Sick Kids In Love

by Hannah Moskowitz

  I can’t remember who it was, but I read about some movie guy—I think it’s one of those actors who turned out to be a really shitty person, but that doesn’t exactly narrow it down, I know—who needed to gain weight for a role, so he’d microwave buckets of ice cream and just drink them. That’s what I want. I do it now with the low-fat shit, but I’m sure it’s a whole new world with the real stuff.

  —Luna Williams, 16, professional lesbian

  My last meal was just some chicken broth because I wasn’t really feeling up to anything else. My mom fed it to me while I lay in bed and watched birds fly outside my window. They were swooping in long, slow circles, like kites. That’s the last thing I remember.

  —Claire Lennon, 16, dead

  French fries and whiskey. Most people here, though, when they think they’re gonna die, they all want food from home. I always think, you must come from a different home than I did, that’s for sure.

  —Leon, 30-something, Linefield and West cafeteria worker

  Spaghetti with NO vegetables in the sauce. Mom thinks I don’t know. I know.

  —Mina Eisenhower, 7, visitor

  Chapter Two

  I don’t know why hospital cafeterias get such a bad rap. I’m not saying it’s five-star cuisine or anything, but it’s as good as your standard mall food court. We have a whole soft-serve ice cream bar that’s sold by weight, and pizza, and some sandwiches, and some seriously underrated lasagna. I think people just associate hospital food with being in the hospital, and most people don’t associate hospitals with somewhere they’d like to sit and enjoy a nice meal. Unlike me.

  I fill up two cups with soft serve and grab some apples and ask Mario, the hot food server—as in the food is hot, not Mario, who is very nice but about sixty and has grandkids—for two big slices of lasagna. He forces me to take two salads, even though I hate salad.

  “Make your dad eat both of them, then,” he says. “Your dad could use some more vitamin D. Locked up in that office all the time.”

  “Salads have vitamin D?”

  “Haven’t you seen Popeye?”

  “I think that’s iron,” I say.

  “You’re a smart girl.”

  I pay for the food—I get to use my dad’s discount, which I always feel kind of weird about, even though I’m paying with his money—and head back toward the elevator. The cafeteria has this atrium between the real seating area and the elevator, and often people will come out here to eat their food instead. Birds fly in from the patio and get stuck sometimes. When I was eight I watched two cafeteria workers and a patient’s entire extended family rescue a blind pigeon that was accidentally terrorizing everybody trying to eat.

  Even though I’ve seen the atrium a million times, I always used to really love it, but lately I’m more concerned with counting steps. The number of steps it takes to get around the cafeteria. The number of steps from the cafeteria to the elevator. And the atrium is just extra steps right now.

  I balance the cardboard containers in the crook of my elbow and hit the button for the sixth floor. Dr. Garrison, who works in radiology and has been here since I was born, is in here and trying to read an X-ray by the elevator’s frosted-glass light.

  “Hey there, Ibby,” he says. “How’s the joints?”

  “I’m fine. How’s Marsha?” His wife.

  “Due any day now,” he says. “Petey can’t wait. He’s been wearing this I’m a Big Brother shirt every day, y’know, just in case.”

  The elevator dings on my floor. “Can’t wait to see pictures,” I say.

  “Thanks, sweetheart. You take care now,” he says. I’m careful not to limp as I go.

  My dad’s office is at the end of a long hallway with glass ceilings and abstract pastel paintings. The door’s not fully closed, but I still knock a little as I go in.

  He looks up from his desk and smiles at me. When I was a kid he was always running around, seeing patients in the ER, responding to codes, fetching test results, laughing with the other doctors. Now he spends most of his time at a desk. When he got the promotion, when I was thirteen, he said it would be less vigorous work and he’d be able to spend more time at home. So far only one of those has been true.

  “How’s my girl?” he says.

  I hold up the boxes. “Lasagna.”

  “Perfect.” He opens the mini-fridge by his desk and takes out two bottles of coconut water, then neatly stacks his paperwork to clear off a place for us to eat. I pull up one of the comfy chairs he keeps by his coffee table. It’s not as good as the drip room chairs, but it’s nice.

  “How’d it go today?” he says.

  “Just fine. What are you working on?”

  “Oh, you know…figuring out new stuff with insurance policies. Trying to keep the doors on this place open. You know how it is this time of year.”

  I nod, though I don’t really know what November has to do with hospital finances, especially considering he’ll say stuff like that any time of year. But I like that he thinks that I know.

  “Did you get that Chem homework done?” he says.

  “I’m gonna finish it when I get home.”

  He looks at me over his glasses, points at me with his fork. “We’ve talked about saving things until the last minute.”

  “I didn’t! It’s not due until Thursday.”

  He lets the fork go limp a little, relenting. “All right.”

  We eat in comfortable silence for a bit while he leafs through some papers and I look out the window at the people rushing around on the floor below us. There’s nothing to look at inside the office, nothing I haven’t already seen a thousand times. There are always boxes of files that need to be put away, and his gold clock on the wall that’s two minutes fast, and four framed pictures of me on his desk. He swapped out some of the pictures recently.

  I clear my throat. “Hey, Dad?”

  “Hey, Isabel?”

  “Do you know about, um, Gow-Shay disease?”

  “Sure do.” He wipes his mouth.

  “Uh, how do you spell that?”

  “This for your Chemistry homework?”

  “No, I met a boy today who has it.”

  “At the infusion? Y’know, we can get you a private room for this. I didn’t run this hospital so my daughter had to talk to people while she gets needles in her.”

  “I like talking to people,” I say.

  His eyes twinkle at me. “I know you do. Jewish boy?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It’s the most common genetic disease in Ashkenazi Jews. It’s one of the ones we got screened for before we had you. Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis, and Gow-Shay.”

  I don’t really know what to say about that for a few reasons, mainly that it’s hard to hear about all the ways he planned ahead to try to have a healthy kid and then I went and got sick anyway. He’ll talk sometimes about the irony of a doctor having a sick kid, and I always feel so weird and guilty. He doesn’t talk about it much, thankfully. We don’t really discuss me being sick unless it’s a problem, and it hasn’t been a problem in a long time. I’m doing fine.

  I take a bite of lasagna. “Tay-Sachs and cystic fibrosis, those are really bad.”

  “This one’s not as bad. It’s a…ho boy, it’s been a while since my genetics rotation, let’s see. Enzyme deficiency, causes a certain lipid to build up in the body. Hard life, but the fatal type kills you before you’re two, so sounds like your friend’s out of the woods.” He takes a swig from his coconut water. “I think that’s right. Don’t quote me, if this is for your homework.”

  “It’s not for homework.”

  “What about your column?” he says. “What questions have you got?”

  “You’ve already done most of them,” I say. “What’s your favorite part of the city, time management advice…”

  “Right.�
�

  “How about this one,” I say. “What would your last meal be?”

  “Hmm,” he says. “The best meal in the world, huh?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well. This is some pretty good lasagna.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” I say, holding up my fork.

  “That, my dear,” he says, “does not surprise me.” He taps his fork against mine.

  What’s your best tip for time management?

  Create a schedule ahead of time and stick with it. Stop putting things off as if that way it’s going to be another person who has to do it. It’s still you, just later, and that later-you hates you.

  —George Mattrapolis, 41, 11th grade History teacher at The Markwood Academy

  Delegate. Don’t feel bad about hiring someone else to take care of a task you don’t have time for. That’s what runs this company. Money flowing down. It’s important to have good work ethic, but it’s also important not to waste your energy on tasks that don’t require your expertise. Remember that and you’ll have a big head start going into college.

  —John Garfinkel, 49, Physician in Chief at Linefield and West Memorial Hospital

  Honestly, I don’t really have a good system. I kind of just put everything off until I have no choice but to freak out and do it, but like…it gets done. Sorry. You should probably ask someone else.

  —Lisa Hamilton, 18, early acceptance at Yale

  Someone once told me—there is nothing so terrible you can’t survive it for ten minutes. No matter what it is, you can do it.

  —Claire Lennon, 16, dead

  Create a rewards system. See? Answer a question, eat an M&M. Answer a hard question, eat two M&Ms. Take a break, eat five hundred M&Ms. Foolproof. And you have got to think of some more interesting questions, Ibby.

  —Maura Cho, 16, lacrosse player

  Chapter Three

  I don’t celebrate Christmas, but I still love Christmastime in New York, and every second after Thanksgiving is Christmas as far as New York is concerned. When I was a kid, we used to go to Macy’s in Manhattan and drink hot chocolate and wait with all the tourists for the moment they unveiled the Christmas windows.

  I hold my hands in front of the radiator and look out my window, down the street toward Queens Boulevard. The train tracks are above ground here, with stained glass on the sides like some kind of art piece. It’s sunny today, white light gleaming off the glass and probably the retro metal SUNNYSIDE sign on the other side of Queens Boulevard, but I can’t see that from here. It’s a massive street, and instead of a median there’s the elevated train tracks, and underneath them, little chairs and tables in case you want to eat a bagel in a very strange location. There are snowflake lights strung up all across my street, between the trees and the streetlamps and off the apartment buildings. They aren’t lit during the day, so they just hang like ghostly spiderwebs, waiting.

  I blow on my hands and put on another pair of socks.

  Our house is quiet. It’s small, just the two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs and a living room and a kitchen downstairs, but it’s ours, which is saying something in New York, even in Queens. Still, it means Dad and I are constantly aware of whether the other one is home, always stepping over each other, keeping the other one awake. Which would be more of a problem if he were home more often, but he’s not. So instead I’m usually very aware of how much he isn’t here. He didn’t get in until ten last night, and he’s long gone now. It’s been like this my whole life. Dad says when he was growing up, they called children in New York who were left alone a lot latchkey kids. Now they just call us children.

  I make instant oatmeal and cup my hands around the bowl to keep loosening them up, then put on a sweater, joggers, and sneakers. I gave up on jeans earlier this year. I put on pink lipstick and mascara and tie my hair up in a messy bun. Scarf. Hat. Backpack.

  And I’m out the door and into the November air.

  It’s just one block to the 46th Street–Bliss Street subway station, then my school is two stops deeper into Queens, in Woodside. There’s no elevator at either stop, though, so you have to take the stairs down from the elevated train, and then it’s a two-block walk from the second subway station to my school. For most New Yorkers, that’s nothing. We walk everywhere. You can’t complain about that, is the thing. I’m about to go to my posh private school where my friends are, wearing the warm clothes my dad bought for me. You can’t complain.

  I get up to the platform and blow on my hands while I wait for the train. A text comes in, and I roll my fingers around before I answer it.

  Luna: Topic???

  We have our end-of-the-semester research project starting today for our History class, and the two of us have been waffling on topics since it was announced. We have to go in-depth on the life of literally any historical figure, and it’s just far too much freedom. I don’t know how anyone else made this decision. I ended up going to the hospital library and asking Nina, the librarian, who she recommended.

  Me: Frida Kahlo

  Luna: FUCK

  She doesn’t care who I picked, really, she just cares that she hasn’t decided yet. She keeps thinking of new people she wants to do and abandoning her old choices.

  Me: You’ll figure something out in the lab. Something will grab you.

  My train pulls up, and I shove my way inside. In the mornings it’s all work commuters and students, and it’s always packed, even though most of the traffic is going the other way, from Queens into the city. I take my backpack off and set it on top of my feet and wrap my fingers around the pole, one by one. My knees creak as the train jerks into motion.

  It’s only about five or six minutes of standing. And then down the stairs, and then just two blocks.

  Then up the steps in front of the school. Down the hall to my History class. Only five doors down from the computer lab.

  I can’t complain.

  …

  Luna, Maura, Ashley, and Siobhan are waiting for me on the steps. “Didn’t Frida hate white people?” Ashley says.

  I say, “Just because I’m white doesn’t mean I’m going to do my report on someone who was ignorant enough to like white people.”

  “Did Jane Goodall like white people?” Luna says, taking Siobhan’s hand as we head into the building. “I might do Jane Goodall, but not if she liked white people.”

  “I don’t think Jane Goodall liked any kind of people,” Maura says. “That’s why she went to live with monkeys.”

  “Chimps,” Ashley says.

  Maura rolls her eyes. “Whatever.”

  Maura and I have been friends the longest, since fourth grade, when we both had a crush on Luke Schivo and he told us he liked both of us, but he liked two other girls more, Maura third and me fourth. Maura and I hated each other over that for about a day and a half before we decided that we were going to hate him instead, and we wrote a no-dating pact that she honored for three months, until Johnny Lupo transferred in, and I’ve honored for seven years. We started hanging out with Ashley—who, incidentally, was Luke Schivo’s number-one girl, and they dated for two weeks and had a very emotional breakup on the playground after he kissed girl number two—in seventh grade, when the three of us chased a field hockey ball that rolled away during gym class, got poison ivy, and sat on the sidelines scratching ourselves and bonding for the next week. Like Jane Goodall and the monkeys. Chimps.

  “Did you do the Bio assignment?” Laura asks Siobhan.

  “I did not,” Siobhan says.

  “Me neither. We’re screwed.”

  “I told you not to take that class,” Luna says. “Too many APs.”

  “You’re supposed to take APs junior year,” Siobhan says. “It’s how you get into college.”

  Luna fluffs up her hair and says, “I’m gonna be just fine.”

  “I know,�
� Siobhan says, and they give each other sappy smiles.

  Luna, we met in high school. She’d just moved here from Jamaica with her family, and she was really into tarot and was doing everyone’s readings, and she told Ashley something good was going to happen to her the day she found out her mom was pregnant, so we became completely obsessed with Luna and her tarot powers and basically stalked her until she agreed to be our best friend. Siobhan is her girlfriend, who is cool and artsy and used to only hang out with other cool and artsy people but now splits her time with us.

  We stop at our lockers to drop our stuff off before first period, and Maura, whose locker is two down from me because the fates are always on the sides of me and Maura, says, “Did you see the paper yet?”

  “No,” I say. “It’s already out?”

  “Yeah, Hattie’s new boyfriend works at FedEx, so now she’s getting it printed early or something.” Hattie is our editor-in-chief, this kick-ass senior who looks and acts like she’s twenty-five. She’s amazing. Maura doesn’t really understand my love for the school paper, but she still writes the sports column, so she at least gets it more than the others do. She digs around in her tote bag. “Uhh…here.”

  I flip through it and find my column. Sick Girl Wants to Know! it says at the top in big pink letters.

  “Y’know people were talking about it,” she says. “Laughing over the answers.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s been there for years and people still like it. You’ve got crowd appeal, girl.” She pulls out her compact and eyeliner. Maura loves makeup but hates getting up early, so she always sleeps as late as she can and puts her face on one step at a time between classes.

  I smile.

  “Y’know, that’s what’s gonna get you into college,” she says, tapping the paper without looking up from her mirror.

  “Crowd appeal?”

  “Yeah. An interesting extracurricular. You really think colleges want to hear about one more person taking AP Bio? They want the girl with the weird advice column.”

  “It’s not that weird,” I say.