"Even if I get worse?"
"Especially then. Getting worse is information. Vanishing is the thing I won't cooperate with." She squeezed Aaliyah's shoulder once, a rare touch, precise as a fingering. "Go upstairs. Eat whatever harmless food they've put out. And if anyone at coffee hour calls you a miracle, you tell them miracles don't practice on Wednesdays. Workers do."
The video existed by Sunday night.
Ruth found out from a church mother who meant well and arrived with a phone already glowing. Thirty-eight seconds, filmed from the second level, the sound compressed until the gray song was a ghost of itself and the fountain was louder than the left hand. The caption called Aaliyah a prodigy and the woman a villain and asked viewers to share if they believed in kids. The comments did what comments do: some were kind, some were hungry, some were about the yellow cardigan, which was none of their business. Ruth watched it once with Aaliyah beside her on the couch, as Miss Anita had ordered, and then she put the phone face down.
"That's not the whole thing," Aaliyah said. Her stomach felt strange, as if the pizza had come back as a theory. "They cut Malik. They cut you. They made her face do more than it did."
"They made a story that fits in a pocket," Ruth said. "Pockets leave things out. That's their nature." She was quiet a moment, thumb rubbing the edge of the couch cushion. "We are not going to chase it. We are not going to make an account so you can become a child who checks a number before she checks her hands. If a real person from a real school calls the church or the center, Anita and I will listen. If a stranger calls this apartment with a deal, the answer is no until a human being we trust has read the paper. Do you understand the difference between a door and a stampede?"
"A door is one person knocking. A stampede is people who want the feeling of me without the Wednesday."