Free If I Stay by Gayle Forman

after I started showing a strange preference for classical music. I didn’t want for real family, either. Gran and Gramps lived nearby, and they were happy to take me for weekends so Mom and Dad could act wild and stay out all night for one of Dad’s shows.
    Around the time I was four, I think my parents realized that they were actually doing it—raising a kid—even though they didn’t have a ton of money or “real” jobs. We had a nice house with cheap rent. I had clothes (even if they were hand-me-downs from my cousins) and I was growing up happy and healthy. “You were like an experiment,” Dad said. “Surprisingly successful. We thought it must be a fluke. We needed another kid as a kind of control group.”
    They tried for four years. Mom got pregnant twice and had two miscarriages. They were sad about it, but they didn’t have the money to do all the fertility stuff that people do. By the time I was nine, they’d decided that maybe it was for the best. I was becoming independent. They stopped trying.
    As if to convince themselves how great it was not to be tied down by a baby, Mom and Dad bought us tickets to go visit New York for a week. It was supposed to be a musical pilgrimage. We would go to CBGB’s and Carnegie Hall. But when to her surprise, Mom discovered she was pregnant, and then to her greater surprise, stayed pregnant past the first trimester, we had to cancel the trip. She was tired and sick to her stomach and so grumpy Dad joked that she’d probably scare the New Yorkers. Besides, babies were expensive and we needed to save.
    I didn’t mind. I was excited about a baby. And I knew that Carnegie Hall wasn’t going anywhere. I’d get there someday.

5:40 P.M.
    I am a little freaked out right now. Gran and Gramps left a while ago, but I stayed behind here in the ICU. I am sitting in one the chairs, going over their conversation, which was very nice and normal and nondisturbing. Until they left. As Gran and Gramps walked out of the ICU, with me following, Gramps turned to Gran and asked: “Do you think she decides?”
    “Decides what?”
    Gramps looked uncomfortable. He shuffled his feet. “You know? Decides,” he whispered.
    “What are you talking about?” Gran sounded exasperated and tender at the same time.
    “I don’t know what I’m talking about. You’re the one who believes in all the angels.”
    “What does that have to do with Mia?” Gran asked.
    “If they’re gone now, but still here, like you believe, what if they want her to join them? What if she wants to join them?”
    “It doesn’t work like that,” Gran snapped.
    “Oh,” was all Gramps said. The inquiry was over.
    After they left, I was thinking that one day maybe I’ll tell Gran that I never much bought into her theory that birds and such could be people’s guardian angels. And now I’m more sure than ever that there’s no such thing.
    My parents aren’t here. They are not holding my hand, or cheering me on. I know them well enough to know that if they could, they would. Maybe not both of them. Maybe Mom would stay with Teddy while Dad watched over me. But neither of them is here.
    And it’s while contemplating this that I think about what the nurse said. She’s running the show. And suddenly I understand what Gramps was really asking Gran. He had listened to that nurse, too. He got it before I did.
    If I stay. If I live. It’s up to me.
    All this business about medically induced comas is just doctor talk. It’s not up to the doctors. It’s not up to the absentee angels. It’s not even up to God who, if He exists, is nowhere around right now. It’s up to me.
    How am I supposed to decide this? How can I possibly stay without Mom and Dad? How can I leave without Teddy? Or Adam? This is too much. I don’t even understand how it all works, why I’m here in the state that I’m in or how to get out of it if I wanted to. If I were to say, I want to wake up, would I wake up right now? I already tried