Chapter 74: Friends. Whatever.

NATE

JUNIOR YEAR

FALL

One thing most kids who are sick a lot have in common is that we don't take for granted long stretches of health. For the first seventeen years of my life, a regular hospital stint was part of life, just as much as my birthday was-only less predictable about when it would fall. I'd gone almost four remarkable years without a serious illness, from the autumn of my junior year in high school to late summer before my junior year in college, but I never got used to it. Every time I had a tickle in my throat or an odd pain in my legs, I waited for the inevitable.

When it finally came, the timing wasn't as bad as it could have been. In early August before our third year of college began, I woke up at home and realized I was running a fever. Before the end of the day, I was in the hospital, and by the next day, I was in the ICU.

Quinn had come home early from her summer with Leo. She'd told me a little about what everything had been like down there, and how it had