Free What's Left of Me by Kat Zhang

at him. The heat made them both sweat, made an uneasy situation worse, and it was an even bigger relief than usual to reach the cool, airy Mullan house, to swallow the drugged water and lie down and wait for Addie to fall asleep.
    It still made me sick to feel her ripped away from me, but I was getting better at keeping calm. She would come back. It was easier knowing that she would come back, that the drug’s effects lasted only an hour at most, and sometimes only twenty minutes or so.
    Devon had been sitting at the table when Addie went to lie down, but about ten minutes after she disappeared, my name came floating through the blackness.
    “Eva?”
    He said my name like a secret. Like a password, a code whispered through locked doors.
     I said, though he couldn’t hear. Everything was darkness and the soft couch beneath Addie and me. I could feel the ridges of the fabric beneath our fingertips, the textured grain against the heel of our hand.
    I felt the warmth of his palm as he laid it softly on the back of our hand, the pressure of his fingers, the brush of his thumb against our pulse.
    “It’s Ryan,” he said. “I figured you—that you’d like to know there was someone here.”
    I tried to speak. I focused on our lips, on our tongue, on our throat. I tried to form thank you with a mouth that belonged to me yet didn’t want to obey. But it seemed I wasn’t going to be able to speak this particular day.
    So instead, I focused on Ryan’s hand, which was easier. He’d slid his palm down over our knuckles, his fingers tucked beneath our hand. I curled our fingers around his and squeezed as hard as I could, which was barely anything at all.
    I figured that was as articulate as I was going to get.
    But the thought of one day being able to respond to him, to sit and laugh and talk with him as anyone else might have done, was added to my ever-growing list of reasons to keep on coming to the Mullan house. To keep fighting, no matter the cost.

Eight
     
    T he days passed. Then a week. Then another and another. I used to count my life in weekends or theater visits or Lyle’s dialysis sessions. I marked the days with school assignments or babysitting jobs. Now I tallied my life by the improvements I made lying on a couch with Ryan or Devon, Hally or Lissa, by my side. The number of words I managed to speak. The fingers I managed to move.
    And for the first time, my mind filled with memories that were mine and mine alone. My first smile while Hally whispered to me all the stupid, crazy things she’d dragged her brother into when they were little. My first laugh, which startled Lissa so much that she’d jerked away before laughing, too. And even on the days when all my progress seemed to backslide and I lay mute and paralyzed on the couch, trapped in the darkness behind our eyelids, I had someone beside me, talking to me, telling me stories.
    I learned how the Mullan family had moved to Lupside a year before Addie and I did, when their mother had changed jobs. How Ryan missed their old house because he’d spent twelve years there, had known the position of every book in the library, the creak of every step in the curved stairwell. How Hally didn’t miss it because they’d hardly had any neighbors, and the ones they did have had been hateful. How they both had fond memories, though, of the fields behind the house and childhoods spent running through them, pretending to be anywhere but where they actually were.
    I remember with perfect clarity the first time I opened our eyes.
    Hally had screamed, then scrambled to fetch Devon. “Look!” she’d cried. “Look!”
    “Eva?” Devon had said. But it hadn’t been Devon.
    That was the first time I caught them shifting, caught Ryan pushing through and looking out at me. I couldn’t even move our gaze or smile or laugh, could only stare up at his face. He was so close that I could pick out his individual eyelashes, long and dark and curved like Hally’s.
    I