My mother insisted on meeting us at the glass entrance doors.

Before my sister even walked inside for her blood draw, our mother grabbed her by both shoulders, kissed her pale cheek, and said, smiling with a terrifying intensity at a volume only the three of us could hear:

“Do not disappoint me again, sweetheart.”

Again.

I sat in the sterile waiting room with my paperback upside down in my lap, doing terrible new math.

Chelsea wasn’t the lucky one.