A/N: To all my readers and reviewers, it has been a privilege to take this journey with you. I hope you will stay tuned for the (as yet unnamed) sequel - I have so much more to tell you.

Enjoy!

"Aelphie! Let's go!"

In her book-crammed bedroom, Aelphie Donovan pushed off her covers. She ran her hands through her blond hair and yawned. "I'm up, Mom!" she hollered.

"Half an hour until we leave!"

Aelphie tucked her hair behind her ears as she got out of bed. She looked over at the Harry Potter calendar on the wall. "First day of school at Hollywood Arts, H," she said, giving Hermione's image a smile.

She still had the acceptance letter tacked up on her bulletin board. "Dear Miss Donovan, we are pleased to inform you that a spot has opened in the Visual Arts Department at Hollywood Arts High School for the Fall term. Please contact Alicia Santiago at…."

Aelphie got dressed, yanked her blond hair back into a messy ponytail, and grabbed her camera bag from her desk chair, then headed downstairs for breakfast.

Her brother Eian was sitting at the table in his booster seat eating a Pop-Tart. Her older sister Micah was standing at the stove, poking eggs with a spatula.

"Look at my beautiful lady!" Linda Donovan said, and she gave Aelphie a hug.

"Mom," Aelphie protested as she slung herself into her seat.

"What does my beautiful lady want for breakfast? Pancakes? French toast?"

"Same thing I always want, Mom. A bowl of granola with yogurt and blueberries."

"Haven't changed a bit," Linda said.

"Mom, you're going to make her conceited," Micah said, looking over her eggs with scientist seriousness.

Linda smiled. "No one could change our Aelphie that much. I'll get you your granola, sweetheart."

"I want some juice," Eian said.

"And some juice for the young master," Linda said.

While she was at the refrigerator, she said, "Seriously, though, are you nervous?"

"Nervous?" Aelphie tapped her fingers on the tabletop. "Umm…"

"It's okay if you're nervous," Micah said. "I was nervous when I started at Brentwood."

"You were nervous because you couldn't figure out how to wear a kilt," Aelphie said.

"Kilt pins!" Eian sang.

Linda brought over the granola bowl and the juice. "Here you go, my darlings. Aelphie, I'm going out to warm up the van. Eian, I want you to brush your teeth before the carpool gets here."

"Yes, Mommy," Eian said.

Aelphie scarfed down her granola in record time. She and Eian fought over the sink as they brushed their teeth. She ruffled his hair. "Love you, E."

"Love you, A."

"I'll see you this afternoon," Aelphie said. She grabbed her backpack. "Bye, Micah."

"Bye, Aelphie."

Aelphie hopped into the van and waved to Eian, who was sitting in the front window waiting for the carpool. "Mom," she said as Linda backed the van down the driveway, "do you wonder why there was an opening at Hollywood Arts?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I've been on their waiting list for like three years," Aelphie said. "Ever since Mr. Johnson recommended me right before eighth grade. And there's an opening now? As I'm going into sophomore year?"

"Honey, I always thought it was just a wonderful coincidence." Linda slowed, signaled, turned. "I try not to look at things with a negative light. You know that."

Aelphie smiled out the window. "Yeah."

"For instance, if I did…" Linda said.

"Mom," Aelphie said, and rolled her eyes.

But Linda was smiling. "I know. I've got to get better stories."

A few minutes later they pulled into the parking lot of Hollywood Arts. Aelphie surveyed the lunch area, indicated by a grouping of tables, and the building beyond. "Mom," she said.

"What?"

"I don't think I can do this," Aelphie said.

Linda parked and leaned over to open the glove box. "Do I have to show you the picture?"

"No…"

"I'll show it to you anyway," Linda said. "This picture you took of Eian and Uncle Rudy right before he passed away… it breaks my heart every time I see it. You are an artist, Aelphie. And you deserve to be in a school where that talent is nurtured. No offense to your previous educational institutions, but they were teaching you a lot of things anyone could teach you. These folks here, they can teach you things beyond that. They can help you be more of an artist."

Aelphie touched the black-and-white photograph gently. She had seen it hundreds of times before… she had taken it, for crying out loud. But it still did something to her, too.

"You are my artist," Linda said. "Micah is my socialite. Eian is my mathematician. And your father… well, he's my Prince Charming."

Aelphie rolled her eyes.

"I know," Linda said. "Someday when you're old you'll remember me as the mom who told the same stories and loved you just the same every time."

She looked out at the students gathered around the tables. "You belong here, Aelphie."

"Thanks, Mom," Aelphie whispered.

"Now grab that camera of yours and get out of my van," Linda said. "After all, your father and I spent Eian's college fund on it…"

Aelphie laughed; it was a family joke and entirely untrue. "Okay, okay, I'm going."

Linda got out of the van to open the side door, revealing Aelphie's black-and-lavender manual wheelchair. She lifted it out of the van and brought it around to the passenger-side door. "Give me your backpack," she said, and Aelphie handed over her backpack and her camera bag. "Now get your butt in this chair. School time. And I've got to get back to the store before Reginald ruins everything."

Aelphie swung herself out of her mother's van and into her chair. "Bye, Mom."

"Wait! Shoes!" Linda said. She reached into the backseat of the van and grabbed Aelphie's tennis shoes.

"Mom," Aelphie said, "I don't have feet. When are you going to stop making me wear shoes?"

Linda Donovan looked down proudly at her daughter, who had been born without legs. The nimble girl's body ended somewhere after her hips, but truncated in a pair of insubstantial, two-toed "feet." "Until you stop wearing holes in the bottoms of your shorts," she replied. "Your father and I are not made of money."

"No, because you spent it all on my camera," Aelphie said, and Linda laughed.

"My devil," she said. "Give me a kiss and then get out of my hair."

Aelphie laughed and obligingly reached up to give her mother a kiss. "Love you, Mom."

"Love you, Aelphie. Defy gravity, my sweet."

Aelphie watched as her mother pulled out of the parking lot. Then she squared her shoulders and grabbed the push-rims of her chair. Day Number One, she thought. Here goes nothing.

"Okay, Evie, here comes the nasty part," Jade said. "I promise after this I'm all done messing with you and I'll leave for school."

Her sister didn't respond, but Jade wasn't offended. Evie hadn't spoken since she'd come home from the hospital more than three months ago. A brain injury had stopped all that.

"Ready?" Jade asked. She had one gloved hand on the on-off switch of her sister's suction machine and the other hand on Evie's ventilator circuit. "One… two…"

She tried not to flinch as she pulled off the ventilator circuit. The ventilator's alarms started going off. Evie choked.

Jade nimbly dropped the suction catheter into Evie's tracheostomy tube and began twirling it around, bringing up mucus that Evie couldn't clear herself. The suction machine stuttered and choked as phlegm filtered out into the collection bottle. "Okay, and… three," Jade said, and replaced Evie's vent tubing.

The ventilator faltered for a moment as it registered that Evie was reconnected. Evie herself gasped a little, and then her face smoothed.

"Good girl," Jade said. She turned off the suction machine, yanked off the used suction catheter, replaced it, and then peeled her gloves off. "All done."

Evie was upright in her hospital bed, still wearing the light yellow pajamas she'd slept in. Her shoulder-length brown hair was cut bluntly and somewhat stylishly; at the moment it was pinned back on the sides with a pair of yellow bow-shaped barrettes. If not for the enormous amount of medical equipment surrounding her, she could have been any young woman in any hospital bed in any other private residence in the country.

"But you're mine," Jade said. "Okay. Don't be too hard on Mom today. I'll see you after school."

Since suffering an anoxic brain injury following a double-lung transplant, Evie had been dependent on machines to breathe for her and feed her, to pull mucus from her trach tube and to suction out her saliva. She could not breathe, swallow, chew, move independently, stand, eat, or walk.

"But she no longer has CF," Jade murmured, rolling her eyes as she grabbed her backpack from the doorway to Evie's room. "Mom, she's done with treatments! I'm leaving!"

Annie West appeared in the door separating the kitchen and the living room. "Okay, sweetheart. Thank you. You don't have to do her treatments every morning."

Jade crossed the room to kiss her mother. "Yes, I do."

"See you after school," Annie said, returning the kiss.

Jade opened the front door and looked appraisingly at the car parked in the driveway behind the Wests' oversized handicap-accessible van. "Right on time," she said to Tori as she crossed the sidewalk and opened the passenger-side door.

"I pride myself on my promptness," Tori said.

"Hi, Jade!" Cat sang from the backseat.

"Hi, Cat."

"First day of school!"

"Yippee," Jade said, and twirled her fingers in the air in a manner suggesting sarcastic festivity.

"What classes are you taking?" Tori asked as she pulled out of the driveway.

"Well, Improv 3 with Sikowitz," Jade said. "And Math. And Ballet. And…"

"I'm taking Cooking!" Cat squealed.

"Cooking?" Jade looked in the rearview mirror at her redheaded friend. "Is that safe?"

"She has a partner," Tori said. "Robbie."

"Is that safe?"

All too soon they were in the parking lot at Hollywood Arts. Jade helped Cat out from the backseat. The redhead saw some of her friends and bobbed off, squealing with glee.

"Is it hard?" Tori asked, when it was just her and Jade standing by the cars.

"Being here without Evie?" Jade hadn't even considered that. "Hell, yeah. I mean, everywhere I look, I see…"

Her eyes skipped over the Asphalt Café. "She used to like to sit at that table, because it was out of the sun but it was close to the double doors that lead back into the Visual Arts hallway," she said, pointing. "And she never, ever ate anything out of the Grub Truck, which I guess proves she was smarter than the rest of us."

"Is she… is she going to school?" Tori asked, oddly unsure of how to phrase the question.

"No," Jade said. "There's just tutors and therapists coming to the house. Which is easier on my mom, at least for now. I mean, at some point they'll have to either send her back to a school or tutor her full-time, but we're not there yet."

"She's lucky to have you," Tori said, and was sure that she would have said more.

The bell interrupted them.

"We're all lucky, one way or another," Jade said, and lifted her bag to her shoulder. "See you in Improv."

"Until we meet again," Tori said.

Jade was the majority of the way to her math class, minding her own business, when she saw a crowd of people in front of Evie's old locker. It's stupid. It's not her locker anymore, she thought.

The crowd thinned as the warning bell rang, and suddenly there was just one person in front of the locker.

For a moment her heart clanged in her chest. Evie!

And there were some similarities – a wheelchair, for example. And a backpack slung haphazardly over the back.

But as Jade took in the rest of the picture, she confirmed what she already knew. Her Evie, the Evie she imagined, was no longer at Hollywood Arts. Indeed, the person sitting before her in a wheelchair was smaller, blond, and the backpack was a mishmash of Harry Potter pins and brightly colored hand-drawn birds, not the classic black Evie favored.

The blond girl reached up and slammed Evie's locker – her locker – and the wheelchair spun towards Jade, nearly hitting her in the knees. "Oh, I'm sorry!" the girl apologized. "My mom says I have a habit of twirling wherever. Didn't mean to hurt you."

"I'm… I'm all right," Jade said.

"Are you sure?" the blond girl asked. "You look a little seasick."

Jade wasn't sure what she was feeling. She stared at the girl, who seemed to be a pocket-sized person. It took her a minute to realize that the girl had no legs.

"Is it your first day too?"

"No," Jade said, and she could feel herself start to clench in. Her chest hurt. "No, it's not my first day."

"Oh," the girl said. "Sorry."

She grabbed her wheelchair's push-rims and was about to roll away when Jade gripped her shoulder. "Can I help you?" She didn't sound so pleasant anymore.

"Take care of that locker," Jade said. "A really great girl had it before you."

"Yeah?" The blond girl didn't look convinced.

"Yeah," Jade said. "She was really awesome."

"If you say so," the girl said, and spun away.

"Wait!" Jade said, feeling useless.

The girl turned back towards her. "Can I help you? I'm going to be late for Photography, so if this is one of those you-don't-have-legs talks, could we have it later?"

"Um, no," Jade said, her head spinning. The girl was in Photography? Evie had been in Photography. But Evie was gone. So there was a space. This girl was the new Evie?

"'Cause I am so well aware that I don't have legs," the girl went on. "Sixteen years kinda puts that one in your head."

"No," Jade repeated. "I just… Welcome to Hollywood Arts. I'm Jade."

She stuck out her hand, and was surprised when the blond girl rolled forward and shook it. "I'm Aelphie."

"Aelphie," Jade said, aware that she sounded like a broken record. "Aelphie."

"It's not short for Elphaba," the girl said quickly. "You know, from Wicked? It's actually Aelphina, after my father's great-aunt. Sorta weird. But my mom covers for me and tells people it's from Wicked. It wasn't her name choice."

She looked up at Jade. "You still look seasick."

"It's just… my sister used to have that locker," Jade said, and it was as though the words had set her free. "My sister used to have that locker. And she's not coming back to school here, because she has a brain injury."

"Oh," Aelphie said.

"And… I guess I just got sentimental."

Aelphie considered this. "It seems like the kind of thing to get sentimental over," she said at last. "In fact, it seems completely normal."

The final bell rang, and Jade at last pulled her gaze away from Evie's locker. "Well, I have to get to math," she said, and started to walk away.

"Jade," Aelphie said.

Jade turned back towards her.

"Would you… would you like to have lunch some time? You could… tell me about your sister. What made her special. I have to decorate this locker, apparently. Maybe I could use some inspiration from its previous tenant."

And though Jade thought she would rather pull her fingernails off with barbecue tongs than eat lunch with the girl who had taken Evie's place at Hollywood Arts, she forced a smile. "I'd like that," she said.

Aelphie rolled away.

"Aelphie?"

"Yeah?"

"Maybe… while we're at it… you could tell me where your legs went," Jade said, and offered what she hoped was a sarcastic, funny smile.

"Yeah," Aelphie said, a slow smile spreading across her face. "Maybe I could."

And she rolled away into the crowd of students rushing to class, until she faded from sight.

Until she could have been anyone.