Getting Through Tuesday

Three missed calls from Mom before Morgan is even out of bed. That is how you know she is hovering. Seventeen seconds before having to move. Eighteen. Nineteen. The water stain on the ceiling looks like a rabbit if you squint, or a map of somewhere you will never go. Twenty. *I'm up.* *Breakfast is ready. You have thirty minutes.* *School doesn't start until eight-fifteen, Mom.* *Thirty minutes. I made your favourite.* Morgan does not have a favourite. She knows that. But every Tuesday morning for four months she has made something she thinks is the favourite — pancakes, omelettes, French toast, smoothie bowls — and Morgan has eaten enough of each of them to convince her that things are fine. Today it is blueberry muffins. You can smell them from the stairs. Jeans that hang loose at the waist. A hoodie that used to be Darcy's before she handed it over last year. Fingers run through hair so that it looks like somebody tried. That is the performance, and Morgan has perfected it. What the performance covers: a lie told to the library, a ribbon that should have been tied, an appointment not kept, a note that was not enough, a box opened alone, a sleeve rolled down a second too late, a silence that stays, and a betrayal that turns out to be the thing that helps. Dr. Kim gives Morgan a journal. It sits on the desk with its first page blank, its cardboard cover already bending at the corners from three days of being shoved into a backpack and forgotten. The letter it is meant to hold is addressed to something Morgan has been calling the Gray, and the first word of it — *Dear* — is already wrong. A young adult novel about self-harm, grief and the exhausting work of seeming fine, told by a narrator who is very good at it and very tired. It does not resolve neatly and it does not pretend that being found out is the same as being fixed. Content note: this book depicts self-harm, therapy, hospitalisation and grief directly and without sensationalism.