Chapter 4

"There were no sedatives in the sample," the man said. "No psychiatric drugs, nothing on the banned list. Just ordinary tea. The only thing off was some bacteria, from it sitting too long. That's all."

The phone slipped out of my hand and clattered into the sink.

It wasn't possible.

If the tea was clean, how had I gone down the first two years? Why did my mother stand over me every exam eve and watch me drink every last drop?

Unless there really was something wrong with me. Unless the diagnosis was true, and I'd done this to myself, year after year, too desperate to win.

That was the moment it all came apart.

For weeks the tea had been the one thing keeping me sane—proof there was a reason, proof it wasn't all in my head. Now even that was gone.

I looked at the girl in the mirror—gray, hollow-eyed—and didn't know her. I slid down the bathroom door and cried into my hands without making a sound.

After that, I stopped being a person.

I stopped arguing. I stopped asking questions. If the tea was clean, then the broken thing was me. I'd been the kind of student teachers bragged about; now I couldn't get through a page without my eyes sliding off it. Maybe I'd been built wrong from the start, and the fainting was just the proof finally showing.

They wouldn't let me near a book. My mother found me a job bussing tables at a café on the corner.

"If you can't study, you can earn your keep," she said. "Your brother starts at a real university soon. Tuition, rent—thousands a year. The least his sister can do is help."

I didn't argue. I chopped fruit, wiped counters, hauled out the trash. The days blurred into each other, and I stopped counting them. My paychecks went straight to my mother; she left me a few bills for lunch. The girl who used to top every test couldn't be trusted with her own money now.

Cole came in sometimes with his friends, tipping his chin at me behind the counter. "That's my sister. She's got... issues. Works here to help pay for my school."

His friends would give me that look—half pity, half disgust. I kept my head down and kept wiping.

A month passed like that. I didn't fight any of it. There was nothing left in me to fight with.

One slow afternoon, my coworker Mara caught the color draining out of my face.

"Hey. When'd you last eat? You look like you're about to drop." She filled a cup from the kettle and pushed it at me. "Here. It's just chamomile. It'll settle you."

I flinched away from it. "I don't drink tea."

"Two sips. Come on." She folded my fingers around the warm cup.

I was too tired to fight her. I took a small sip.

The taste touched my tongue—thin, plain, a little bitter. A faint grassy smell, and under it, nothing.

I went still.

Wrong. It was wrong.

Why wasn't it sweet? Where was that warmth at the back of it, that smell I knew better than my own name?

I stared into the cup, and the blood went cold all through me.

Every night for years, my mother had handed me tea that was sweet. Sweet and rich and just a little strange—a taste I'd decided, somewhere along the way, was simply what tea was.

This was what tea was. Thin. Bitter. Nothing.

Hers had never been plain. Not one single night. And every exam eve she had stood in my doorway and waited—waited until the mug was empty, watching, making sure.

It wasn't me. It was never me.

My mind started racing, faster than it had in years.

I understood. I finally understood the secret of my mother's tea.