No. Not here. We’d be anywhere but my room.
Music and Mark and everything else in this room are only such good company. They can’t hold conversations with me. They can’t laugh. And when Sophie’s not here, they can’t tell me how much I mean to them, even if they mean a hell of a lot to me.
CHAPTER 3
SOPHIE
A BIRTHDAY PARTY FOR A one-year-old is pretty pointless. Luna obviously has no concept of the passage of time, despite how cute she looks in a hat too big for her head. That didn’t stop my sister, Tabby, from decorating the backyard and inviting over a dozen friends. Any excuse for a big production.
If the yard is a stage, I’m merely an usher. I offer smiles to Tabby’s friends as they arrive, tell them where to place their gifts. Then I escape to a lawn chair in the corner with my earbuds and a cup of punch.
Most of Tabby’s friends are theater kids too. Though we’re both involved in the performing arts, our interests have never exactly overlapped. Tabby loves musicals but can’t dance, and the idea of memorizing a script makes me sweat. We’re only a year and a half apart and she’s a junior like Peter, but her friends have always very clearly been Her Friends, while he has always been mine. It’s not that she doesn’t like Peter, but this party is for her—well, for her kid—and his family didn’t make the guest list.
While the party people coo over the spectacle that is Luna playing with a bubble wand, I scroll through my phone until I find my current favorite song. It’s a remix of a nearly century-old jazz piece—when you are on dance team, you listen to a lot of remixes—with horns and bass and a catchy chorus. I envision the choreography as anachronistic too, vintage Fosse moves mixed with modern and hip-hop. Over and over, I play the first eight bars, trying to visualize how I’d position our dancers. My favorite choreographer, Twyla Tharp, mashed up music and dances that weren’t supposed to go together all the time: a ballet choreographed to a Beach Boys song in the 1970s, for example. I’d love to create something unexpected like that, something risky and new.
Every so often my mind drifts to the woods behind Peter’s house, his side warm against mine as we sat on the blanket. I crave physical contact between us, but it’s also a special kind of torture, one I analyze and reanalyze after every time I see him. The rare moments that seem to dip beyond friendship, like when he slid his hand beneath my sweatshirt and my tank top, are just that: moments. Fleeting. Agonizing.
“Sophie?” Dad’s voice cuts through my song. I pause it and whip my head around. He’s standing on the porch, hands jammed in his pockets, shoulders hunched in an I’m-not-sure-what-I’m-doing-here-even-though-I-live-here kind of way. My dad and I are the kind of people who are okay one-on-one but disasters in large groups. He’s a sound engineer at an NPR station in Seattle, and he spends most of his time dealing with knobs and wires instead of people. “Could you come help with the cake?”
“O-kay,” I say tentatively, unsure how a dessert has bested my father.
“You looked lonely out there,” he says in the kitchen as he starts slicing the carrot cake, confirming he did not, in fact, need that much help—maybe he just wanted to talk to me.
“You know me.” I hold out a plate so he can place a cube of cake onto it. “Not exactly a party person.”
“It’s a little much,” he agrees, gazing out into the backyard. “But you only turn one once, I suppose.”
He and my mom never expected to be grandparents so young, I’m sure. But when Tabby told us that she was pregnant and she and Josh Cho, whom she’d been dating since eighth grade, had decided to have the baby, Mom and Dad seemed to skip the judgmental phase and climbed right aboard the supportive-parents train. Now seventeen, Tabby’s taking classes online, waitressing at a diner in the evenings, and living across the hall with her baby. Josh, who goes to North Seattle High with me, spends so much time here he might as well move in.
Most of the time it feels too crowded. Like there isn’t enough space for quiet people like my dad and me to simply be.
Mom slides open the door and joins us in the kitchen. “Phil! I saw that,” she exclaims as my dad licks buttercream frosting off a finger.
“Guilty,” he says, and she laughs, swatting his arm.
“Soph, where have you been all night?” Mom says. “I’ve barely seen you.”
My mom, who’s high up at Starbucks corporate, has always been the alpha of our family. She and my dad met in Israel on a Birthright trip, and a couple years later, she was the one who proposed to him.
“I’ve been here.”
“Did you have a good last practice?”
“Pretty good. Not sure how I feel about our new captain yet. She’s . . . a little intimidating.”
“I’m sure you’ll get used to her.” She reaches into the fridge for more sodas. “I wonder if Tabby and Josh will sign Luna up for dance classes when she’s older. Can you imagine how cute she’d be in a toddler tutu?”
“So cute,” I agree.
When Tabby got pregnant before she turned sixteen, it seemed like an opportunity for me to step into her “good daughter” shoes. I could be the easy kid. But nothing in my sister’s life changed that dramatically. Her schedule shifted around and she couldn’t do as many plays, but she and Josh stayed together. She kept her friends.
And yet, when I told my parents I wanted to get tested to see if I’d be a match for Peter, they lost it. “There are so many health risks,” Dad said. “What if something happens to your friendship and you regret donating?” Mom asked.
The only regrets I have when it comes to Peter are things I don’t do. Things I don’t say.
It felt like fate that I was a match when even his parents weren’t. When I reminded my parents it could take years for him to find a match on the transplant list—years he might not have—they didn’t know how to respond. I am eighteen and my body is mine, and I will make any and all choices for it as long as I can.
“You know, I was thinking,” Mom says as she closes the fridge. This is how she’s begun all conversations about the transplant ever since my test results came back and a slim possibility became a reality.
“Mom. I’m doing it. A day and a half from now, in fact.”
She sighs. “I know you are,” she says quietly, gently touching my arm. “All I was going to say is that it’s a very noble thing you’re doing. I hope you know that.”
I give her slight nod, though “noble” doesn’t seem like the right word.
She fixes sad eyes on me, looking like she wants to add something but isn’t sure if she should. I head back outside before she can.
We stick a single candle onto Luna’s piece of cake and sing “Happy Birthday,” which seems to both amaze and confound her. When it’s over, Tabby blows out the candle, and Luna destroys the cake.
It’s not long before the sky deepens to a dusky blue and Luna gets cranky. Tabby and Josh put her to bed, their friends leave, and I linger outside to help them clean up the backyard so my parents can relax with a bottle of wine and a show about British royalty on Netflix.
“They grow up so fast,” Josh says as he and Tabby collect Luna’s toys.
Tabby flicks short auburn bangs out of her eyes. “Don’t even joke about that. I want her to be this small and sweet forever! Though I wouldn’t mind getting more sleep.”
“Me too,” I mumble. One of the hazards of living with a baby. I tip food scraps and paper plates into our compost bin.
“I can’t believe she’s one,” Tabby says. “This whole thing is still unbelievable to me. Amazing in a lot of ways, terrifying in plenty of others.”
It’s strange, my younger sister growing this family of her own. While Tabby and Josh have been together since they were fourteen, I didn’t know they were having sex until Tabby told us she was pregnant. She’d advanced to level forty, and I was still trying to beat level one. Most of the time I try not to think about how at eighteen and with an actual baby in the house, I feel like the baby of my family.
<
br /> “Working on any new dances?” Josh asks.
“Starting one,” I say. “Not sure how much time I’ll have this summer, though.”
“You’ll bounce back fast. I’m sure of it.” He checks the time on his phone. “Yikes, I should head home.”
“You don’t want to spend the night?” After Tabby got pregnant, my parents decided it didn’t matter if Josh stayed over. The thing that wasn’t supposed to happen had already happened.
“My parents miss me, weirdos that they are,” he says. He hugs her, a hand sliding effortlessly through her short hair as he pulls her to his chest. Until recently I didn’t know watching two people hug could make me ache. That clear fondness they have for each other: It’s impossible not to see. “I’ll be back tomorrow for Sophie’s Last Meal.”
I groan. “Don’t call it that!” I have to fast for eight hours before the surgery, which isn’t a big deal since I’ll be asleep for most of them. But no breakfast Friday before I go to the hospital, where they’ll do final tests before the surgery.
We say our good-byes, and then my sister and I are alone in the backyard.
“I should take this compost out to the curb,” I say before the silence between us gets awkward.
“And I should check on Luna.”
Sometimes Josh feels like a buffer between us, helping us forget we aren’t actually that close. We’ve never been enemies or had fights that ended in tears or slammed doors. But we’ve never bonded the way some sisters do.
“Wait,” I say when she’s halfway to the door. “Do you . . . want to hang out tonight? Watch a movie or grab food somewhere or . . . something?”
A pause. Then: “You know, I am exhausted, Soph.”
I’m almost relieved by her non-excuse because—what would my sister and I even talk about?
“Right. Right. Another time.”
“I’m sure I’ll see you around,” she jokes, and I press my mouth into a firm line, hoping it resembles a smile.
The next time I see Peter, it’s officially summer vacation and the doctors have finished their final tests and we are both in hospital gowns. This is really happening.
“I love you,” I whisper to him before we’re taken into the operating room.
“Me too,” he whispers back, and my last thought before I surrender to the anesthesia is: You have no idea how much.
CHAPTER 4
PETER
I’M DEAD. THE PAIN IS so severe, so white-hot, that that’s the only explanation. But I can’t tell where it’s coming from. Can’t tell where I am.
Huh. I was hoping heaven would smell less like a hospital room and more like espresso beans. Latkes with applesauce. The perfume Sophie wore the night we stayed home and had what we dubbed “fauxcoming” because I didn’t have the energy for the real dance. She probably didn’t think I noticed because I didn’t say anything. Didn’t know what to say, because “you smell good” sounded like it might mean something I wasn’t sure I meant. But I noticed.
Maybe . . . maybe this isn’t heaven. The thought hits me hard. Obviously hell would stink like a hospital. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure if what I’ve done with my life would earn me salvation or eternal damnation. Given the circumstances, I’ve been as good as I can be. I listen to my parents and try not to complain and always do my homework. But I’ve also never done anything daring, and I don’t know if people who play it safe deserve to go to heaven. I want to believe, though, in heaven and hell. From what I understand of it—which, admittedly, is very little—my Jewish side views those concepts differently, more complexly. But when you’ve been sick your whole life, you have a lot of time to read. A lot of time to philosophize. I’ve read Dante’s Inferno and Albert Camus and Zhuang Zhou, who said that when we die, we simply become something else.
It’s reassuring to think that after you’ve spent nearly seventeen years feeling like shit, the afterlife, or whatever comes next, might be better.
At least, that’s what I tell myself on my bad days.
The pain twists around my abdomen. Climbs up my back. A jolt straight to my brain. No. I’m not ready to die. Who will take care of Mark? I’ve never even left Washington State. And I’m still a virgin. I’m sure my philosophers would agree that it would be cosmically unfair to die a virgin. I bet they all got laid a lot.
“Peter?” My mom’s voice. A hand on my shoulder—and nails.
If I can feel my mom’s claws, hear my mom’s voice, then I must still be alive. . . .
My eyes blink open, and I squint at the bright hospital fluorescents. Machines are beeping. In the corner of my vision, I spot a single GET WELL SOON balloon that must be from my parents.
It takes a while to find my voice. “Did it—am I—”
“The operation was successful,” my dad says, grinning his I’m-a-nice-dentist-not-a-scary-dentist grin. “No complications for you.”
I scrabble under the sheets with the hand that doesn’t have a needle sticking out of it. The bandage on my abdomen is thick and wide. Suddenly what my dad said takes on new meaning. No complications for you.
“Sophie?” I say, unable to form a complete sentence.
“She’s doing fine,” my mom says, and my body relaxes into the hard hospital bed. “She’s in the room next door.”
“Can I see her?” The question doesn’t come out right. I need to see her. Need to know she’s okay. That’s what it feels like: a deep, coursing need that goes all the way down to my toes. My toes, ankles, elbows all need to see her.
“You should rest,” my mom says.
“Dr. Paulson still has a lot to discuss with us,” my dad says.
“I need to see her.” It comes out right this time, and there must be some conviction in my voice, because my parents buzz the nurse and everyone agrees to let this reunion happen.
They wheel me to the adjoining room. Sophie is lying down, but I can tell she’s awake. Freckles cover her cheeks, forehead, nose, chin—she must have hundreds of them. I like every single one.
Sophie smiles when she sees me—or tries to. Her lips move, but they don’t really curve upward. “How’s my kidney?” she asks in a groggy voice. It’s strange seeing her in a hospital gown. Her love for dance usually radiates off her; even when she isn’t dancing, she’s tapping her foot to a song only she can hear or clacking her nails against her phone case. Piano isn’t static, but unless you’re in a band, you’re sitting down.
“It’s, you know. Doing its kidney thing.” Suddenly my brain is so fuzzy that I can’t for the life of me remember what a kidney actually does. Just that I needed one. Really badly. Bad enough that they sliced us both open to fix me. “You look like . . . like shit.”
“Peter!” my mom exclaims. She doesn’t get it. But Sophie’s parents, who are sitting in chairs next to her bed, scrounge up a couple pity laughs.
“It’s a joke they have, Holly,” Sophie’s mom says to mine.
But Sophie doesn’t have the energy to laugh. I don’t have the energy to energy. I close my eyes
only
for
a
minute.
“You both need more rest,” the nurse says, and I fall into darkness again.
Then there are more doctors. So many doctors over the next couple weeks that I can’t keep their names straight. They’re optimistic. They talk about the anti-rejection medication that I’ll have to take for as long as I have the “donor kidney.” As though at some point I’ll give it back to her.
That’s what they keep calling it. The “donor kidney.” They remind me a kidney transplant is not a permanent fix. I know that. That one day I’ll probably be back on dialysis, back on the transplant list. The “donor kidney” has an expiration date, an average of fifteen years.
Sophie’s kidney, I mentally correct.
Part of Sophie, inside me.
Patchy stubble covers my face, and the hair on my chest and stomach starts to grow back, too. I had to shave it before the surgery. The nurses a
sk if I want them to shave my uneven beard for me, or if they should bring me a razor. I tell them no because I feel weirdly proud of it. Part man, part beast, one functioning kidney. When I get home, I’ll take it all off. If my life were a piece of classic literature, shaving my beard would be a symbol of a fresh start.
“Excited to go home?” asks Dr. Paulson, the doctor I’ve had for years, on my last day in the hospital. A kidney doctor is a nephrologist. I learned that word when I was six.
“I can’t wait.” There are more weeks of recovery ahead of me, and I’ll be back soon for a follow-up, but getting discharged is a huge step, like my body has finally aced a test it spent years studying for.
Dr. Paulson smiles. He’s large and blond and built like a Viking.
When I was younger, I thought all kids admired their doctors the way I did. After all, they were saving our lives. But then I realized I didn’t think about his lifesaving abilities as much as the intriguing sharpness of his features. His broad chest. I had crushes on girls, too, and other guys. Sometimes they overlapped. Sometimes they didn’t. For a year when I was twelve, I seemed to fall in love with anyone who spoke more than a sentence to me. Then, of course, there’s Sophie herself and the spiderweb of feelings I’ve had for her for the past half decade. The ones I used to think were love that I forced back into friendship. Still, they occasionally flared back into crush territory. Made me wonder what a relationship between us might be like. How would it feel to hold Sophie’s hand or kiss her again—for real this time?
When I found the word “bisexuality,” it fit. I liked that I had a word to describe myself besides “chronically ill” or “transplant list candidate.” It was a word that didn’t care what my body could or couldn’t do. It was sure of itself and unapologetic about that sureness.
“I think I’m bisexual,” I told my parents when I was fourteen, even though it was more than a thought at that point. I was someone who told his parents everything, because I’d always had to. When they didn’t respond right away, I explained, “I mean—I’ve had crushes on both girls and guys. And in the future, I might want to date a girl . . . or a guy.”
Our Year of Maybe Page 3