I open my eyes. There’s a paneled ceiling above me. A whiteboard with the name of my nurse and a smiley face written in blue marker. The intrusive chill of oxygen tubing beneath my nose and the prickle of an IV in the crook of my arm. The window is one of those unopenable, industrial affairs, nothing at all like the arrow slit of a castle tower.
I know my regional hospital rooms: I’m in the ICU of Riverside Methodist Hospital on the north side of Columbus.
It occurs to me that one explanation for the seven days I spent trapped in a fairy tale is that I collapsed on the night of my twenty-first birthday and have spent the past week hooked up to an IV, furiously hallucinating about hot princesses and un-wicked fairies. That maybe I’m actually in one of those bullshit Wizard of Oz stories where the girl wakes up in the final chapter and everyone assures her it was all a dream.
But then—why is there a slender splinter of wood held tight in my fist? I press my thumb against my own fingertips, feeling for blood or bruises; there are none.
“Hey, hon.” The words are rough with exhaustion, cracked with relief.
How many times have I woken in a hospital bed to the sound of my father’s voice? How many times have I turned my stiff neck to see my parents perched at my bedside with new worry lines carved into their faces, cardboard cups of watery coffee clutched in their hands?
“Hey.” My voice sounds like it’s coming from inside a rusted pipe organ, a flaky wheeze. “Where’s my Prince Charming?” It’s the same joke I always make when I wake up from my surgeries and procedures. Usually Dad pulls a wounded, “Am I not charming?” face and Mom rolls her eyes and tousles his hair in a way that tells me she, at least, is thoroughly charmed.
This time they both burst into tears. Dad is the established crier of the family—he was asked to “get a grip or leave the theater” during the last twenty minutes of Coco—but this time Mom is crying just as hard, her shoulders heaving, her knuckles pressed to her eyes.
“Hey,” I offer rustily. “Hey.” And then somehow they’re both on the bed next to me and our foreheads are mashed together and I’m crying too. I spent the last week （or maybe the last five years） trying not to let the weight of their love suffocate me. It doesn’t feel very suffocating right now.
I clutch them a little closer, tucking my head into the hollow place right beneath Dad’s collarbone the way I did when I was little, when my death was far away and neither of us were very afraid of it. We stay like that for a while, shuddering and snuffling at one another, Mom smoothing the hair from my forehead.
Questions intrude, scrolling gently across my brain like the banners behind planes at the beach. How did I get here? How am I not dead? Am I still dying?
I don’t really care about most of them. There’s only one thing （five things, technically） I care about. I pull back from my parents. “Is Charm around? Or…” I don’t know how I’m going to finish that sentence—or any other mythical figures/Disney princesses?—but I don’t have to.
The curtain between my bed and the next is flung back with a dramatic flourish, and there she is: five-and-a-half feet of attitude, a bleeding heart with bleached hair. Charm. She gives me a smile that’s aiming for cavalier and landing closer to desperately relieved, then tugs someone else around the curtain. She’s tall and slender, with enormous eyes and fragile wrists that extend several inches beyond the sleeves of Charm’s leather jacket. It takes me far too long to recognize her.
“Primrose? How—”
A helpless, giddy smile slides across the princess’s face as Charm swaggers to the foot of the bed and sits casually on my ankles. “Morning, love.”
A throat clears on the other side of the curtain and someone says, “There’s a three-visitor limit, folks!” in the cheery, steely tone of a nurse on a twelve-hour shift who is not interested in a single ounce of back talk.
Mom and Dad stand. “We’ll give you all a minute,” Dad stage-whispers, and they edge around my princesses and out into the hall, taking their cardboard cups with them.
I push the button that buzzes my bed upright. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Primrose answers carefully. “How are you?” She sounds like a tourist who has memorized the local phrases from a guidebook.
I resettle the oxygen tubing beneath my nose. “Alive. So, you know. Pretty excellent.” As I say it, I realize it’s true: I’m tired and a little stiff, but my heart is thumping steadily in my ears and my lungs are filling and emptying easily, casually, as if they could keep doing it forever. Hope flutters again in my chest, a habit I can’t seem to quit. “How did we get back?”