“That’s it,” said Dr. Maxwell, her hand on Olivia’s arm. “It’s small, but it’s powerful stuff.”
How could that tiny bit of stuff save Livvie’s life? It seemed impossible. I moved my eyes away from the bag, and for a second they caught Livvie’s. As our eyes held, I thought I saw the same question I was thinking run through her head, and there was a look of fear in her eyes. Immediately, I smiled at her, then realized she couldn’t see my smile behind my mask.
“I’d like to say a prayer,” said Mr. Greco. I blushed. Talking about God always made me embarrassed. But Jake, the twins, and Mrs. Greco just lowered their heads and closed their eyes. Olivia didn’t believe in God, and at first she didn’t do anything, but when her mother put her hand on Olivia’s head, she closed her eyes too.
I knew that Mr. Greco was praying for Olivia to get better, and I imagined his prayers being joined by Mrs. Greco’s. Jake’s. The twins’. Mr. Greco’s parents. Mrs. Greco’s parents. All of Olivia’s aunts and uncles and cousins. Everyone at school. I dropped my head and closed my eyes, and I pictured all their prayers like a giant beam of light shooting up to God at the speed of thought. It would be impossible for any God to ignore that many prayers, that much love.
He would have to let her live.
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There are two dangers for someone who’s just had a bone marrow transplant. The first is graft-versus-host disease. Apparently the leukemia cells weren’t the only thing Jake’s blood cells were capable of fighting. His cells, released into Olivia’s body, would think they were in their own body. Which would mean they could start attacking Olivia’s body, thinking it was an invader, as foreign and dangerous as any cancer. Meanwhile, Olivia’s body would think Jake’s cells were invaders. To the extent that her diminished immune system was capable of launching an attack, it would launch that attack as vigorously as it could at the new bone marrow it had received.
But of course, Olivia’s cells, while they were capable of attacking Jake’s cells just enough to make her feel really shitty, weren’t really capable of defeating invading cells, so she was just as vulnerable to infection as she had been with chemotherapy—maybe more so, since this last round of chemo had been so much more lethal than all the others. That was the second danger. Her cells weren’t (as Emma had claimed) well-trained American soldiers. They were crazed terrorists with no allegiance to any country or cause, desperate only for their own survival.
I hated them.
Livvie couldn’t eat fresh fruits or vegetables, both of which could carry bacteria. She had to brush her teeth gently so her gums wouldn’t bleed, and she was showering twice a day with antibacterial soap. Infections were everywhere—not just outside Olivia but in her own body. Mrs. Greco told me about how the antibiotics Olivia was taking to fight infection could make normal bacteria in her body grow out of control and give her fungal infections. Livvie’s mom watched everyone who visited Olivia like a hawk, making sure we didn’t touch our faces or our mouths without washing our hands. Mine were red and raw from all the Purell and soap and water I was using.
As the days passed, Olivia looked worse and worse. She was shaky and nauseous. Her mouth was sore, and it was hard for her to talk. She had diarrhea. Almost every other day, when I called to see if I could visit, Mrs. Greco said Livvie was just too tired.
Meanwhile, we were waiting. Like pandas flown to a zoo in the hopes that they’ll mate, Jake’s bone marrow cells had been injected into Olivia’s body to engraft, which meant to grow and make new blood cells, but that could take anywhere from ten to thirty days. And while we waited for engraftment, all we could do was hope none of the things happening in her body—the graft-versus-host disease, the bacteria growing everywhere, the fevers and the diarrhea and the vomiting—would be enough to kill her.
When I visited, I always wore a pair of latex gloves and a surgical mask. There was a cart loaded with them outside Livvie’s room. Even though Dr. Maxwell had said that the most important thing was that people not visit if they were sick, Mrs. Greco wanted everyone who came into the room to wear the gloves and the mask. I’d gotten so used to wearing protective clothing around Olivia that it would have felt weird not to—like driving without a seat belt.
Time passed. I went to school. I had lunch with people—mostly Mia and Lashanna and Bethany, but sometimes other people too. I went over to Mia’s house a couple of times. But I couldn’t really focus on anything I was doing—not my classes, not my friends. Wherever I was, I’d just fiddle with my phone, waiting for a call or a text from Livvie. It was like I was there but I wasn’t there. The only time I felt like I was actually able to get caught up in the moment was when I was with Calvin. And not just with Calvin but making out with Calvin. Sometimes I’d text him from a class, and we’d meet in the parking lot and just fool around in his car, and for a few minutes the fact that Livvie was so sick would just disappear, erased by Calvin’s lips and hands and body. None of my teachers ever yelled at me for cutting out of class. Unlike my parents, they seemed unwilling to remind me that Livvie’s illness was a tragedy and not an excuse.
We counted the days. Literally. The day of the transplant was day zero. On day ten, there was no sign of engraftment, and Livvie felt terrible. On day fourteen, there was still no sign of engraftment, but when I pushed open the door of her room after school, she was sitting up in bed, and her cheeks were pink. “Hey,” I said. “You look really good.” It was all so relative. For the way she’d looked before she got sick, she looked like shit. For the way she’d looked the last time I’d seen her, she looked amazing.
“I got a transfusion this morning.”
“Vampire.” I sat in the chair Mrs. Greco was usually sitting in. “Where’s your mom?”
“She thought she might be getting a cold,” said Livvie. “Dr. Maxwell said she should stay home for a couple of days. Could you get me an ice pop?” Even if Livvie looked okay, she still sounded pretty tired.
“Of course,” I said. I went out into the hallway and got one of the ice pops the nurses stored in a freezer. When Livvie’s mouth and throat hurt, they were the only things she could eat.
“Thanks,” she said when I came back with the pop. She peeled the paper off it, and I gestured for her to hand it to me so I could throw it out. The nurse had given me a pop also, and we sat eating them in silence.
“It’s so weird how there’s weather out there,” Olivia said finally, watching the icy rain spatter against the window. She looked around the room. “It’s like, what does that have to do with me? I haven’t been outside in weeks.”
“It’s not so great,” I assured her. “It’s a snowless blizzard out there. It sucks.”
“Mmmm.” Livvie slurped on her ice pop. I put a box of tissues on her lap. “Thanks.” She took one out and wrapped it around the wooden stick.
It was quiet.
Too quiet. I didn’t like the silence, and so I filled it.
“So,” I said, sitting back down in Mrs. Greco’s chair, “I tried what you said, you know, with showing the girls some harder steps. It didn’t work out that well. They were like . . .” I rolled my eyes to try to communicate how unenthusiastic they’d been. “Anyway. Then I tried improvising, like we’d talked about. I played them some Tchaikovsky, hoping, you know, just that they’d like it or something . . . but that was pretty much a fucking disaster.” I laughed a little at the memory of how not into Tchaikovsky the girls had been. Or fake laughed.
“Oh,” said Livvie dully. “That’s too bad.”
“You know, you’ll be outside soon,” I promised, pulling my chair closer to the bed. My voice was chipper. “As soon as this is over. And then you won’t even have to go through chemo again! That’s the good thing about your leukemia coming back and your needing a bone transplant and everything. You get to be cured with no mo
re chemo.”
“Who knows,” said Olivia, affectless. “I mean . . .” She shrugged. “Maybe I won’t be cured. Maybe I’ll die.”
“Of course you won’t die,” I said, rolling my eyes and reaching forward and fussing with her blanket. “You’re doing great, Livvie.”
“Did you know AML has a thirty percent survival rate?” Her voice was accusatory, as if I’d known and been hiding the information from her. “I found that on the internet. Dr. Maxwell kept telling me not to go online. Well, now I know why.”
The number made me feel sick. Thirty percent? With all the chemo and the bone marrow transplants they could do, how could seventy percent of people with AML die?
I racked my brain for a reassuring explanation of the statistic she’d quoted, and miraculously, one came to me. “Livvie, it’s an old-man disease, right? So they probably can’t tolerate the drugs as well as you’ve been able to.” I snapped my fingers as I thought of another idea. “And some people don’t even get good treatment. I mean, seriously, what percentage of people with AML actually get to have bone marrow transplants from matched donors at a place like UH?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Some.”
“But Livvie—”
“Could you just please not fucking ‘but Livvie’ me?” she cried. “You sound like my fucking mother.” To emphasize her point, she pointed her ice pop vigorously in my direction, and it flew off the stick and across the room, smashing into the far wall.
I could not think of a time in the history of our friendship that Olivia had used the word fuck once, much less twice.
“Um, I’ll get that.” I took the box of tissues from her lap and used a couple to pick up the melting ice pop. Then I brought the lumpy, dripping mess over to the garbage can and tossed both that and my own pop. “Do you want me to get you another one?”
Livvie shook her head. Visitors weren’t supposed to use her bathroom, so I used the Purell dispenser to wet a tissue, then started cleaning the wall. The pale red line running down it looked like blood.
“I’m just saying there’s a really good chance I could die, and I fucking wish I could talk to someone about it.”
I was on my knees wiping up the floor. When I lifted my head and turned to look at Livvie, she was looking at me. Her eyes were huge and green, and as I thought about how many thousands of times I’d looked into them all I wanted to say was, You are not going to die. Because the alternative was unthinkable.
But Olivia didn’t want me to promise her she wasn’t going to die. She wanted something else.
I wrapped a clean tissue around the dirty ones and dumped the whole bundle in the garbage. Then I Purelled my hands and went over to stand by her bed.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay what?”
I spread my hands out in front of me, palms up. “Okay. Let’s talk.”
“Okay,” she said. Then she laughed awkwardly. “I don’t even know what I want to talk about, exactly.” There was a tear on her cheek, and she wiped it away. She looked at me. “What do you think happens when you die?”
I remembered being in the bathroom at Mack Wilson’s party. That lonely, disconnected sensation that had felt almost like a premonition.
Which it wasn’t. It was a stupid drunken theory. In driver’s ed, the teacher had made fun of people who claimed to drive better when they were drunk. How much dumber was it to claim to understand the universe when you were chock-full of cherry-infused vodka?
“I don’t know what happens,” I admitted, sitting back down. “But there has to be something.” My mind groped for something I could offer up. “What about being a spirit? There are so many stories of that happening. All those people who say their loved ones came back after they died can’t just be crazy.”
Livvie gave me a look. “Of course they can.”
We were both quiet. What would the opposite of the sensation I’d had at Mack Wilson’s party be? Something warm and beautiful and comforting.
“There could be a heaven,” I offered.
Livvie snorted. “Clouds and angels? I mean, seriously. What am I doing all day? Learning to play the harp?”
“No!” I shook my head emphatically. “It doesn’t have to be all that crap. It could be something totally different. Something amazing. Like . . .” I started to get excited by the idea and leaned forward in my chair. “Like imagine the most amazing moment of your life. Only multiply it by a million. And imagine it goes on forever. It’s the most incredible feeling, only we can’t even imagine what it’s like because we’re still alive. Trying to imagine heaven could be like . . . trying to picture the fourth dimension. We can’t do it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
“Maybe,” said Livvie. She seemed okay with my idea, but then suddenly her face crumpled. “But I feel like I’d just be so lonely there.”
I wanted to say something reassuring, but the thought of Livvie being lonely and dead somewhere was so sad I couldn’t catch my breath. I started to cry, and then I leaned forward and squeezed her hand, crying too hard to say anything. We just sat like that, holding hands and crying for what felt like a long time. Finally, I reached into the box and gave each of us a tissue. While Livvie blew her nose, I stood up and went outside to the little cart by her door. Below the piles of gloves and surgical masks were paper smocks that we didn’t normally bother to put on. But now I wrapped myself in one.
“Nice dress,” said Livvie as I reentered her room.
“Thanks,” I said. I tied the plastic belt, slipped my shoes off, and lay down on the bed next to her. She rested her head on my shoulder. “I don’t want to die,” she said quietly.
Her voice was calm; she wasn’t crying anymore. I wiped the tears that rolled down my face as surreptitiously as I could. “I don’t want you to die.” My voice was squeaky. It was so obvious that I was crying.
“That’s a relief,” she said. There was a pause, and then she gasped.
“What?” I asked, alarmed.
She put her hand over her eyes. “Do you realize I could die a virgin?”
“You are not going to die a virgin,” I said firmly.
“I can’t believe it. I might die a virgin.” Her voice was soft with amazement.
“Livs, you’re not going to die a virgin,” I repeated.
She ignored me, slowly shaking her head. “I spent all that time having a gay boyfriend. I should have realized this might happen.”
“You should have realized you could get leukemia?”
I was being sarcastic, but she nodded. “If you realize life is short, you break up with your gay boyfriend and get a real boyfriend.” She laughed.
So did I. “That’s exactly the kind of thing you really wish they’d put on a greeting card but they never do.”
“I know,” she said, leaning back against the pillow and yawning. “My mom says God is love. She says God has a plan for all of us but we just can’t understand it.”
“That sounds nice,” I said, patting her gently on the shoulder.
“Maybe.” Her voice was fuzzy, and she yawned again. “If leukemia is love, who needs it?”
“Good point,” I whispered.
Outside, the rain splattered against the window. Inside, Livvie had her head on my shoulder. After a minute, she began to breathe the slow, steady breath of sleep. I tried as hard as I could to believe in a God who was holding us—all of us—in his arms just like I was holding Livvie. I tried to imagine a God who would never let anything really awful happen to us for no reason.
A God who loved us too much to take us away from each other.
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Jake’s cells engrafted on day sixteen, and Dr. Maxwell said she wanted Olivia home no later than day twenty. Once upon a time, she explained, people who had bone marrow transplants would stay in the hospital for twice
that long, but now, with all the hospital-borne antibiotic-resistant infections that existed, it was dangerous for Olivia to stay in the hospital any longer than was necessary.
I’d had some idea that Livvie would magically get better as soon as engraftment happened, but she seemed to feel just as crappy on day nineteen as she had on day twelve. By the morning of day twenty—when she was supposed to go home from the hospital—she’d developed some fluid in her gut, and they had to drain it. The day after the procedure she didn’t feel any better. Or the day after that. Or the day after that.
“It’s like they’re torturing her,” I said to Mia as I shoved my books into my locker after my last class of the week on Friday. “It’s obscene.”
“See you tomorrow at the rec center!” called Stacy, sailing by with the Bailor twins.
“Oh my fucking God, I can’t believe I have to teach that fucking dance class again tomorrow.” I fell back against my locker. “Those girls hate me. I’m serious.”
Mia laughed. “What’s happening?”
I closed my eyes. “They just don’t care about the class when I’m teaching it.”
“So, they hate you or you hate them?” asked Mia.
I opened one eye. “They’re children. You can’t hate children.”
“Mmm-hmmm,” said Mia, clearly not convinced.
“No. Really. I don’t hate them. I just don’t know how to talk to them. I get all jolly and fake with them, and they don’t listen to me. Plus, we’re making zero progress on our dance for the recital. Livvie said last year they’d choreographed half the dance by now.”
“What’s the dance?”
“That’s the thing. There is no dance. I wanted it to come from them and their ideas, but every time I ask them what they want to do, they just say, ‘We don’t know.’ And when I try to teach them steps that I’ve worked on, they get all . . . squirrelly and distracted.” I closed my eyes again. “You’re right. I do hate them.”
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