by Amy Reed
“I’m sure she’s eighteen,” I say, grateful for the interruption of the depressing mess inside my head. Stella rolls her eyes.
“Hey, guys,” Caleb says as he walks through the door with two construction-paper hearts. He hands one to each of us with a big dopey grin on his face.
It’s still shocking to see him sometimes, so unlike the rest of us. We are all so obviously sick, but Caleb still seems healthy. He walks around the halls unassisted most of the time. He goes around cheering up little kids. Most of the time, he doesn’t seem sick at all, definitely not sick enough to be an inpatient. But then he’ll disappear for a day or two with a migraine that makes him unable to move, or he’ll get really confused all of a sudden and forget how to talk and we have to get a nurse to take him away. But he always comes back cheerful and full of hope, even with double vision, even with sores in his mouth from the radiation. Brain cancer can be weird like that. One day you’re doing your math homework, then all of a sudden you forget your name. Then you have a seizure and end up here, where doctors find a tumor the size of a Ping-Pong ball in your head.
Caleb’s brain cancer was “cured” at age six, so he had a whole nine years of believing he was done with it, nine years to forget what being sick felt like, to forget the fear, nine years to create a normal life. He had nine years to feel grateful, to believe every day was a miracle. But at fifteen, just a semester into his first year of high school, just a week after getting cast in the school musical, he found out God made a mistake. He took back the cure. And yet Caleb still believes in Him, now more than ever.
The heart Caleb made me has a white doily stuck to it and several sparkly heart stickers. He appears to have had a little difficulty with a clump of sequins. It says in careful purple cursive: For Evie. Love, Caleb.
“Glitter,” Stella says gravely. “The herpes of the crafting world.” She leans over and looks at my valentine, then back at hers. “Wait a minute,” she says. “Why does Evie’s say ‘Love, Caleb’ and mine just says ‘From Caleb?’”
Caleb blushes and looks away. He hurries over to the TV and busies himself with setting up a video game. I expect Stella to keep talking, to embarrass him further. But she just looks at me, smiles sadly, and looks back at her magazine.
“You three too cool to hang out with everyone else?” Dan says as he walks into the room. He has to duck his head slightly as he comes through the doorway, nearly dislodging some hanging pink hearts. He looks like he should be playing basketball for the NBA instead of hanging out in here with us. He won’t tell us exactly how tall he is, but I know it’s close to seven feet.
“Hi, Danimal,” Stella coos, and gives a silly little wave with her fingers. Dan rolls his eyes.
“Evie, my friend,” he says, sitting in the chair next to me. “How are you?”
“I’m okay.”
“I’ve been meaning to come by and see you all day, but a couple of little kids were getting ready to go into surgery this morning and needed me.”
“It’s okay.”
“You know it’s okay for things to not be okay, right?” he says softly, as if lowering his voice a little could give us privacy in this tiny room. “You could tell me.”
“I know.” Does he really have to do this in front of Caleb and Stella?
“All right,” he says, but I can tell he doesn’t believe me. “I’m about to leave for the day. I’ll come by and see you tomorrow, I promise. Is there anything you guys need? Caleb? You okay over there?”
Caleb is staring at the controller in his hand, as if he’s wondering how it got there. After a few seconds, he looks up and smiles. “Hi, Dan,” he says, like he just noticed he was here.
“My shoulders are sore, Big Dan,” Stella says. “Can I have a massage?”
“Good night, Miss Hsu,” he says. Stella cracks up, and I laugh a little too. The only reason she can get away with this is because she’s Stella.
“He is so fun to flirt with,” she says after he’s gone.
“You should give my sister some pointers,” I say. “She loves him.”
“Your sister,” Stella says, then pauses for dramatic effect, “has a big fat stick up her ass. And not the fun kind.”
I love how raunchy Stella can be, how she’ll say anything to get a reaction from people. Being with her and Caleb is the only thing that’s making my new death sentence tolerable. They’re the only ones who don’t need to talk about it.
Caleb gives up on the video game and puts the controller down. “I don’t understand,” he says, scratching the flaky skin behind his ear. “Why do you want to flirt with Dan if you’re a lesbian?”
“Oh my god!” Stella exclaims in mock horror. “I am so not a lesbian. Lesbians knit and have ten cats and drink herbal tea. Just because I’ve made out with a few girls doesn’t mean we need to label it. And in case you forgot, I have a boyfriend.”
“Yeah, but wasn’t he—?” Caleb doesn’t finish his sentence. Stella shoots him a look that makes it clear she has no interest in hearing the rest of his question.
“So you’re bisexual?” I say.
“I’m just Stella.” She grins, tipping her hat to us. And that’s the end of that.
Only on pediatric cancer wards do you get friendships like ours. When you’re sick like we are, how you present yourself to the world seems to lose its importance. No one cares about your hobbies or how you dress when you’re sitting side by side for hours getting blood transfusions. No one cares about being cool when you’re rubbing your friend’s back while they puke into a bedpan.
It hits me that I’m going to have to say good-bye to them, too. Not just the world of the well. This one. I’m leaving my sick world too.
“I’m tired,” I say. “I’m going to take a nap before my parents and Jenica get here.”
“Want me to wheel you back to your room?” Caleb says.
“Sure. Thanks.”
“I’ll come up too,” Stella says. “Maybe my roommate will be asleep and I can have phone sex with Cole.”
“Gross,” Caleb and I say in unison.
I just want to fall asleep before I start crying. If I start, I’m afraid I’ll never be able to stop.
The second saddest thing, after Valentine’s Day in a children’s hospital, is a Valentine’s Day present from your parents. The white stuffed dog mine brought me holds a heart in its mouth that says I Ruv You. It sits on my bedside table next to the plastic pitcher of water, an evil grin on its little doggy face. Its beady eyes say, “No romance for you, Cancer Girl.”
Does the white dog know it’s also my two-year anniversary with Will? Exactly two years ago today, we went on our first date—burgers at Barney’s, and Casablanca at the art house movie theater on Telegraph. He kissed me for the first time when Ilsa said to Humphrey Bogart, “Kiss me. Kiss me as if it were the last time.” The theater shows it every Valentine’s Day, and we went again last year, just before my first diagnosis. We were going to make it our tradition. We had it all planned out for tonight—the same burgers, the same movie—but that was before my leg fell apart and I ended up back in here. And now visiting hours are over.
I’ve been lying here since my parents and Jenica left. Kasey even made an appearance, but left quickly for a date with some new boy she just met. I could tell she didn’t want to tell me about her plans, didn’t want to talk about life going on outside these walls when mine’s about to come to a close, but I pulled the information out of her. She couldn’t look me in the eye as she told me.
My favorite night nurse, Suzanne, is on duty, and she keeps coming in to see if I need anything, if I want to speak to the counselor on call. Everyone is trying to get me to talk. It must be part of my care plan now. It must come up in big, blinking red letters whenever someone opens my charts on the computer: Get her to talk about her feelings!!! But I don’t feel like talking. What’s the point of having the same conversation over and over again? What’s the point of talking if it doesn’t change anything?
&
nbsp; But I did tell Suzanne my leg hurts. I can at least talk about the kind of pain that medicine can fix. There’s been talk about putting me on a PCA, “Patient-controlled anesthesia,” which would give me control of my pain meds with the push of a button. But no one’s willing to make that call just yet. Once that happens, it’s over. There’s no coming back from that.
I hear a knock on the door. “Dinner,” Suzanne calls from the other side.
“I already ate,” I say.
“It’s a special treat,” she says. “Close your eyes.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Are your eyes closed?”
I close my eyes. “Yes.” It’ll probably be something heart-shaped. It’ll probably be something pink. I wish I were sleeping. I wish I could just get rid of the rest of this sad, pointless day. I wish my leg wasn’t throbbing. I wish these pain meds were stronger.
I hear Suzanne’s shoes on the floor, the creak of the rolling tray. I swear I can smell the broken promise of my anniversary cheeseburger, and I feel the beginning of tears leaking through my closed eyelids. Crying over the hallucinated scent of a stupid cheeseburger? I must really be losing it.
Suzanne clears her throat. I pretend I’m sleeping. She clears her throat again. Her voice sounds low; I think she’s coming down with a cold. “What?” I grumble, and open my eyes.
The lights are dim and in front of my bed is a tray covered with a lace tablecloth, candles, and a dozen red roses. On a real china plate sits a big, beautiful cheeseburger and curly fries.
I look around the room and find Will standing by the door. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” he says, and I immediately start crying. The floodgates are finally open. In a blink, he is by my side, his warm hands around mine.
“Are you okay?” he asks, his face squeezed into its too-familiar look of concern.
“Yes,” I say. “Just surprised. Just . . . happy.” I don’t tell him that my leg is on fire. I don’t tell him I’ve been trying not to cry for days. None of that matters in this moment. There is just happiness. There is just love. “How did you manage this?”
“I worked it out with Dan and Suzanne. They’re awesome, by the way.”
“I know.”
“I brought Casablanca,” he says, pulling his laptop out of his backpack. “And theater-size Junior Mints. But the deal is you have to eat all three and a half servings.”
I lift my skeleton arm and pull him close. He is so sturdy, his back so muscled and solid, he feels like a different species than me. “I love you,” I say with all the strength I have left.
His lips are soft on mine. I can barely remember what it felt like when my whole body would respond to his kiss, when it was strong enough to want something more than this weak grasp on survival.
“I wish I were stronger,” I say, my tears in our mouths. “I wish I could—”
“Shh,” he says. “You’re perfect. This is perfect. Just like this.” I nod, wanting so badly to believe him. “Except, the burger might have gotten a little cold in my backpack.” It doesn’t matter. We both know there’s no way I’ll be able to eat more than a couple of bites anyway.
I manage a laugh, and for a second, with his face so close to mine that he’s all I can see, love breaks through the fog of the pain medication and everything does feel perfect. I can imagine, just for this moment, that things are back the way they used to be. Back before everything was almost over.
“Will,” I say. “Thank you.” I don’t want to let go. Maybe if I keep him here, just like this, time can stop. Maybe we can stay here forever, a freeze-frame of perfection.
“No problem,” he says, running his fingers down the back of my neck.
“Not just for this. For everything. For everything you’ve done for me this past year. For staying with me. You didn’t have to. No one else would have.”
He looks at me with his kind sky-blue eyes. “Evie, I love you. Leaving was never an option.”
“But it’s been so hard on you. You shouldn’t have had to deal with all this. You should have had a normal life.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve gotten to be with you. That’s all that matters.”
I shake my head, but I know there’s no use in arguing with Will’s loyalty. It is pure and solid and so much better than I deserve.
“I am so lucky,” I say, holding on to him as tight as I can. “I love you so much.”
“I’m the lucky one,” he says.
We stay like that for a while, me lying in bed with Will leaning over me, trapped in my arms. I wish he could climb into bed with me; I wish he could hold me with his whole body; I wish we could fall asleep together. But there’s not enough room in my narrow hospital bed, and even if we tried to squish, there’s the question of my leg and my catheter and my IV, all the things he could get tangled in.
He kisses me on the cheek. “Now how about this movie?”
“Okay,” I say. It might be good to get a break from this intensity, let some fictional people take over the drama.
He sets his laptop on my bedside table and presses play. As he pulls the adjustable tray out across my lap, his elbow knocks over the pole that holds my IV bags. He reaches out to grab it but knocks the table instead, tipping the computer onto my broken leg.
They can hear my scream all the way in San Francisco.
I am on fire. I am blind with pain. Will is crying. His voice, distorted: Help. Oh god. Evie.
Nurse Suzanne to the rescue. Her hand on my shoulder. Walkie-talkie crackles.
Rubber shoes scuffle, so many pairs. The heavy silence of emergency. The whisper of nurses turning into angels.
I am falling, falling. Into the black hole with no ladder. Into the darkness with no way out. Into the pain that leads to more pain that leads to numbness that leads to—
four.
“I’M ON THE GOOD STUFF NOW,” I ANNOUNCE WHEN WILL arrives with yet another bouquet of flowers. “Also, I think I hate flowers.”
“Who hates flowers?” he says, kissing me on the forehead before setting his signature dozen red roses next to the million other wilting arrangements that have collected during the going-on three weeks I’ve been here.
“Cancer patients, that’s who,” I say. “Did you hear me? They have me on morphine now. They inject it right into my port, then whoosh!” He does not seem impressed.
“Are you okay?” he says as he caresses my face. His fingers feel like pillows.
“I wish people would stop asking me that.” I try swatting his hand away but I miss. Nothing is where it’s supposed to be.
“You scared me last night, honey.” His eyes are wet. What is wrong with these people? I already had to endure my family’s waterworks earlier today, but luckily I was nodding out through most of their visit. “You were in so much pain,” he whimpers.
“But now I’m not,” I say. I can’t even remember what pain feels like. “So turn that frown upside down.” I try to smile my biggest smile, but I’m not quite sure I get it right. I don’t have the most precise control of my muscles right now. “My face feels like lasagna noodles.” I open and close my mouth a few times to demonstrate.
“Be careful with that stuff, Evie.”
“Or what?”
“You can get addicted.”
Does he have any idea how ridiculous that sounds? “I’ll go to rehab as soon as I get out of the hospital,” I say. I think that’s pretty hilarious, but Will looks like I just punched him in the nose. He doesn’t know how funny I am. Stella thinks I’m funny. Outside, in his world, I am not funny. In here, I am a comedian. There is so much he doesn’t know about me.
“This stuff is magic, Will. It’s like I know there’s pain, but I just don’t care. It’s so nice to not care for a change. I’ve wasted so much time caring.”
Will ignores me and starts setting up a backgammon set.
“There is no way I’m going to be able to play that,” I say.
What were we talking about? Lasagna? Why were
we talking about lasagna?
He looks at me with his puppy-dog eyes and the room stops its throbbing for a second. “Evie,” he says. “Do you remember what happened last night?”
“Of course I remember. You dropped a computer on my leg.”
He flinches when I say that, and for a split second, I think I hear a distant echo of something that might sound like regret, but it passes and the room starts swirling its comforting swirl. I don’t know why I never noticed how the lights pulse, how they flicker so minutely. I can see so many things now that I’m so slowed down. Like slow-motion photography. Like extreme close-ups on a nature show. Hummingbird wings. Snake tongues.
“Evie,” someone says. Is it the narrator of the show? Or is it the snake? “Evie,” he says again. “Where’d you go?”
Will. “In case you forgot, I can’t exactly go anywhere right now.”
“You can’t even focus your eyes on me.”
“I’m not mad at you,” my mouth says, but I don’t know why.
“Oh, Evie.” Will is beside me, his face buried in his hands. I wish he would stop saying my name. Something must have happened. There are so many flowers.
“Well, if it isn’t my two favorite Abercrombie models,” says a different voice, and it brings a new soundtrack to this tragic scene. It brings dancing instead of this funeral dirge.
“Stella!” I say. And there she is, materialized out of the fuzz, sauntering into the room in her signature rock-chic ensemble. Her tight tank top shows off her boobs that have somehow remained perfect despite all the rounds of chemo she’s gone through.
“Cheerleader,” she says. “Hey, Loverboy.”
“Will, look at her boobs!” I say.
“Evie!” he says with a voice that means I’m in trouble.
“Uh-oh,” Stella says. “Looks like someone’s been hitting the sauce.”
Do I catch her and Will sharing a meaningful moment of eye contact? She’s on the IV drugs now, isn’t she? Next stop, PCA city. This is the end, isn’t it? Only a matter of days now. Hours, even.
Well, whatever. Let them have their moment. Better than the usual of them not knowing what to say to each other, of Stella thinking Will’s a boring tool and Will thinking Stella’s a bad influence on me.