by Amy Reed
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like every time I see you, you’re further away. And now you run off with that girl in the middle of the night, when you’re so sick, when everything is so . . . fragile? It’s not like you, Evie.”
“It was eight o’clock, not the middle of the night,” I say. “And all we did was walk around the neighborhood. I’m sick of being in here. I’m tired.” My default line. No one can argue with a cancer kid who says she’s tired.
So we say nothing. We sit there staring at the bagel neither of us is going to eat. There was a time not too long ago when we could talk on the phone for hours and never run out of things to say. Now we struggle to have a conversation longer than five minutes. And soon we won’t be able to have a conversation at all.
“Hey, bitches!” Stella’s voice breaks the silence, and I take a big breath of relief. Even Kasey looks grateful for the diversion, and I know she can’t stand Stella.
Stella’s in the doorway with Caleb behind her. But she’s in a wheelchair. Stella’s never in a wheelchair. At least she’s still wearing real clothes and her signature red lipstick. But even all that color isn’t enough to hide how frail she is, how unlike herself.
“Like my new ride?” she says.
I open my mouth but nothing comes out.
“Hi, Kasey,” Caleb says.
“Hi, Caleb.” Then, after a pause, like she has to talk herself into saying it: “Hi, Stella.”
“Pep Squad,” Stella says. “So good to see you.”
Kasey doesn’t try to hide her suspicion.
“Let’s get Evie into her chariot.”
Caleb gets one of the medical assistants to help me into a wheelchair. It’s not nearly as difficult as it has been. I woke up this morning and it felt like my arms suddenly decided they have muscles; I’m actually able to help hoist myself up out of bed. But that’s not all of it. It’s like last night changed something even deeper, like everything inside me has been turned upside down, or like the balance of the universe is off somehow. Whatever it is, I am not the same person.
“Girl, you’re a machine,” Stella says.
“Yeah,” agrees Caleb. “You look really strong today.”
Kasey looks at them, and then at me, trying to see what they saw so easily.
As Kasey and Caleb roll us into the hallway, I whisper to Stella, “Have you heard anything?”
“Nope.”
“They’re still in there?”
“Yep.”
“God, what could they be talking about?”
“Probably how they’re going to give us extra cancer as punishment.”
“At least Dan’s with them, though. Right? He’ll be on our side.”
“I hope so.”
“Did you hear from Cole? Did he get away all right?”
“He’s fine.”
“What are you guys whispering about?” Kasey says.
“Nothing,” we say in unison.
We pass by five-year-old Shanti’s room. She’s been in and out of here her whole life with sickle-cell anemia. Her door is open and we can see her tiny figure wrapped up in blankets, attached to a bag of blood.
“Hey, Evie,” Kasey says in a thin, desperate voice. “Remember that time we toilet-papered David Halloway’s house in fifth grade? And your mom made us go over there and apologize and clean it up?”
“Yeah?” I say.
“That was hilarious,” she says, but her voice trails off almost before she finishes.
“That sounds really funny,” Caleb says, and I wish I had some of his sweetness right now. I wish I could at least try.
We pass eleven-year-old Leo’s room. He just got out of the surgery that removed his right arm below the elbow. On the other side of the curtain is his roommate Jonathan, four years old and here for his first round of chemo.
And now we’ve reached the end of the hall. We’re face-to-face with a too-cheerful painting of monkeys hanging from a tree under a smiling sun. There’s nothing to do but turn around.
“We could go down to the teen lounge,” Caleb says. “They’re doing crafts in there right now.”
Stella sighs as Caleb and Kasey face our chairs the other way. “Remember my hair, Evie?” Stella says.
“Yeah. You could have sold it for someone’s cancer wig,” I say, and we all laugh at the irony. Everyone except Kasey.
“I stored all my power in my hair,” Stella says dreamily. I only now notice something off about her, something slow and hazy. She has the pain-meds look. She has the look of being half-gone. “Now I keep all my power in my hat.”
“It’s a good place for it,” I say.
“But you can take a hat off,” she says, and I know there’s some hidden meaning there, but I don’t want to think about what it is.
“So where do we want to go?” Caleb says. “Cafeteria? Teen lounge?”
“Or how about the teen lounge?” Stella says. “Or maybe the cafeteria?”
This is a joke we say multiple times a day. It has never been funny.
“Let’s race,” I say. “Whoever makes it to the nurses’ station first wins.”
“Now you’re talking,” Stella says.
“I don’t know,” says Caleb.
“Are you crazy?” Kasey says behind me. I almost forgot she was there.
“Come on,” Stella says. “Live a little.” Another cancer ward joke that is not funny.
“No,” says Kasey.
“Okay,” Caleb says. “But we can’t go too fast.”
“Three out of four is a good start,” Stella says. “Pep Squad, what do we have to do to convince you?”
“No,” Kasey says again. She steps out from behind my wheelchair and faces me, furious. “I’m not doing it. You could get hurt.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say, with a laugh in my voice that is much crueler than it should be. “We’re already in a hospital.”
She practically stamps her foot. “I’m not going to help you be so reckless. You have to be careful. Your leg. It’s fragile.” Her voice is shaking; her hands are fists by her side; her eyes are full of fear. I forgot she’s not like us; she can’t laugh this world away. She’s still holding on. She still thinks there’s some way for us to control it.
“I’m sorry,” I say, taking Kasey’s hand and squeezing it. She relaxes a little. “No racing. You’re right.”
“Thank you,” she says. We hold each other’s eyes for a moment and our shared past comes rushing back to me. It fills me up with a warm, thick sadness, and I realize I miss Kasey. I miss us. Even though she’ll never be able to fully understand the Cancer Kid world, she was my world for far longer than I’ll spend in here.
Stella starts coughing. Deep, cavernous coughs that shake her whole body.
“Stella?” Caleb says.
Stella shudders so hard that her hat falls off, revealing her pale, bald scalp. She stretches her neck, mouth opening and closing, gasping for air, tendons straining. She is a baby bird, shivering, featherless.
“Nurse!” Caleb calls. He shuffles as fast as he can to the nurses’ station.
Kasey picks Stella’s hat off the floor and places it gently on her head. She puts her hands on Stella’s thin shoulders, says, “Shh.” She wraps her arms around her and holds her as her body quakes. The kindness of this kills me and I start to cry. My beautiful girls. I reach for them but they are so far away.
Caleb comes back with the nurse on duty. She’s new and we don’t know her. She is all business. It shouldn’t be her. It should be someone who loves us. Dan should be here. Even Moskowitz would be better.
“Excuse me,” the nurse says, using her hip to push Kasey out from behind Stella’s wheelchair. “Dr. Bernstein is on her way. I’ve got to get Miss Hsu back to her room.” She wheels Stella away from us, her shoes squeaking in double-time. I want to run after them. I want to do something. But all I can do is sit in my chair, watching as Stella’s bony back disappears down the hall, listening to her cough
rattle the walls.
“Oh my god,” Kasey says. I am crushing her hand in mine.
“It’s going to be okay,” Caleb says. “It’s going to be okay.” But none of us believe him.
nine.
“IT’S A GOOD SIGN THAT SHE’S STILL IN HER ROOM,” CALEB says. “They haven’t had to take her to . . .” His voice trails off midsentence and his eyes are confused, searching.
I put my hand on his arm. “Caleb?”
After a few moments, he’s able to make eye contact and come back to me. “Sorry,” he says. “I got stuck.”
“Don’t be sorry. You have nothing to be sorry about.”
“How long was I gone?”
“Just a few seconds.”
“I must look like such a freak.”
“Not at all. And you’re right, by the way. When you said it’s a good sign that Stella’s still in her room.” I can always count on Caleb to see the positive in everything, even if his brain isn’t fully working.
We’ve been sitting in my room watching TV for the last hour. The meeting with our parents was cut short by Stella’s emergency, then everyone was distracted, so I guess we’ve avoided punishment for now. I saw the relief in Kasey’s eyes when my parents came in and she knew her shift with me had ended. She does not have endurance for things like this. She has not been woken in the middle of the night by the loudspeakers calling “Code Blue”; she has not had to witness parents finding out their kid didn’t make it through surgery; she has never seen a stretcher wheeled down the hall carrying the too-tiny sheeted figure.
But that doesn’t make it easier for us. It doesn’t make it less painful. Just less shocking. There is a place inside us already ready for this kind of pain. But it is still pain.
Will called from baseball practice, but even he couldn’t quite figure out what to say. What is a guy—even one as sweet as Will—supposed to say to his girlfriend when her secret best friend forgets how to breathe? My parents were kind enough to hold off on the lecture when they found out about Stella, and went home early to have dinner with Jenica. Now Caleb and I are just waiting for someone to tell us something, even though we know they’re not allowed to because of some stupid patient privacy law that does not recognize the need-to-know of best friends.
Around seven, Nurse Suzanne comes in. Caleb jumps up and gives her a hug. “Hey, buddy,” she says. “Rough day, huh?”
“Have you heard anything?” I say.
“She’s doing okay,” she says. “You know I can’t tell you any more than that.”
“Can—,” Caleb says, then pauses for a long time with his mouth open as his brain tries to find where it hid the next word. “See?” he finally says.
Suzanne puts her hand on Caleb’s shoulder. “Maybe tomorrow,” she says. “I told her only one visitor tonight and she’s asking for Evie. Sorry, kid.”
He nods, smiling so sweetly I can almost believe his feelings aren’t hurt.
The first thing Stella says when Suzanne wheels me into her room is, “I look like Gollum.”
“Space Gollum,” I say. Tubes stick out of her nose and the portacath in her chest, connecting to various machines and bags of fluids. Her bald head is bare. “You look like a cyborg.” She is half machine. The monitor shows her heartbeat. The beep of her pulse harmonizes with the wet sucking of her oxygen machine.
“Space Gollum,” she chuckles. As well as someone with tubes in her nose can chuckle. “You’re funny, Cheerleader.”
“Why aren’t you wearing your hat?”
“Don’t feel like it.”
Stella’s propped up in bed, her hospital gown hanging off her thin frame. Her shoulder sticks out, barely as thick as a golf ball. In all these months we’ve been in and out of the hospital together, I’ve never seen her in a hospital gown. She has never let herself look this sick.
“Nice dress,” I say. First rule of being a Cancer Kid: we have to say the obvious things everyone else is too afraid to say.
“They cut off my favorite jeans,” she says. “Can you believe that? They didn’t even have to do anything to me below the waist, but they cut them anyway. These assholes in here are always trying to get me naked.”
“’Cause you’re hot.”
“Are you flirting with me? Better not. Cole will kick your ass. Ha-ha.” Her voice breaks and her eyes get shiny. “Fuck!” she says, rubbing her eyes. Even though she is weak, her voice manages enough anger to push the sadness away. “My fucking parents. He’s never seen me in here. He can’t come now. I won’t see him before—” She covers her face with her beautiful hands, but her long fingers are too thin to hide behind. “Fuck!”
“We’ll sneak him in,” I say. “Give me his number.”
“No.” She shakes her head. She looks up at me and smiles. “It’s okay. Don’t worry about me. You worry about enough people already.”
Just when I think the silence will consume us, Stella says, “They got me on some good drugs.”
“Yeah?”
“I basically feel like a giant marshmallow.”
“That’s good.” I look around Stella’s room and see so much familiar—the counter and sink, the tiny closet, the computer and monitors, the blood pressure machine, the TV on the wall, the bed with all its rails and buttons, the other half of the room where it’s all repeated.
“Where’s your roommate?” I ask.
“They moved her in with Gwyn down the hall. Good riddance is what I say. When that girl wasn’t crying, she was snoring. And her mom smelled like hot dogs.”
Neither of us acknowledges what we know the move really means. They only make someone change rooms if they think their roommate is dying.
Stella hasn’t decorated her side of the room like most of us long-term patients. There are no pictures of Cole or her friends and bandmates, none of whom her parents approve of. Stella wouldn’t let them baby her with stuffed animals or, god forbid, religious paraphernalia. The only sign of her is her hat, alone, on the bedside table.
“You know what’s weird?” Stella says. “You never come to my room. I always come to yours. You’ve always been the sickest one. We’ve always had to come to you.” I don’t know what to say to that. “Now look at you,” she says, smiling. “You’re going to be running in a few days. Or what is it you do? Cheerleading? Can that be a verb? You’re going to be cheerleading in no time.”
“I’m not sure that’s the first thing I’d do if I could walk.”
“Oh yeah, you’d have to screw that cutie boyfriend of yours.”
“Stella!”
“That’s what I’d do. Except not your boyfriend. Mine.”
“It’s weird you call him your boyfriend.”
“Why? That’s what he is.”
“Sorry, it’s kind of confusing to me.”
“Maybe it’s good to be confused sometimes.”
“You never seem confused.”
She considers this for a moment. “I get confused sometimes. About all sorts of things. But I just don’t let it win. I figure it’s better to make a decision and do something rather than just sitting around thinking about it forever. Even if it turns out to be the wrong decision. Then at least I’ll be moving. At least I’ll learn something, right? You don’t learn much sitting on your ass waiting for a sure thing.”
“You are very wise, Space Gollum,” I say as I take her hand in mine, even though I know she hates mushy stuff.
“Shut up,” she says, swatting my hand away. “I don’t need you pining away at my sickbed. Suzanne!” she shouts into her intercom, shockingly loud for someone who needs tubes in her nose to breathe. “Come take this wench away. I need my beauty sleep.”
Suzanne appears seconds later. “Bye, wench,” Stella says as she pushes the button to lower the head of her bed. “Smell you later. Seriously, you should get that cast checked out. I think there’s a dead rat in there.”
“I love you, Stella,” I say as Suzanne wheels me out of the room.
I expect a wi
tty comeback, but what I think I hear are sobs.
ten.
I’M WAITING FOR MY PARENTS TO GO HOME SO CALEB and I can go through with our surprise for Stella, but they won’t leave. They’re too worked up about today’s visit with Dr. Jacobs.
“She’s gaining strength,” Dr. Jacobs told them in his professional passionless monotone. “I know the plan was to send Evie home as soon as her pain stabilized, but if it’s all right with you, I’d like to keep her in here a few more days so we can run some tests just to see what’s going on. If anything’s going on.”
“I thought you said I was done with tests,” I said. “I thought you said the goal was to minimize my suffering now.”
“Well, that’s the thing,” Dr. Jacobs said, addressing my parents even though it was me who asked the question. “Evie is doing a lot better than anyone thought possible. She seems to have turned a corner. Very suddenly, I might add. She seems to be getting stronger even though her condition should be quickly deteriorating.”
I heard Mom gasp.
“But I don’t want anyone to get too excited just yet,” Dr. Jacobs continued. “She’s probably just feeling better because we stopped the chemo. I’m afraid if we let her go home right now, she might push herself too hard because of a false sense of wellness and end up accelerating her decline.”
Despite Dr. Jacobs’s attempt to rein in their hope, of course my parents jumped at the opportunity. No one even asked me what I wanted. So they sucked my blood and sent me off to radiology for a bone scan. Mom and Dad are working themselves into a tizzy, even though they should know by now it’s going to hurt more later when the tests show I still have the same broken body as before.
For so long, my life was on hold. Now my death is on hold, and it’s just as irritating. What a bizarre thing for life to feel so inconvenient. How unnatural to want to get it over with.
“How’s Stella doing?” Mom says now, trying to make conversation. “I wanted to say hi earlier but she was sleeping.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “She’s okay, I guess.”
“Her parents were livid in the meeting yesterday,” Dad says. “It’s like she can’t do anything right in their eyes.”