Send Me a Sign

by Tiffany Schmidt

  “You’re lucky I was allowed to get you. I begged for a ten-minute head start to pick you up. I had to pull the old Halloween photo of us dressed up as Sonny and Cher off the fridge and bring up how you chased down the sixth grader who stole my candy.”

  “Gyver, I just needed …” My voice was shaking. I’m not afraid.

  “What? What do you need, Mi? I’ve been patient. Tears over a song? That’s extreme, even for you. Even if you were drunk—”

  “It was water.” I wasn’t sure yet. I wasn’t ready to tell everyone. But he wasn’t everyone. He was Gyver. I needed a sign. Or a distraction. “Why isn’t that band together anymore?”

  “Something Corporate? The lead singer wanted to pursue a solo project. Then he got leukemia. You’ve heard some of his new band’s music. Jack’s Mannequin?” He searched my face for recognition. “No? I’ve played it for you. You like it.”

  I gripped the seat with both hands. “What’d you say?”

  “You like Jack’s Mannequin?” Gyver reached toward his CDs, but I shook my head.

  “Before that.” I hadn’t meant to whisper, but it was all the volume I could manage.

  “He made a new band? He got leukemia? His original band was called Something Corporate? What part?”

  Signs don’t get much clearer than that. “I’ve got to tell you something.”

  Chapter 3

  “Can we stop somewhere? I hate talking in the car; I never know where to look. I know you have to watch the road, but I feel like I’m having a conversation with the side of your face and you’re talking to the windshield.”

  Gyver eased his car into the parking lot for East Lake’s “beach.” It closed at sundown, and the only other things on the pavement were litter: sunblock bottles, deflated floaties, snack wrappers.

  He raised an eyebrow, waiting for me to begin. I took a sip from the water bottle in his cup holder. It was out of a need to do something, not thirst. I choked it down with an awkward coughing noise.

  He snorted. “You okay?”

  I didn’t want to tell him what was strangling me—saying the news aloud would make it real. I pulled my knees up and tucked them beneath my chin.

  Gyver’s hair looked blue black in the glow of the parking lot’s lights. His face was a series of beautiful angles and shadows, but I could still see him as he’d been: the little boy who’d been bullied in elementary school for being named MacGyver after a cheesy eighties TV show about a guy who liked duct tape. I’d defended him then, and he’d been my best ally ever since. I needed him now.

  “Remember about a week ago when you asked if Hil and I were cat fighting—because I had bruises?” I regretted my choice of openings; annoyance spilled across Gyver’s features.

  “I was joking. What’s Hillary have to do with anything?”

  “Nothing, but your comment made me notice how much I’m bruising.” I held up my elbow as proof; showing him the purplish bull’s-eye that marked the spot I’d just banged on the door.

  Gyver touched it with two cool fingers. “Are you okay, Mi?”

  “No.” I swallowed against the tightness in my throat, the fear that piled like stones in my stomach. “I’ve also been really tired and I had a fever. Mom and I went to the doctor and he took some blood. He called me back the next day for more. We went to Lakeside Hospital for tests yesterday—they took a sample of bone marrow from my hip. Today we met with the head of oncology.” I felt detached, as if narrating the details of someone else’s life.

  “What is it? Just tell me.” His hand curled around my arm, hitting the bruise, making me wince.

  “Leukemia,” I whispered, the word sharp and acidic in my mouth.

  “Leukemia?” His eyebrows had disappeared under tousled hair, and his face and voice were pleading.

  I forced myself to continue. “It’s called acute lymphoblastic leukemia. ALL for short. It’s blood cancer; my body’s making lots of bad white blood cells. They’re called blasts—and they’re crowding out all of my good cells.” I parroted the words the doctor used that afternoon. My voice was emotionless, but my arms were trembling. I squeezed my knees tighter and tipped my head against the cool glass of the window in a last-ditch effort to blink back tears. I hadn’t cried in the doctor’s office. Hadn’t on the drive home. Hadn’t while getting ready. But with Gyver, it seemed like the only thing left to do.

  “What do the doctors say? Mi?” He sounded little-boy lost, like the first time we’d watched Bambi.

  I stared at the car’s ceiling, speaking around the stutters in my breathing. “It’s aggressive. That’s the word they kept using. ‘An aggressive form of cancer,’ ‘its spread is aggressive,’ ‘we need to start aggressive treatment immediately.’” I shut my eyes and tears traced salt lines down my face.

  “That’s why I went to the party tonight. I just needed to feel normal for a few more hours. Before my life becomes a mess of chemo and doctors and drugs.” The last barrier between me and detachment fell, and the doctor’s words hit with suffocating reality. “God … I have cancer.”

  He tugged on my elbow and pulled me toward him. I resisted at first; his sympathy would make it harder to stop crying. His other hand closed on my shoulder, and I surrendered, allowed him to draw my head to his chest and fold his arms around me.

  I could feel the thud of his heart through his T-shirt, interrupted by the convulsions of my sobs and his unsteady breathing.

  It grew hot in the car—late-June-in-Pennsylvania humid—and I couldn’t tell tears from sweat. I needed to stop. To calm down. I couldn’t go home blotchy and terrified. I unclenched my fingers from a fistful of his shirt, sat up, and focused on slowing my breathing and tears. I took another sip of his water and asked, “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m mentally shouting every swear word I know.” He rubbed his forehead with both palms, then leaned back against the seat and shut his eyes.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Am I okay? Am I okay? Of course not, but who cares? How are you? What does all this mean?”

  “I don’t really know … I haven’t had much time to figure it out. We’ve got piles of brochures at home, and Dad’s already ordered every book he can find.” My fingers were at my throat, twirling my necklace in frenzied loops.

  “So what do we do?”

  His “we” filled my eyes again and I couldn’t answer.

  “Mi? What happens next?”

  “I check into the hospital tomorrow for more tests. I’m not coming home for a while, like, at least a month. Probably not till August. Dr. Kevin—that’s my doctor, my oncologist—said they’d keep me there so I don’t pick up infections.”

  “A month! What about school? Are you going back in September?”

  The mention of school sparked a different reaction. I put my feet on the floor and sat up straighter. “It’s only been a day. I don’t know. I haven’t figured out all the details yet.” I sounded angry, but the alternative was tears and I couldn’t—I wouldn’t—lose control again.

  He sighed and squeezed my shoulder. “Mi, I can’t believe this.”

  “Get this, my horoscope today was: ‘Kick back and enjoy the flood of contentedness! It’s a great day to appreciate what you’ve got and stop worrying about getting more.’” I stared out at the litter-strewn parking lot. A lonely toddler-sized flip-flop. A cracked sand pail.

  “I don’t know why you read those. They’re crap.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe the point is I should start appreciating my life, because this is as good as it’s going to get.” My words slipped from bitter to wistful.

  “Don’t,” Gyver warned.

  “Don’t what?” I peeled my eyes away from the beach debris.

  “Don’t you dare start looking for pessimistic signs. You’re going to be fine.”

  The windows were fogging, obscuring the lake from my view. “I need … I need air.” I pushed the door open and stumbled into the humid night. Wiping my eyes, I crossed to a picnic table
and sat facing the lake.

  “Here. Drink.” Gyver handed me his water bottle and sat on the tabletop.

  We faced each other in a showdown of fear. I spoke first. “I don’t want to go home yet.”

  “Understandable. How are your parents? I can’t believe they let you go out tonight. Well, actually, I can.” I looked away from the ripples on the lake and up at his disapproving frown.

  “Dad’s turned into Captain Cancer Facts—charts and spreadsheets in full force. And Mom? She’s alternating between hysterics and a Prozac-fueled insistence that I’m going to be fine. When I left she was taking a bubble bath to ‘calm herself down,’ and Dad was cooking dinner with a spoon in one hand and a pamphlet in the other. There wasn’t room for my reaction—I had to get out of there.” I rolled the bottle between my hands and fussed with the sand at my feet, creating furrows with my toe and then smoothing them flat.

  “Oh, Mi.” Gyver, with his perfect parents, shouldn’t be able to understand mine, but he’d spent enough time around my mom’s melodrama and my dad’s analytics to nod with comprehension. “You should’ve called me, or just come over.”

  “I should’ve. Is your mom going to make a big deal out of tonight?” My parents might accept that parties were a part of high school, but his mother—the chief of police—never would. Living next door to Chief Russo meant D.A.R.E. lectures at neighborhood barbecues. “I don’t think I can handle her yelling right now.”

  “Don’t worry about her. It’s not a big deal,” he reassured me.

  “I guess not, comparatively.” I kicked at the pile I’d built beneath the bench and watched the sand scatter into darkness.

  Gyver reached out to touch my shoulder. “I’m here.”

  “Thanks.” I leaned my cheek against his hand and took a deep breath. It stirred the faintest sense of comfort, the first flicker of reassurance. “You have your guitar with you, right?”

  “I’ve got my acoustic in the car.”

  “Can you play me that song? Do you know it?” It had seemed scarily appropriate: “blood,” “fear,” words whose definitions had changed overnight. Knowing the singer had faced this too, I needed to look for more signs in the lyrics.

  He’d already pulled a pick from his pocket and was twirling it as if this were any other night and this were any song request. Then he paused, “You really want to hear it again?”

  “Please.”

  He squeezed my shoulder before backtracking to the car. After finishing the water, I fiddled with the empty bottle, spun it, and told myself if it stopped with the cap facing me, my friends would take the news well. If it stopped facing the lake they wouldn’t. It twirled an irregular circuit across the table. I held my breath.

  Before it finished rotating, Gyver plucked it off the sun-bleached boards and tossed it into the recycle can. “You want to play spin the bottle?” he joked, then saw my stricken face and gestured to the guitar. “You sure, Mi?”

  I nodded.

  No matter which singer he covered, I preferred his version to the original. A girl could fall in love with a voice like his and lose herself in his performance. Not tonight. His deep voice was unsteady—it cracked on the first line and broke the word “hopeless” in half. Normally his eye contact was electric, but tonight he looked away as he sang.

  When he got to the chorus, his intensity was intimidating—until he choked and stopped playing. I wasn’t surprised to find tears blurring my view of the lake, but I was shocked when he looked up and he was crying too.

  I wanted to hug him—to remove the guitar strap from his neck and drape myself around it instead—but I couldn’t move. I’d made Gyver cry. The knowledge reverberated somewhere beneath my rib cage with an ache too intense to name.

  Gyver put the guitar on the tabletop and moved to sit on the bench next to me. I tilted my head against his shoulder. He slipped an arm around me and leaned his head against mine. We stared out at the water, united in our fear. The silence was filled with the chirps of crickets and the splash of fish surfacing to swallow mosquitoes.

  “I think you’re wrong,” I whispered.

  Gyver eased his head off mine and examined my face. He smiled, but it faded before erasing any of the pain from his eyes. “You usually do. What am I wrong about this time?”

  “It’s not an angry song. It’s a sad, scared song. You’ve got it on the wrong playlist.”

  Chapter 4

  The next morning I deleted the drunken voice mails and beer-clumsy texts from Ryan, Hillary, Lauren, and Ally. Hil sounded annoyed. “So, you disappear for three days, show up at the party where you pout all night, and then you disappear again? What the hell, Mia? Is everything okay? If you’re done being no fun, come meet us at Matherson’s.” There was a message from today too: plans for a hangover lunch.

  I wandered into the kitchen and found my parents sitting with coffee and chemo books—a departure from their typical newspaper routine.

  “Good morning, kiddo. How are you feeling?” Dad stuck a napkin in his book to mark his page. He believed that anything worth knowing could come from a book, chart, graph, or diagram. He made sense of the world through numbers and data—which was why he’d liked gymnastics more than cheerleading. He understood gymnastics’ scoring: points added for difficulty, deductions taken for not sticking a landing. Cheerleading competitions, with their unquantifiable categories like “crowd appeal,” baffled him. He sat in the stands with his clipboard, trying to do the work of all the judges at once, until my mom lost patience with him asking, “Did that girl bobble?” “Would you say their voice quality is strong or barking?” “How would you rate their tempo?” and finally told him, “Put that away and just watch your daughter.”

  Yesterday’s news had launched him into leukemia fact-finding overdrive. His fingers twitched over the book’s cover, and he looked as if waiting for this conversation to be over so he could resume his reading was causing him actual pain.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  Mom swept me with a head-to-toe gaze. “What happened to your elbow? I’ll get you some cover-up.”

  “It’s no big deal. I banged it.”

  My dad nodded. I wondered if he was aware that he was flipping the cover of his book open and shut. “We talked to Nancy Russo this morning. It sounds like it was some party. You’re lucky she let Gyver come get you.”

  “I wasn’t drinking.” I grabbed the orange juice from the fridge and expected that to be the end of the conversation.

  Mom didn’t believe in discipline and Dad didn’t believe in upsetting Mom. She had been an adored only child. She now wanted to be adored by her only child. She didn’t bother with rules or punishment; she stuck with bragging about my accomplishments and making vague comments that teenagers were “so difficult.”

  “Of course not,” she agreed now. “Even so, you need to be careful. But you know this. I’m sure you were being safe.”

  “I’m going to meet everyone at Iggy’s,” I announced as I poured juice.

  “Iggy’s? Will Ryan be there? Oh, I bet he’ll send you flowers in the hospital.” She clapped her hands together and said, “How sweet!” like it had already happened. Choosing cheerful oblivion, a Mom trademark.

  “Maybe.” I kept my face blank. “I don’t know if the hospital’s really Ryan’s scene. It’s not exactly going to be fun.”

  “Kitten, I know that, but I’m sure you girls will still manage to create plenty of drama.”

  “The hospital isn’t summer camp.” I kept my annoyance carefully controlled. She’d been there when Dr. Kevin explained treatment: remission induction—a.k.a. a month’s stay in the hospital so they could administer chemo and do other painful, awful things. “I don’t know if I’m going to be up for girls’ nights.”

  “Of course you are.” But her smile weakened. She stood and brushed some hair out of my face, a transparent attempt to feel my forehead. Maybe she understood a little.

  “I haven’t even told them.”

 
; Mom touched my hair again, then frowned at my bruised arm. Her voice was slow, thoughtful. “What if you don’t tell them just yet? Maybe you should wait and see how things go. Give it a few days—and if you feel up to visitors, then you could call them.”

  “Not tell them?” I was filled with sudden shame, like cancer was my fault and something to hide. “Dad, what do you think?”

  “It’s your illness, Mia. You get to decide who you want to know.” This was as close as he ever came to disagreeing with Mom.

  “I already told Gyver.”

  Mom fluttered her fingers in dismissal. “Gyver’s different. We told his parents this morning. But maybe hold off on your friends; you don’t know how treatment’s going to make you feel. You might want privacy.”

  “But you told the Russos?” I curled my fingers over my newest bruise, hiding it from sight as I realized how my mother saw it: a blemish and a dark sign of things to come.

  “It couldn’t be helped. I’ve decided to take a leave of absence from the firm until induction’s done.” She shifted her shoulders in a show of self-pride. “Vinny Russo would know something was up when all of a sudden I didn’t carpool and wasn’t at work.”

  “Maybe I won’t tell the girls right now,” I said, looking from Mom’s nod of agreement to Dad. Hil would want to know everything. Everything. And I didn’t have all the answers yet. Or the energy to sit through an interrogation.

  Dad picked up a pamphlet off the table. “If you’re not ready to tell people, that’s okay. There’s an article here comparing a diagnosis to mourning, because there are sta—”

  Mom interrupted. “We’ll beat this. Because, kitten, you can do anything. You are smart and brave and beautiful and you have friends and family who all love you very much.” Her voice was chipper as ever—a throwback to her own days as a cheerleader—but her eyes were wet.

  I did what was required when Mom gave one of her my-daughter-is-a-superhero pep talks; I smiled and agreed. Although I had to bite my tongue to keep from pointing out that none of the characteristics she named had magical anti-cancer properties. I couldn’t think my way healthy, and despite her focus on cheerleading and beauty, leukemia isn’t a popularity contest.