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sounds and the glaring lights of the vanity mirrors. She gasped for breath, then lapsed into the quiet shadows while the sounds of running feet, adult voices, and excited babbling scraped against her eardrums.
    “What’s wrong with her?”
    “I think she’s unconscious.”
    “She’s sick. Really sick.”
    “Lacey. Lacey. Say something.”
    “Call an ambulance.”
    “Better call her mother too.”
    Her mother would be angry, Lacey wanted to tell them. But suddenly, she wanted her mother with her. And her dad too. But they were divorced. And warring.
    Hands lifted her, placed her onto a couch, and covered her with a blanket. In the distance, a telephone rang.
Maybe Katie was calling
, Lacey thought. But no, Katie wouldn’t call the theater. She heard running feet and metallic noises. She again felt herself lifted, this time by men’s hands onto something that was cushioned, a bed with cool sheets. Someone pried open her eyelid and shone a bright light straight into her eye. She tried to turn away.
    “Start an IV,” a man’s voice said. “Saline. She’s dehydrated.”
    “
Is she dying?”
    “Clear out of the way,” the man’s voice commanded.
    Someone else was crying. Terri?
    The bed started to move, and then Lacey was outsidein the night air and the metal clacking stopped as she was rolled through an open door inside a vehicle. Red lights reflected off people’s faces, giving them an eerie, nightmarelike quality. Lacey allowed herself to drift away once more.
    “Lacey! Lacey honey … it’s Uncle Nelson. Can you hear me?”
    When she could focus, she realized that she was no longer in the theater or the vehicle. Uncle Nelson’s face was right above her, and she wanted to ask him why he’d come to see her. All around her she was aware of people moving and of a sharp antiseptic odor.
    “You’re in the emergency room, Lacey,” her uncle told her.
    She drifted off hearing him command, “I want her up in ICU.
Stat.”
    She was aware that her bed was rolling again, and when it stopped moving, more hands lifted her onto yet another bed. She heard murmuring, felt needles pricking the backs of her hands and round sticky pads being stuck to her chest. She heard the sounds of machines blipping and humming and Uncle Nelson’s voice coming from far away.
    “It’s your diabetes, Lacey. You’re in keto and I don’t know why, but I’ll find out. Hold on.”
    But she couldn’t hold on. It was too much effort.
    “Your parents are here and they’ll be in just as soon as I can get you settled.”
    Her parents? Together? Lacey felt a numbing sensation that pulled like quicksand, or an undertow, sucking her into a sea of darkness. She foughtagainst it, panicky, like a drowning swimmer. But the numbness crept upward, seizing her legs, then her arms, and finally her mind. The last thing she remembered was the bleep of a machine and the cold, quiet terror of falling headlong into a dark and bottomless pit.

Eleven

    L ACEY FELT DRUGGED , mired down, weighted by tentacles of sleep she couldn’t quite shake loose from. She recognized the comings and goings of people—nurses, her uncle, her parents. She even recalled hearing her mother crying, which surprised her. Her mother never cried. Not even when Lacey’s father had moved out.
    She heard her father call her “Daddy’s girl.” He hadn’t called her that since she was ten. She heard Uncle Nelson giving instructions to nurses, and she was aware of tubes being changed that had been inserted into parts of her body. The one down her throat hurt whenever it was removed, and she was relieved when they didn’t put it back.
    Yet Lacey had no sense of time as she drifted. The artificial lights were always dim, never indicating ifit was day or night outside her glass cubicle. When there were no people around, the machines kept her company and their mechanical rhythms kept diligent vigil, sometimes comforting her, other times frightening her. She would drift into