It was all I could do not to cry. “She’ll be fine,” I reassured myself. “Tony will take care of her.” I was supposed to have been in that car anyway. It’s just because of diabetes I am here at all.

Decision made. I punched the “Stop” button on the IV machine and disabled the alarm. The nurses don’t know that I’ve learned how to do that, but I watch everything. It’s not like it’s difficult. There’s a big red button that says “Disable Alarm.” I’m no technological genius, but I think I can handle that.

I freed myself from the IV with a wince and reached down into the panties I was still wearing. I stashed a whole bunch of jolly ranchers inside of them before I began the plan. It sounds gross to eat something that came out of your underwear, but desperate times call for desperate measures. The candy of course was separated from my crotch by means of cellophane wrapping. That made it less gross. I unwrapped about ten candies put them in my hand and swallowed them at once. Hopefully no one would find me until I had crossed over. It would take about an hour, but it should work.

I’d been secretly cutting my connection tubing for the past week or so. No one ever looks at my tubes and since the pump itself didn’t display an error message, I hadn’t been caught. Ideally, I would’ve simply gone up to my room and died peacefully in my room, but mom had caught me. I guess I was a little more incoherent than I realized. When I said I was going to take a nap, she followed me upstairs. I fell on the bed and my shirt lifted. I didn’t even notice she was in the room. I was way out of it. “Here”, she said, and I was surprised to learn she was there. “Are you feeling alright?”

“I’m okay,” I lied.

“You don’t look okay,” she told me. Before I knew it, she was inspecting my pump.

“Hey, wait! What are you doing?”

“Shanna, these aren’t connected!”

“It must have come undone.”

“I don’t think it does that.” Mom eyed me wearily. “You weren’t trying to do anything to yourself, were you?”

I’ve never lied to mom in my entire life. Sometimes I’ve just not mentioned things, but I’ve never actually lied verbally out loud. “Of course not. I don’t know what happened.”

“Neither do I, but we better get you to the hospital.” We got there and they paged Doctor Warner. He was not happy to have his Easter dinner interrupted by me. And a very sick me at that. “How’s my star pupil today?” he teased.

“Fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“I’m sorry I screwed up.”

“Happens to everybody. Even you.”

There were advantages to all those years of playing responsible role model of teenage diabetic. No one ever thought you were doing anything on purpose. I used that to my advantage. If I had always ended up here like my friend Paul who has had diabetes longer than I have, but can’t seem to manage his care without having an episode every month or so, there was no way I would have gotten away with this.

I went back to the bed to wait. There was no need, I felt, to create added drama for the poor nurse who found me. Besides, I had no real desire to faint onto cold linoleum anyway.