Sick Kids In Love

by Hannah Moskowitz

  She lowers the mirror just to give me a look. “You call yourself Sick Girl, ask people weirdo questions, and then somehow turn them all into one little story. It’s brilliant, but it’s weird. And that’s why,” she continues, “you shouldn’t go messing up your brand by dating some boy you met in… Where did you meet him, anyway?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “And I’m not dating him.” Like I could even think about dating someone without wanting to run away. From myself. While screaming. Trust me, it’s for the betterment of society.

  “Good. Because take it from me. Boys are terrible. And not worth messing up your reputation as…you know.”

  “As what?” I say.

  “The even-keeled spinster.”

  “That is not my brand.”

  Luna appears over my shoulder. “It’s sort of your brand,” she says. “Can we go?”

  “My brand is Sick Girl,” I say. “Not single girl.”

  “Sick Girl is single,” Luna says. “That’s part of what makes her so wise. That’s why she thinks to ask such lovely and insightful questions.” She kisses my temple. “Come on. We’re gonna be late.”

  Luna and I head to History, where Mr. Mattrapolis gathers us all up and then leads us to the computer lab to start our research for our project. Luna sits next to me, clicking through picture after picture of Jane Goodall.

  “It’s not working,” she says. “The chimps just aren’t speaking to me. Maybe I should do Bob Fosse. Do you think I should do Bob Fosse?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Ask Mattrapolis.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  I’m scanning Frida’s biography and writing down all the important early dates and some quick facts—I didn’t know she wanted to be a doctor—when I get to the part about her bus accident. I think I knew about this, but I haven’t heard about it in a long time. Mostly people just talk about her eyebrows. She had a pole go all the way through her, and she was in pain her whole life. One of her friends said she “lived dying.”

  I stretch my fingers.

  “You’re not even listening to me,” Luna says.

  I close the page. “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine. I’ve decided. Bob Fosse.”

  I need a break, and Mr. Mattrapolis is all the way across the room, helping Katherine Lewis with her Ann Boleyn thing, so I open up Tumblr and scroll through for a while, and then I take a BuzzFeed quiz to find out what piece of furniture I am (I’m a bed) and then I Google my dad and see if he’s been published anywhere new recently, and then I think what the hell and make sure no one’s looking and type in “gow shay disease.” A bunch of pages on Tay-Sachs come up, so I try one word, “gowshay,” and Google asks me if I meant “gaucher” and like yeah, Google, probably.

  Gaucher disease is a genetic disease in which a deficiency of the enzyme glucocerebrosidase (also called glucosylceramidase) leads to the overaccumulation of the sphingolipid glucocerebroside (also called glucosylceramide) and wow, okay, that’s the least I’ve ever understood a sentence in my lifetime. I scroll down and look for some plain English.

  There are three types of Gaucher disease. Cool, that’s more my speed. It looks like one of the types almost always kills you before you’re three, like my dad said, and then one of them, type three, you can live into “early teen and adulthood.” There’s only one type—type one—that doesn’t say anything about a reduced lifespan.

  I don’t know why I’m sad about this. I barely know the guy, for one, and two, for all I know he has the type that doesn’t kill you—he told me himself he wasn’t dying—and three, you don’t grow up in a hospital without developing some amount of comfort with death. I volunteer there once a week, just helping the nurses answer calls and bringing patients their water and things like that, but I’ve been very close to a lot of very dying people.

  I guess when I met him I felt some kind of camaraderie. Here was someone who was just going to deal with the everyday slog of being sick for the rest of his normal-length life until he died of something completely unrelated, just like me. That’s a weird and special and boring kind of existence that you don’t get to share with a lot of people. If he has some illness he’s dying of, he’s not part of the Long Slog Club anymore. He’s in the Shiny Dying People Club, and he’s all important and significant and not just…this. Waiting.

  And also, you know. I’d rather people weren’t dying.

  The main symptoms are severe anemia, bleeding problems, weak bones, and enlarged spleens and livers. The less common symptoms basically boil down to “and whatever the fuck else it wants,” like lung problems, seizures, and severe bone pain.

  I wonder what severe pain feels like. You have to know if you have it, right? There must not be any question about it. You don’t doubt yourself. You just know, yep, this here qualifies as severe pain.

  This is a fucking legit disease, I guess is what I’m saying.

  “Learning anything good?” Luna says.

  I close the page quickly. “About Frida?”

  “Yeah, what else?”

  “She had a pole go all the way through her,” I say.

  “Pretty punk rock.”

  “It hurt forever.”

  What’s your idea of a good time?

  Honestly? I like to go to the casino. I only go a few times a year, and I have a budget and everything…which is good because I always lose. But I don’t know. There’s that hope that this time I won’t. Why? I don’t know. I think a “good time” is being someone different from who you usually are. I’m usually so responsible. Going to a casino and blowing money is like a vacation from myself. And it’s not like I can afford to take a real vacation.

  —Tyson Yugosoft, 24, Law Student

  Oooh, hiking! Or rock climbing, but not in a gym, like out there with actual rocks. Honestly anything out of the city. I don’t know what I’m doing here. If Billy Joel had written about a seventeen-year-old girl instead, I’d be the piano man. Does that make sense?

  —Ashley Baker, 17, from Connecticut

  A stiff drink, a good book, and a long ride on the Staten Island Ferry. And my daughter right there with me. What else do you need?

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

  I’d like to go on a picnic in Central Park, where you can see the sheep. I’d bring a big checkered blanket that I could lie out on and tea sandwiches and lemonade, and I’d have everyone I love there, and they could eat while I slept.

  —Claire Lennon, 16, dead

  Nothing you can print in the paper. What is it you call yourself, “Sick Girl”? Aw, I could make you feel better.

  —Brad Levington, 17, Student Council Treasurer

  Chapter Four

  After school, we get boba and frozen yogurt at a place near the subway station. It’s actually a little past the subway station, so you have to double back to get home.

  Siobhan got a bad grade on a Calc exam, so we’re all brainstorming ways to cheer her up. She’s slumped over her frozen yogurt, giving us all these pitiful little smiles every time we suggest something new, to show she appreciates it. Even her freckles look sad.

  “My parents are still in Korea,” Maura offers. “We can go to my place and make a stew with their overpriced wine. And also drink it.”

  “I’m in for that,” I say.

  Ashley checks her phone. “I have to be at the animal shelter in…forty-five minutes. Don’t you have the hospital thing today?”

  She means my candy-striping work, not the infusions. “Tomorrow,” I say.

  “I should probably go home and study anyway,” Siobhan says.

  Luna rests her chin on top of Siobhan’s head, giving herself this curly red beard. “You’re not going home and studying,” she says. “I won’t allow it.”

  Ashley puts her phone dow
n and claps her hands. “Got it.” Ashley doesn’t wear makeup and still looks like a Chapstick ad all the time, all blond and fresh-faced and healthy, and the cold air’s stung her cheeks a little and put me and my layers of blush to shame.

  Siobhan raises an eyebrow.

  “My parents were going to use their ski house this weekend, so they didn’t rent it, but now my mom has a sinus infection, so they’re going to stay home, aaaaand since it’s already not rented…”

  “Seriously?” Luna says.

  “They just texted me,” Ashley says. “It’s ours. I’ll bring Justin, you and Siobhan bring each other, Maura can meet some cute ski instructor, and Isabel can interview them all.”

  I raise my cup in agreement, despite the feeling at the bottom of my stomach, because a lot of friends wouldn’t be supportive of my choice not to date. They’d keep saying, well, once you meet the right guy, or come on, it’s just for the weekend. Or they’d try to fit me into a box and tell me I’m asexual—which I’m not, not that there’s anything wrong with that—or a closeted lesbian—which, again. It’s just a choice that I’ve made, and the stupid excuse that it’s for the column either satisfies them or they’re willing to act like it does, and either way that makes them pretty awesome friends.

  The problem with having awesome friends, though, is they want to do stuff like go skiing with you on the weekends.

  “It’s supposed to snow in the mountains this weekend, too,” Ashley says. “It’s gonna be gorgeous.”

  “Who’s driving?” Maura says.

  Ashley says, “I can, but we won’t all fit… Maybe if we take Justin’s dad’s car? How many is that?”

  They count people and arrange seats and talk about snacks and double black diamonds and I chew balls of tapioca between my teeth and look out the window. A man walks by in a big overcoat, bowed down against the cold. He’s holding a newspaper and wearing a structured hat and looks like something out of another century.

  I hear them get quiet all of a sudden, and I know they’ve finally gotten to oh wait, Isabel, so I put on a smile, turn back to the table, and play dumb.

  They’re all looking at me. “I’m sorry,” Luna says. “I got excited—I wasn’t thinking…”

  “We can do something else,” Maura says. “I’ll hide all the wine before my parents get back, and we’ll bring it to Luna’s and watch Netflix. Or to your house, do you want to do it at your house?”

  “Guys,” I say. “It’s fine.”

  “There are tons of other things we can do,” Luna says.

  “Yeah, and there’s tons of other things I can do at the ski house,” I say. “I’ll like…go to the lounge and hang out and do puzzles and drink hot chocolate, and you guys will break your ankles and get all sunburned and be suuuuper jealous that I had an excuse to sit around in the hot tub all day.”

  They look really unsure.

  “Come on,” I say. “What are you supposed to do, not go skiing because one of us has arthritis?”

  Honestly, it’s not a rhetorical question, though I know none of them has the answer, either. I know they’re not supposed to sit around planning a whole ski trip with me, even though it’s fine and I’m not mad. But they’re also not supposed to just secretly go without me, and I honestly can’t expect them to plan everything around me and what I’m supposed to do. So like…what is the actual answer here? I think it’s that I go and I hang out in the ski lounge, and that’s fine. A weekend at a ski resort, for free? I’m going to complain just because I can’t actually ski? Of course not.

  Ashley says, “Okay, well, I have to run, so we’ll work out all the details of this later?”

  Everyone else has places to be, too, basketball practice or study group or couple-y stuff. I think about going to the hospital and having dinner with my dad, but I just had all that frozen yogurt, so I’ll probably be eating late, and anyway I’m tired. I just want to go home.

  They say goodbye to me and head back to school or toward the subway platform. I don’t want to have to walk fast enough to keep up with them, so I make an excuse about how I left something inside the boba place and they should go on ahead. I go inside the store for a minute and just wait, soaking up a little bit more warmth before I go back out.

  I think about Claire, like I usually do when I’m feeling like this. She would never have gone outside in weather this cold. Nobody would have let her. Claire’s mom sat inside with her, bundled her up in blankets and made her tea, and they distracted themselves watching Christmas specials on a tiny TV and talking about candy.

  I step back out onto the sidewalk and take a deep breath against the wind. I’m on the west side of Queens Boulevard, so the traffic is headed out toward Manhattan, the right direction for me to get home. I just need to walk a block back, then cross to the middle of Queens Boulevard. Climb up the stairs. Get on the train. Take it two stops toward Manhattan. Go down the stairs. Walk back to the west side of the boulevard. Walk one block to my house. Up the front steps. Up the stairs inside. Into my room.

  It’s not far.

  But the thing is that there’s a cab waiting at the light, with its numbers on top lit up. I could stick my arm up and in three minutes I’d be right at my door. No waiting outside for the train. No holding on to that frozen pole. No stairs, except the ones in my house.

  It’s not like we’re hurting for money, but my credit card is my dad’s, and he checks the charges, and he’d ask me why I took a cab to go fifteen blocks. Plenty of people wouldn’t even pay to take the subway that far. They’d just walk. Old people and pregnant people. And people with arthritis who are just better than me.

  The cab driver would judge me. I’d tell him the address, and he’d say, “In Sunnyside?” and he’d think I was some tourist who didn’t know how close she already was to where she needed to be. Or he’d just roll his eyes at how lazy I am, how in his day…

  The light turns green and the cab blows past me.

  I walk to the end of the block to get to the subway.

  It takes me about twenty minutes to get home. I shake my hands out and fumble with my key and take my shoes and coat off in the kitchen.

  It is so, so quiet, and my dad won’t be home for hours.

  I look at the stupid third chair around our breakfast table that we haven’t moved because this is a tiny house and we don’t have a place to store a chair that nobody’s using, and we’re not just going to throw it out because probably there will be three people in this house again at some point, so there’s no reason to just put a chair out on the sidewalk like some sort of sculpture about how lonely we are.

  It could be worse. I could be Claire, wrapped up with her mom and waiting to die.

  I go up to my room and get into bed.

  What’s the strangest coincidence you’ve ever experienced?

  My cat died when I was eleven, and I was just completely devastated. Her name was Moulin Rouge because that was my favorite movie. Not that I understood anything about it, because I named her when I was eight, I just thought it was really sophisticated and I wanted everyone to hear my cat’s name and think about how sophisticated I was, I guess. Anyway, after a while my parents wanted to get a new cat, and I felt like I wasn’t ready, and then my mom found a kitten on Petfinder that was named—you guessed it. And like, what are the odds of that? Maybe if her name had been Mittens or something, sure, but Moulin Rouge? You’re going to find two cats named Moulin Rouge in the same borough? I guess they weren’t alive at the same time, but…still. Pretty wild.

  —Siobhan O’Brian, 17, sculptor

  The only time I’ve ever driven a car, I wrecked it. Is that a coincidence?

  —Justin Trainer, 17, boyfriend

  Well, I’ve told you about that diner in Astoria? And how every time I went in I’d get coleslaw, a tuna melt, and a chocolate shake. Well, I had a favorite waiter there, named Sal. They alwa
ys put me in Sal’s section. Anyway, one day I was in Manhattan, and I walked into a diner, and who should be sitting there at the counter having lunch but Sal himself. And what was he eating? Coleslaw, a tuna melt, and a chocolate shake. I just turned around and went home. Too much for me.

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

  I died on my birthday.

  —Claire Lennon, 16, dead

  Biggest coincidence? I don’t know, one time I walked into a store and they were playing the same song I was playing in my car. My mom used to say all coincidences were signs from God. Not sure what that one was a sign of. Sign that we need more radio stations, maybe. Now you get back to work.

  —Sheila Bellequest, 58, orthopedics charge nurse

  Chapter Five

  I’m sitting at the nurses’ station, in front of the monitor that tracks the patients pressing their call buttons. They press it, their room number pops up, I pick up the handset and ask them what they need, and then the same thing happens. Every time.

  The monitor dings and I pick up the phone. “Hi, room seven ninety-one, can I help you?”

  “I need my nurse,” a woman says.

  “Can I ask what it’s about? I might be able to help you.”

  “I just want my nurse.”

  “Right, but there are some things I can do, and some things an orderly—”

  “Hello? I need my nurse, please!”

  So I hang up the phone, and I flag down Brenda, and she’s pissed at me for not finding out what the patient wants before I send her in, and then she’s going to come back here and complain that I sent her in to do something an orderly could have handled. Every time.

  I like the patients, and I like nurses when I am a patient, but good lord can both of them be hard when you’re a volunteer.

  “Sorry,” I say to Brenda as she groans her way to seven ninety-one.

  Two of the older nurses are in the station behind me, and Sonia says, in what I must assume she thinks is a low voice, “Brenda really should go easier on her, with what she’s going through.”