Sorry Not Sorry

by Jaime Reed

  My phone vibrated again. Speak of the Devil and she will text.

  I showed Mateo the message. “Alyssa wants me to come to her house now.”

  Grinning, he got to his feet and returned to the center counter. “See? There’s your sign right there. Go see her.”

  My gaze darted to the clock on the microwave. “At seven thirty at night?”

  He slipped on a mitt, then bent to check the pizza in the oven. “Yeah. Better to see her at seven thirty than the eleventh hour.”

  Chef Yoda strikes again. Did he have a book of inspirational quotes lying around? And that pizza sure smelled good. But I felt it best to face the devil with an empty stomach, so I went upstairs to grab my shoes instead.

  One thing I did not miss was going to Alyssa’s house at night. Behind the backyard fence was nothing but wilderness, insects, scavengers, and eight different ways to go missing.

  Through the floating pepper cloud of gnats, the door opened and Alyssa materialized, wearing pajamas and a frown. She crossed her arms, which brought my attention to the bandaged fistula on her bicep. I could be wrong, but that thing got bigger every time I saw it. Or maybe she was getting smaller. Her clothes hung on her in a formless tent and her cheekbones were looking really sharp these days.

  “So, I’ve been hearing some things,” she said.

  “Me too. Sounds like the possums found your trash bins again. Nature’s really scary at night, so can I come in?”

  In a huff, she walked back inside, toward her room. I closed the door behind me and followed her sluggish gait. If she kept with her usual schedule, then she’d had another dialysis treatment yesterday. Her fatigue had to either be from that nasty powder medicine she had to take or from sleeping all day.

  From the door, I scoped out Her Majesty’s boudoir. It was clear that the only time she left the bed was to shower, which she did twice, sometimes three times a day to wash off the urine smell on her skin. It leaked from her pores, soured her breath, soiled her hair and the bedding, and left a briny ammonia smell in her room. Scented candles and time-release air fresheners ran nonstop, and sugar-free mints sat in a fishbowl on her bedside table.

  I found that out on the day I drove her home from her dialysis appointment. The first thing she wanted after her treatment was a shower and clean bedsheets. She could barely stand, all knock-kneed and woozy like a baby deer learning to walk. Even then, she didn’t want my help.

  “I got it, okay? I can make my own bed.” She’d snatched the fallen pillowcase from the floor before I could pick it up. Eyes closed, she’d exhaled slowly, then asked with controlled calm, “Just be here, okay? I don’t need help. Just … be here.”

  And that’s what I did. That’s what I’d been trying to do ever since. She wasn’t asking for the moon; just the remains of her dignity. The trick to honoring that request was to …

  First: Get all the crying done in the car.

  Next: Ignore the elephant in the room, even if the elephant was her.

  Last: Treat her like I normally would, i.e., ratchet and hostile, where she’d grant me the same courtesy.

  I’d mastered all three of these dark arts, which was why I was the only person from school—aside from Ryon—who was allowed in her house.

  Alyssa sat on the bed and collected her phone from the nightstand. “Like I said, I’ve been hearing some things. It’s not like I really care, but have you seen the posts online?”

  Hands tucked into my jeans pockets, I averted my gaze and rocked on the balls of my feet. “Yeah, they’re pretty brutal.”

  “Brutal, you say?” She scrolled down the entries in her phone, then read, “Princess Mayonnaise likes her fried chicken with a side of rice. Hmm. They must be talking about Ryon. Then there’s, I wonder if she’s gonna start twerking after the surgery. Oh, then there’s—”

  “Okay, I get it.” I sat on the foot of the bed. “My feed is just as bad.”

  “It’s trash like this that I wanted to avoid, Janelle,” Alyssa said. “But like always, you gotta wear the cape and try to save someone, even when no one asked you to.”

  “Yeah,” I snapped. “But my hero complex came in handy when you nearly died at the pool sophomore year. So how about you show some gratitude, you hateful brat!”

  “Oh come on!” Alyssa hissed back. “I wasn’t gonna die and you were the main one freaking out. And let’s not forget your betrayal.”

  “Are you still mad that I told Ryon you have diabetes?” I asked. “Funny, that fact clearly wasn’t a deal-breaker for him. And you sneaking around, trying to keep it a secret reached new heights of stupid every week. Your own insecurity is what created all this drama in the first place.” My finger swung between the two of us, indicating the history therein.

  “Mine?” She pointed to her chest. “My insecurity? Have you heard of a boy named Mateo Alvarez? Tall, curly dark hair; kids in school think you two have an arranged marriage?”

  She had me there.

  “And I’ll bet my entire wardrobe that you still haven’t come forward about that stupid love letter, have you?” she went on. When I didn’t reply, she let out a loud groan and rose from the bed. “Omigod! What is wrong with you? The guy lives in your house, sleeps twenty feet away from your room, and you still haven’t told him you wrote it?”

  “I wouldn’t have to admit anything if you hadn’t forced me to write that note in the first place,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “I was doing it for you!” she yelled. “I thought I was helping!”

  “Yeah, you said that a few times. The thing is I didn’t need your help. Just like you don’t need mine.”

  Silence.

  Finally, I asked, “Why did you call me here tonight?”

  “I wanted to see how you were. It’s been nice the past few weeks. You coming by to see me, taking me to my appointments, and helping me get around afterward. I missed us hanging out. I forgot how much I missed it.”

  “Then why didn’t you say something? You know where I live. You obviously know my number.” I wagged my phone in front of her. “We could’ve done this a long time ago and saved a bunch of needless drama and back talk.”

  “That would mean admitting I was wrong, that I was weak. I’m neither. I’m not a fragile, pearl-clutching damsel who needs her boyfriend, her daddy, or her best friend to come save her. I worked so hard to break away from that label. Every class trip, every stitch of clothing in that closet—I earned with my own money. The girls I followed freshman year were following me junior year. Me, the marketing genius that could sell anything to anyone. I was so good, I bought my own hype. I was popular and winning at life on my terms.”

  “And now?” I asked.

  Her mouth opened but she paused. Then she wiped the whole issue away with a wave of her hand. “Anyway, I’m gonna channel my superpowers on something worthwhile, starting with these bangs.” She crossed the room, took a seat in front of her vanity, picked up a pair of shears, and began snipping curly strands on a mannequin.

  With everything going on, I hadn’t noticed the faceless white dummy heads. Three of them sat on her vanity table, all with gray wigs styled in short pixie haircuts.

  Those blank faces sparked a number of questions. Chief among them being, “What are you doing?”

  She fluffed the top of the curly wig with a hair pick. “I’m styling these wigs for Lorraine. She likes the short look. Says it’s more believable at her age, but the ones she ordered are all too long for her taste.”

  Okay, that made perfect sense, except for one thing. “Who’s Lorraine?”

  “The old lady at the dialysis center.”

  It took a moment for the identity to click. “The creepy wig lady? You had nothing but jokes the whole time and now you’re making wigs for her?”

  “She bought them; I’m just shaping them. But yeah, I couldn’t just sit back and let an innocent lady look raggedy. Oh no. Not on my watch. I had to do something.” She kept snipping. “She’s a nice lady. You’d l
ike her. She mentioned having a crush on some guy in her book club but didn’t know how to approach him. I recommended she get that dead raccoon off her head and get an eyebrow wax. I also suggested a good skin cream that fades liver spots.”

  “You’re giving dating and makeup tips to old dialysis patients?” I asked, deadpan.

  “Janelle Lynn Pruitt, shame on you. Just because you’re old, doesn’t mean you can’t be fabulous. I know I plan to be. Because an Active Beauty is always on duty.” She gave me a salute in the mirror.

  This was the softer side of Alyssa that few people saw. I rarely saw it, but when I did, I took the time to reflect on its rarity. I sat cross-legged on her bed and watched her work her magic for nearly an hour, twisting the Styrofoam head here and there for a better angle.

  Though congeniality wasn’t her strong suit, Alyssa had always been smart. She got straight As and Bs and earned a master’s in the hustle and grind by the age of twelve. It was a real shame. That brain was trapped in that body. That body was killing her slowly and making her feel every minute of it. That body, mostly loose skin and retained water that settled to her feet, now weighed ninety pounds. Nobody needed Grandma Trina to say that the girl looked hungry. It was a given.

  “Those better not be tears, Janelle.” Alyssa glared at me through the mirror.

  I wiped my face. “Nah, it—it’s just, you know, my eyes are sweaty. It’s hot up in this piece. What you got the thermostat set on? Armageddon?”

  She snorted a laugh. Her real laugh. “You’ve never been afraid to cry in front of me.”

  Very true, but this was different. I usually cried about things that were already gone or were never with me in the first place. This was mourning in advance, and I thought it best to hold out until that deal was closed.

  A week later, at two in the morning, Grandma Trina tapped on my bedroom door and told me to get dressed. Her request was stern but soft, with a grave note of urgency. For a woman who’d stretch a ten-minute event into an hour-long saga, her vagueness was wrong.

  The time of night was wrong. The need to leave my bed in such a hurry was wrong. Could I at least get dressed? No. No time. My shushed questions and the insistence to come peacefully and not wake the rest of the house was wrong. Why did we have to whisper and tiptoe down the stairs? Why couldn’t the others know? More commands bumbled in the dim light of the hallway.

  Shh, hurry. Grab a coat and come. Everything will be okay.

  But why wouldn’t it be? I hadn’t seen this worry on her face since the night Pop-Pop passed away. A night like this one.

  That chill I’d felt in Alyssa’s hospital room returned, and I knew without Grandma Trina saying anything that something bad had happened.

  Her minivan was cold—no time to warm it up. There was no time for anything; we just had to get there. Everything was closed at this hour, including the eyes of our sleepy town, leaving us to navigate the roads alone with green streetlights ahead.

  Thin pockets of shadows covered the hospital parking lot as we parked close to the door. Not in the front for visitations and appointments, but the side of the building, where bold red letters revealed the truth of the situation. EMERGENCY.

  Dressed in my sweatpants and a holey Bob Marley T-shirt, I rushed through the sliding doors. My pupils shrank at the lights and the sterilized white of the waiting room. Mrs. Weaver paced the floor in her pajamas and a winter coat, chewing her thumbnail down to the nub. Her hair was a fried nest of disrupted sleep, her face a wet spill on a painting, a sad clown with black mascara tears.

  When she saw us, she raced into Grandma Trina’s arms, like a child who needed a mother, and any mother would do. And Grandma Trina held the woman tightly.

  “She had an attack. Her levels dropped again and she went into shock,” Mrs. Weaver cried. “We were so careful. We did everything right.”

  Feeling empty-handed and useless, I watched her fall apart in my grandmother’s arms. “Is she all right?” I asked.

  Mrs. Weaver wiped her black tears on her coat sleeve. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know! She’s all I have; I can’t lose her. She’s just a baby. I can’t!”

  “It’s okay, calm down, Leslie. We’re here. You’re not alone.” Grandma Trina wrapped a thick arm around the woman’s back. “We might be here all night. You want some coffee? Does that sound good to you?”

  Mrs. Weaver nodded, then locked eyes on me. “I’ll sign whatever you need. She’s not eighteen yet and I’m still her legal guardian. I’ll do whatever it takes to make her better, ya hear?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I tipped my head to her, then looked at Grandma Trina, who was still on the fence about the donation idea.

  I expected to see her usual annoyed expression. Instead I saw compassion and a bit of sadness, but it didn’t seem aimed at Alyssa’s mom. Grandma Trina was directing that look toward me. All that worry that creased her forehead and had seemingly aged her in the past week or so had pushed out of her body in a tired breath.

  “The Lord gave us common sense for a reason,” she said. “It ain’t always about floods and burnin’ bushes. Prayers can be answered in a number of ways, includin’ at the end of a scalpel.”

  I nodded at her and let out a long breath. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

  “Call who you need to so we can get this done,” Mrs. Weaver told us. Large, mascara-smudged eyes bore into me, wild with grief. “If there’s a chance that she doesn’t have to go through this again, I’m takin’ it.”

  Using Grandma Trina for support, she left the waiting room, her slippered feet dragging along the brown carpet. I moved to one of the boxy wooden armchairs and allowed my weight and the weight of the world to land on the stiff cushions.

  Three hours later, the doctor gave me the okay to visit Alyssa. Only relatives could stay in the unit for very long, but Mrs. Weaver vouched for me. I told myself I’d stay with her for a few minutes. That’s all I could stand.

  I stood over her sleeping form, noting the various mechanisms that I now knew by their proper names, thanks to all my doctor appointments. The clear hose taped to her hand: IV catheter. The plastic clamp on her index finger that read the oxygen in the blood: pulse oximeter. The face-hugging breathing tube that tunneled down her throat: endotracheal tube. The ventilator, the EKG wires, the ski-boot-looking braces on her legs that prevented blood clots. I could be a certified RN before it was all over. That would never be a career choice—I was about as sick of looking at blood as Alyssa.

  Her hands felt soft and clammy in mine. If she was cold, she wouldn’t say. Stubborn people never admitted defeat or asked for help. Waiting for her to swallow her pride would leave her six feet underground, where hot and cold made no difference.

  At my touch, her eyeballs rolled left and right under the skin before the eyelids parted. She blinked a few times before her gaze settled on me.

  I smiled down at her. “What was that you were saying about winning at life?”

  She tried to smile back, but she was too weak to do anything but blink.

  I’d expected something like this would happen. It was a hope and a fear, and my reason for not withdrawing from the Living Donor Program. My paperwork was still active, and I would see this through until the bitter end, with or without Alyssa’s blessing.

  “All right, Lyssa, we tried it your way. Now we’re gonna do it my way.” I squeezed her fingers to drive my point home. “I’m calling the transplant coordinator first thing, and we’re doing the transplant. I don’t care if I’m pulling rank and stepping on your toes. You’ll have plenty of time to ignore me, talk trash, and get on my nerves later. Because I’d rather have you hate me for the rest of your life than to have you not have a life at all.”

  The space between her eyebrows quivered in her effort to frown, but then the skin fell smooth again. Her watery eyes held mine as she nodded slowly.

  I released a long, exhausted breath. Enough of the fighting, enough of the hurt feelings and bruised egos. Goin
g against someone’s wishes was necessary if it was for a good cause. Right now that was reason enough.

  Rocking yoga pants, wool socks, and Dad’s baggy college sweatshirt with a hole in the arm, I stretched out on the living room couch and watched TV in the barest of terms. Looking super cute for Mateo no longer mattered and all my past efforts to turn his head had been in vain. Take now, for instance. He sat on the opposite end of the sofa, staring at the screen. That adorable head never turned my way, yet the corner of his eye caught my every move. Few words passed between us as he waited for that overdue meltdown to kick off at any minute. I waited, too.

  In a huff, Mateo reached for the remote on the coffee table and turned the channel.

  The sudden movement shattered my trance. “Hey, I was watching that!” Whatever that was.

  “No you weren’t. You were zoned out.” On the screen, a pudgy chef flipped a pan of veggies over an open flame.

  His silent show of support was sweet, but I had to keep the lie going. “No, I wasn’t. It was getting good.”

  “Yeah, the season finale of Pro Bass Fishing is ’bout to be lit.” His arm draped the back of the couch, Mateo shifted in the seat so his whole body faced me. “You’ve been moping around ever since that phone call. This was what you wanted, isn’t it? You’re helping out your friend. She finally agreed to go through with the transplant. What’s the problem?”

  I could name a couple of problems off the bat. Alyssa was all doom and gloom about the procedure. Sera completely ignored me in school and used Devon Shapiro to relay messages to me during student council meetings. I had to close my Facebook account because I kept getting hateful messages calling me a sellout and a freak. Top that off with the mandatory diet I had to endure for the surgery and I was fit to be tied.

  But why burden Mateo with my issues?

  “I don’t wanna talk about it,” I mumbled, and sank deeper into the couch cushions.

  “Fine. You need something else to think about. Go change. We’re going out.” When he got nothing but dead eyes for a reply, he said, “Come on. Let’s go.”