When I was sixteen and broke my arm, the doctor at the hospital asked me to rate the pain on a scale of zero to ten, with zero being no pain and ten being the worst pain I could imagine. I wanted to look tough, sure. But also I could imagine oceans of pain so vast and incalculable they tipped this to practically nothing. So I told him it was a four. He smirked at me and gave me a pain pill anyway. What was worse than the pain, though, was the fear. When I first crashed Pop’s car, all I felt was pain, and I didn’t know what it meant. Was I going to look down and see that my arm had been torn
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