Free What's Left of Me by Kat Zhang Page A

remember that snapshot of him, smiling with only one side of his mouth, hair damp and curlier than normal from that afternoon’s rain. It was my first glimpse of him, really, because we hardly ever saw him at school, and even when we did, Devon always seemed to be in control. He rolled his eyes slightly as Hally nudged him aside so I was looking at her instead.
    “Soon,” Hally said, grinning, “you’ll be doing cartwheels.”
    At times like that, I believed her. Other times, I wasn’t so sure.
    “Don’t worry about it,” Ryan said one afternoon. Hally and Lissa were gone again that day. They seemed to be leaving us with Ryan more and more now, and Addie had stopped asking where they went. I didn’t mind. I liked this boy who pulled up a chair next to the couch, who talked to me about wiring and voltage and then laughed and said I was probably bored out of my mind, that this was all incentive for me to get control of my legs so I could escape.
     I said. I talked to him and Lissa like this a lot now, knowing they couldn’t hear me but speaking anyway. Sometimes they carried on one-sided conversations for up to an hour. The least I could do in return was speak to them, even if they didn’t know it.
    Ryan pulled his chair closer. “Devon and I never really settled. There were a few months when we were five or six when I kept losing strength. Everyone was sure I’d be gone by our seventh birthday.” His lips twitched into a smile. “But I came back. I don’t know how, exactly. I remember fighting it, Devon fighting it . . . and I don’t know. Our parents never told anyone. You remember our mom works at the hospital?”
    I did. That was where the medicine came from—stolen one day when Hally had gone with her mother to work. Addie had barely kept from shuddering when she’d learned.
    “She knows a bit about this kind of stuff. She thought maybe we were just late bloomers or something. Or she hoped, anyway. So she never reported it, and she made sure we hid it—she hid us . Donvale—that’s where we lived before—is this tiny, rural place, so it was easier to keep to ourselves. Our dad homeschooled us through first and second grade so we wouldn’t be in public so much during that time, when everyone’s newly settled. Our parents were afraid, you know?”
    It took all my strength—all my strength and all my concentration—but I managed to force our lips, our tongue, to form one word: “ Yes .” And in that one word, I tried to convey everything.
    Ryan smiled, like he always did when I spoke, even when it was just a few syllables. But then his smile faded. “The officials wouldn’t have been lenient about the deadline—not with us.”
    I was torn between horror and envy. If you knew your child was sick, wasn’t developing naturally, how could you not take him to the doctor? How could you not worry?
    “But eventually, not going to regular school was attracting more attention than it was worth. Our mom thought Devon showed signs of being dominant, so when she finally registered us, she put only his name. Just pretend, she told us. We’d already learned how important it was that we did.”
    I stared up at him, wishing I had the words and the strength to tell him I knew exactly what he meant. About the open curiosity and growing fear Addie and I had faced on the playground.
    But Ryan knew that, just like he knew how his features reminded everyone who saw him of the pictures in our history books, the foreigners who had to be kept out at all costs to keep our country safe.
    “So we pretended.” Ryan shrugged. “And we kept on pretending. Hally and Lissa were seven then, and they didn’t show any signs of settling, either.” He laughed. “I think Mom and Dad were a little more worried the second time around. Hally’s kind of hard to keep hidden inside.”
    
    “Hally was always the louder one, so they put her name down for school,”