The Fever

Sometimes he could still feel it on his ankles, the sneaking sense that something had gone wrong and it was right there and it was touching you, rustling against you all the time even if you didn’t look.

When she breathed, the warm seemed to swirl in her mouth.

Vaccines, like all great scientific discoveries, are counterintuitive. You must take the very thing you are protecting yourself against. So your body remembers it, knows how to fight it.

What happens when someone touches her someday and doesn’t understand these things about her? That she was both fearless and fragile and could be hurt badly in ways he could not fix.

It was weird with moms, how you could see the faces of their daughters trapped in their own faces.

what was really bothering her, which was the realization that you can’t stop bad things from happening to other people, other things.

Sometimes it felt like parenting amounted to a series of questionable decisions, one after another.

You spend a long time waiting for life to start—the past year or two filled with all these firsts, everything new and terrifying and significant—and then it does start and you realize it isn’t what you’d expected, or asked for.

In the school’s hallways, Tom could see it: Gabby carried the glamour of experience, like a dark queen with a bloody train trailing behind her.