reading glasses to the tip of her nose to peer closer at my hives and notices my hand with the ragged remains of the blister. “Did you pop a blister?”
“Mom.”
“We need to sterilize it.”
“Mom. I dealt with it and followed the instructions on the Mayo Clinic site.”
Thankfully, Dad’s hmm, as he glares at the pendant lights, distracts Mom.
“Like I said, honey, Nat Geo’s energy blog says that it’s a myth that CFL bulbs”—Mom tells Dad, pointing at the light bulbs above us—“emit UVA rays.”
I may have researched my potential condition, but my parents have one-upped me with an action plan. Annoyed, I focus on collecting the ingredients for the test soup. I search the freezer for the flour only to find the missing canister against the backsplash along with the sugar, even though I’ve told everyone a million times to store the flour in the freezer where it’ll last longer. I slam the container harder than I intended (sort of) on the counter.
“Roz is sleeping,” Mom chides me mildly as she grabs a teacup from the table, but Dad is already sweeping over to her with the kettle. Her answering smile is so sunny, we should check her for UVA emission. “Oh, thank you, honey.”
“No problem, but, treasure, the NIH published a study that says photosensitive people”—Dad sits back down and nods over at me as if there was any doubt about who the photosensitive person in the kitchen is—“can get sunburned from those bulbs.”
I sigh. Heavily.
“Oh!” Mom cries, forgetting all thoughts about letting a sleeping Roz lie. She scurries away on her tiny, slippered feet, as she does whenever an idea overtakes her. What now? The call of her inspiration is as mysterious as it is indiscriminate—whether chaperoning a field trip to the Pacific Science Center or showering when my friends are here (all true, all witnessed with real live eyeballs, all mortifying).