If I Stay: 4:57 a.m.–7:16 a.m.

Some clue about what my parents would choose for me if they could? I try to think about it from their perspectives.

She’d be livid with me for even contemplating anything but staying.

He sounds so young and vulnerable, like Teddy used to sound when he got the stomach flu.

Adam. God, even in this state, he is beautiful. His eyes are dipping with fatigue.

When he first sees me, he blanches, like I’m some hideous Creature from the Black Lagoon.

“Please, Mia,” he implores. “Don’t make me write a song.”

I had a feeling that they were going to let me in, at least—even before I told Professor Christie about the one judge’s “long time since we’ve had an Oregon country girl” comment, even before she hyperventilated because she was so convinced this was a tacit promise of admission.

I had broken through some invisible barrier and could finally play the pieces like I heard them being played in my head, and the result had been something transcendent: the mental and physical, the technical and emotional sides of my abilities all finally blending.

I’m not the kind of person who’s prone to premonitions or overconfidence, so I suspected that there was more to my flash than magical thinking.

But after I told him I’d only done okay at the audition, I had the feeling that I was wading into quicksand, and that if I took one more step, there’d be no extricating myself and I’d sink until I suffocated.

Two minutes before, I hadn’t even wanted to celebrate, but now I was feeling dejected and insulted at being relegated to a midweek dinner at the same place we always went to.

But somehow, the prospect of Juilliard made things different

Adam and I had never been the kind of couple to talk about the future, about where our relationship was going, but with things suddenly so unclear, we avoided talking about anything that was happening more than a few weeks away, and this made our conversations as stilted and awkward as they’d been in those early weeks together before we’d found our groove.

The idea of me going to New York was seeming more and more real, and though this generally filled me with a nervous, if conflicted, excitement, the image of me and Teddy hanging out together on New Year’s Eve left me feeling unbearably lonely.

She put down a plate of hash and a thick slice of sourdough bread, and even though I couldn’t imagine being hungry, my mouth watered and my stomach rumbled and I was suddenly ravenous.

“But seventeen is an inconvenient time to be in love.”

All relationships are tough. Just like with music, sometimes you have harmony and other times you have cacophony.

“What am I going to do?” I lamented.

“I’m calling it ‘The Girlfriend’s-Going-to-Juilliard-Leaving-My-Punk-Heart-in-Shreds Blues,”’ he said, singing the title in an exaggeratedly twangy voice.

She’s up to something, but whether it’s trotting out loved ones to lobby on behalf of my continuing my earthly existence or whether she’s simply bringing them in to say good-bye, I can’t say.

But then it’s like she adjusts to the light and decides that even though I may look like a zombie, even though there are tubes sticking out of every which orifice, even though there’s blood on my thin blanket from where it’s seeped through the bandages, I’m still Mia and she’s still Kim.

I’m exhausted, but at the same time Adam’s visit has left me ... I don’t know what. Agitated. Anxious. Awake, definitely awake.

After all, I spent the last day dreaming of him coming to me, and when he finally staggered into the ICU, if I had the strength, I would’ve run away.

I like how Kim is talking to me normally, like Gran did earlier, just jabbering on, spinning a good yarn, as if we were together on my porch, drinking coffee (or an iced caramel frappuccino in Kim’s case) and catching up.

I don’t know if once you die you remember things that happened to you when you were alive. It makes a certain logical sense that you wouldn’t. That being dead will feel like before you were born, which is to say, a whole lot of nothingness.

Every now and again, Mom or Dad will be telling a story about something, about Dad catching his first salmon with Gramps, or Mom remembering the amazing Dead Moon concert she saw with Dad on their first date, and I’ll have an overpowering deja vu.

But sometimes the memories feel so real, so visceral, so personal, that I confuse them with my own.

And I want to remember her like this: telling a funny story, fighting with her crazy mom, being cheered on by punkers, rising to the occasion, finding little pockets of strength in herself that she had no idea she possessed.

And the rest of her senior year will probably suck, what with her getting all that cloying your-best-friend’s-dead sympathy that will drive her so crazy, and also because really, we are each other’s only close friend at school.

But then I looked out at Mom, who was smirking at me, as if issuing a challenge, and Dad, who was tapping on his pipe, pretending to be nonchalant so as not to apply any pressure, and Teddy, who was jumping up and down—though I think it was because he was hopped up on marshmallows, not because he had any desire to hear me play—and Kim and Willow and Henry all peering at me like this really mattered, and Adam, looking as awed and proud as he always did when he listened to me play.

But everyone was looking at me so intently, wanting me to join in so much, and I realized that sounding bad wasn’t the worst thing in the world that could happen.

It’s all just a matter of time, and part of me wonders why I’m delaying the inevitable.

When he says Teddy, his voice cracks and an avalanche of tears tumbles down his face.

But I can’t wrap my mind around the notion of you not getting old, having kids, going to Juilliard, getting to play that cello in front of a huge audience, so that they can get the chills the way I do every time I see you pick up your bow, every time I see you smile at me.

In comes the cello, like a heart bleeding. And it’s like something inside of me implodes.

Yo-Yo Ma continues to play, and it’s like the piano and cello are being poured into my body, the same way that the IV and blood transfusions are.

For the first time, I can sense how fully agonizing staying will be.

I’m feeling not just the physical pain, but all that I have lost, and it is profound and catastrophic and will leave a crater in me that nothing will ever fill.

The feelings pile up, threatening to crack my chest wide-open. The only way to survive them is to concentrate on Adam’s hand.

I summon all the love I have ever felt, I summon all the strength that Gran and Gramps and Kim and the nurses and Willow have given me. I summon all the breath that Mom, Dad, and Teddy would fill me with if they could. I summon all my own strength, focus it like a laser beam into the fingers and palm of my right hand.