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By Root 347 0

purple and gold sweatshirts, shelves stuffed with pennants and soda cozies, and out into the evening, which was not blue at all but a soft, waning pink. The floorboards of his car were littered with textbooks and old CD cases, the carpets gritty with road salt. As he drove her across the bay, he spun an excitable little monologue, telling her about the inlet they were passing, where his friends Coop and Mia kept their catamaran, and the neighborhood off to the right, where his favorite coffee shop was located, and not far away, near the arboretum, was the unpainted furniture store where he had worked after high school for eighteen months, while he “decompressed,” he said, “and figured the whole thing out,” and there up ahead you could see the car wash with the elephant sign, a smiling neon behemoth hosing itself down with its trunk, which was his very favorite car wash—easily, no contest.

It took an effort of will to interrupt him. “You live in a wide world of favorites, don’t you?”

“That’s what Coop says. I guess I do.”

“So how did you hurt your arm?”

He searched the sagging cloth of the ceiling for an answer. “You know, I honestly can’t remember. Bumped into a doorway. Got punched.”

He slid into the turning lane at a red light and leveled his gaze at her. “But that,” he said, and he tugged his lip down to display the tissue, a healthy rose color, unlit by trauma or disease, “must hurt like all hell.”

Impulsively she grazed the ragged fringe of her sore with her tongue. It flashed the way a shard of glass does when it’s struck by the sun. “Mm-hmm. Like all hell.”

“Yeah, I can totally tell. You know, I really respect you. My football coach—don’t worry, I’m not one of those football guys. I quit when I was in eighth grade. But what my coach used to say is that you’ve got to play through the pain. And that’s what you do. It must be hard to get up in front of an audience and talk when your mouth is like it is.”

And that was her situation exactly. There were entire weeks when she did everything she could to avoid speaking to other people: letting her voice mail take her phone calls, using the self-service lane at the grocery store, waiting for the UPS truck to drive away before she collected her packages. The problem began shortly after the Illumination, when she punctured her soft palate with a tortilla chip. With fascination and disgust, she watched over the next few days as the mark sank into her skin and filled with a luminous fluid. It took nearly two weeks for it to heal, by which time she had generated another by jabbing her gums while brushing her teeth. After that the wounds came in clusters, appearing whenever she bit the inside of her mouth or ate something too salty or spicy, but just as often for no reason whatsoever, or at least none she could determine. At first she thought the problem was only temporary, but four years had passed since then, and she had not gotten any better. Four years of withdrawing from her friends, her son, her parents, of declining to go on dates because she couldn’t bear to pretend she was all right. Four years of pinprick-size cavities on her lips and her gums, her cheeks and the roof of her mouth, on the tender border of her tongue, tiny inflamed holes that expanded slowly and clotted at their edges, then whitened, distended, and lost all form. Some of the sores grew as large as nickels, flooding her face with light even when her lips were clamped shut. No sooner did one vanish than another would appear. Often, when things were at their worst—when she came into morning thinking she might have healed while she slept and gave the spot where one of her ulcers had been an experimental tap and felt so ill with pain that her hands tightened and the wells beneath her eyes grew damp—she would find herself repeating, Why me, why do I have to be sick all the time, what possible purpose could it serve? And why this sickness, why this pain, why not some other? Take my eyes so that I cannot see. Take my legs so that I cannot run. Anything, anything, but my mouth so that I cannot speak, my