Free Believe by Sarah Aronson

into the corner and poured herself one drink and then another. She blamed herself. She never should have let me out of her sight on such an emotionally packed day. “Do you want to talk to someone?” She meant a shrink. “It helped before.”
    â€œNot really.” I hated sitting on the couch with my “paid best friend.” I was pretty sure it wouldn’t help me now.
    She didn’t fight me. “You could come by the studio and take a few classes. Maybe a thirty-day challenge.” Lo believed that Bikram yoga was the answer to 99 percent of the world’s questions. When I shook my head no—to me, thirty days in her hot room was the equivalent of a torture chamber—she frowned. “Maybe you should do some research. You know—in the name of understanding the other side.” Lo’s favorite yogi worked at the used bookstore—right near the white church. Many times, she’d asked me to check out the section on medical and spiritual health. “You know, the Demetriuses are right about one thing: the body heals itself in all kinds of mysterious ways. You can call it God. Or just nature. Reading about alternative medicine might be helpful.”
    â€œAlternative medicine?” I almost laughed. I’d rather blame my PTSD.
    Sharon had other concerns. “What does Abe think? Who else knows?” She turned to Lo. “Now will you talk to Robert? With Armstrong in the area, things could get messy fast.”
    I sighed. Yoga wasn’t the answer. Neither was the law. “My friends will not sell me out. They won’t go to the press. They definitely won’t talk to Armstrong.” I held up my hands to stop them from interrupting me. “When I told Miriam about my mom, she said the same thing you did. That I was stressed out. It was just bad timing. I heard her because I was scared. And because of the timing.” I stood up and headed for the stairs. I had nothing more to say.
    Up in the loft, remnants of the brown dress lay scattered on the floor. The retrospective sat on my bed. I opened it. Then I closed it. I thought about tearing it into pieces or throwing it across the room with the rest of the mess. But after everything that had happened, I had to admit—I was curious. I didn’t know what they could have said. It had been years since I had given an interview.
    First I flipped through the magazine. It was printed on high-quality glossy. There were at least thirty pages of ads. It felt heavy.
    Then I scanned the sections about Israel, the Middle East, and war, skipping past the list of victims and the section about Dave Armstrong, until I got to the part about me. It wasn’t long, mostly a photo diary, a collage of old headlines. But it was me. My life: ten years on four pages. The center montage featured close-ups of my hands before and after surgery. Some of them were pretty gruesome.
    The caption read, “Janine endured multiple surgeries and years of painful rehab.” At the time, the doctors in New York said that it was the most difficult hand surgery they’d performed to date.
    I turned on the light to the brightest level, so I could compare the newest pictures to my palms, the scars that remained.
    What it didn’t say: My hands didn’t just look different. They were different. My fingerprints changed. My nails didn’t grow right. It took years of hard work to learn how to do even the simplest things. Even now, I had a hard time typing for a long time. Writing wasn’t simple. And forget about playing an instrument. They considered their surgeries a huge success, but I still couldn’t text anything longer than a couple of keys. I needed a stylus to get it right.
    I turned back to the story.
    The coverage surrounding Janine Collins’ rescue rivals the biggest stories in history, including the death of Princess Di and even 9/11. For years, sympathetic strangers showered her with gifts of