Jenny Halper is a Brooklyn film critic and arts writer working on an MFA in creative writing. She is also working on a memoir about her childhood, which was filled with books, theater and reconstructive surgery. The birth defect she suffered from is corrected now, and her torso is complete with all the usual features (or as she puts it, “requisite holes”), but her ability to slip back into her 10-year-old brain is uncanny. Here is one scene from her memoir in progress.

My mom and grandma and I take the train to Boston to have tests and then see Dr. Hendren, who is called a miracle doctor, but I’m still sick so I’m not sure. It’s my first time taking Amtrak, and I’m excited by the dining car. I lead the way up the train’s narrow aisle, singing songs from West Side Story — mostly “I feel pretty, since,” in my favorite hot pink shirt, I do — pulling open in-between car doors and letting cool air hit me in the face. My mom buys three individual four cheese pizzas and we sit down in a booth and I look out the window, hoping for a view but all I see are trees and trees and trees.

When we get to Boston, I’m able to talk my health-conscious (I’m fed frookies and tofu pups and cheerios) mother into buying me a Boston cream donut. We’re in Boston, I plead, and my mom shakes her head and takes her wallet out. I grin, slide across the floor, exclaiming YES! — an intentional parody of Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. I used to have a crush on him. The Boston Cream donut is bigger than the ones they have at Dunkin Donuts and the chocolate glaze gets all over my mouth and the cream drops on my favorite shirt. I’m the happiest I’ve been all day, and it’s a good thing my mom or grandma do not ask me for a bite because there’s no way they’d get even one.

We share a room in a Best Western across the street from Boston Children’s Hospital and the room is small but I have my own bed. They have pay per view — the best thing EVER — and we watch Parenthood that night, and again the next morning, before going to the hospital. There’s an Au Bon Pain with pastries and coffee in the hospital lobby — every hospital has Au Bon Pain downstairs — but I’m not allowed to eat and so my mother doesn’t either. My grandmother drinks tea; she always smells like tea, tea and dried up roses I’ve decided. I’m supposed to get a shot and then the doctors will take X-rays and it’s called a wi-di-ker test and it’s just to make sure my bladder and my kidney are both working properly because I’ve only got one kidney, on my left side. If it stops working, will I die? I ask my mom, and she says no, and she’s said no before, but I’ve already told the whole fifth grade I might not have that long to live. Three girls in my homeroom felt so bad they gave me their dessert, and I didn’t have to eat the mushy turkey sandwich that my mom had packed that day.

When we get into the wi-di-ker test room I’m told to change into a hospital gown, and then I realize that this wi-di-ker thing is more than just a shot and I ask — a little panicked — if they’re going to give me an IV. I have the smallest veins in the whole world, I say, and it usually takes five nurses just to get the needle in and I have lots of scar marks on my wrist and hand and arm. The nurse says yes and I feel that hot burny about to cry sensation behind my eyes but I stop it and I tell myself to pretend I’m acting, playing someone brave, since I’m not brave myself. I hum “I feel pretty” as I change into the hospital gown and I think of how last week someone in the middle school locker room was singing ‘I feel horny’ and that makes me laugh. Even though I’m not sure what horny means.

The wi-di-ker test room is dark and there’s a long table in the center and when I sit up on it it’s so hard it hurts my butt (I think underneath the cloth there’s metal). The nurse, who has pudgy light brown hands and dreadlocks, looks at both my arms and hands, then wraps a rubber band around my left elbow and taps the inside of my arm. Aaah, that’s a good one, she says, and I think, no it’s not. She rubs my wrist with alcohol and I cringe and look up at the ceiling light and pretend that I am being filmed and I can’t cry or look afraid or else the audience will not admire me. Don’t want to watch? The nurse asks, and I shake my head. Want to hold my hand? My mother asks and I say no. She stands with her shoulders stooped, voice rising, shrill, like whenever she talks to Dr. Hendren, and now she’s standing in the corner asking the wi-di-ker test doctor lots of questions, and it’s a good thing Doctor Hendren’s in his office on the seventh floor because he’d say that lawyers talk too much.

The needle’s in so I unclench my teeth. My mom’s still standing in the corner, looking up at the tall doctor, straight brown hair hiding her face. I’m already almost as tall as my mother, even though last year I only reached her shoulder, and she says that that’s why my legs always hurt. Now I’m lying on my stomach and the metal table presses hard against my ribs, and the nurse spreads jelly on my back, pressing down hard with her pudgy hands. I close my eyes and try to picture scenes from West Side Story, but I only see the ending, Maria sitting over Tony’s body, crying because he is dead. In real life, I remember, Natalie Wood drowned and died, and maybe I don’t have it so bad after all. Then something sharp and even colder than the jelly pierces my left side and I can’t help it and my leg shoots up and then I kick the doctor in his big and bony chin.

The doctor grabs onto my ankles and I squeeze my eyes to keep tears back. My eyes are burning and my back is burning and the x-ray camera flashes as sharp cold needles pierce my left side up and down and almost towards the center, and I wonder if this is what it feels like to be shot. My mother’s standing next to me and I won’t let her see my wet face — my fingers are already soaked — and I think of how Alex in Alex: The Life of a Child had cystic fibrosis but was cheerful even when her fingers puffed up and she couldn’t breathe. So I swallow and pretend I’m Alex — on the cover of the book she even looks like me — and so I act like I am Alex in a TV movie, not scared even though I’m sure I’ll die. Three quarters through, the doctor says, and two big flashes go off, then another needle and another flash. I grind my teeth into a smile, and my mother pats my arm but I still cannot look up at her.