Where We Fell

by Amber L. Johnson

  She drives me back to my house a couple hours later, and I give her a half-hearted hug goodbye.

  “I go in at eight.” I don’t know why I’m telling her this. I could just call her when I’m up for it.

  “Okay.”

  “What? No ‘good luck’ or anything?” I smile as much as I can, given how tired I am.

  “You don’t need luck.” She pops the car locks and motions with her chin that I should get out of the car. “Luck is for people that don’t know if they’re going to make it.”

  I stand outside of the car and look down at her face that’s staring back at me with such determination.

  “You don’t need luck because you’re not going to die.”

  I close the door and watch her taillights dim into the distance, hoping for the first time that she’s right.

  ***

  At precisely eight forty-five in the morning, I’m admitted to my very first treatment. Dressed in a hospital gown, my nurse wheels the bed down the hall, with my mother fretting and wringing her hands by my side.

  Just as I am turned down a particularly long corridor, I see Hannah Hartwell standing there with a bright–ass yellow poster board that reads “I Told You to Eat Your Veggies, Bishop.”

  She smiles.

  And for once, I can see it waver just the tiniest bit.

  6.

  “TERRENCE HAS CALLED YOU EVERY FIVE MINUTES.”

  “I should have turned my phone off.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have ‘checked in’ at the hospital.”

  I sit up a little and glare down at the edge of my bed where Hannah is applying pressure to my feet with her thumbs. “I didn’t check in on Foursquare. My friend finder app was on and when I didn’t answer my phone, Terrence saw I was there.”

  “Likely story.” She moves her hands up to my ankles and higher, making small hits against my calf muscles with her fists. The cramps and aches associated with the treatments are more than I bargained for. I have to admit I’m really glad she’s around so damn much because she does things like this without me actually having to ask. She crawls onto the bed and sits up on her knees while she works on my thighs.

  “Your bromance is really cute. I think Kayleigh is warming up to me, too. When I answered your phone while you were taking a nap, she didn’t cuss me out. She just hung up.” She smiles. “Definite progress.”

  “She’ll warm up to you. Her social skills are lacking. Plus, she thinks of me as the brother she never got to have.”

  “She’s a girl,” Hannah says with a pointed look, as if that should answer every question about the subject at all.

  Between the chemo, the radiation, prednisone and a plethora of other things, I’m feeling worse for the wear. I vomit and sleep – pretty much exclusively. But this girl . . . she keeps a smile on my face no matter what. I’ve come to not even be surprised when she shows up randomly in my room or at my visits.

  She flexes her fingers and cracks her knuckles before going back to patting her fists against my left thigh, right where my boxers touch my leg. “So, tell me something.”

  “What?”

  “Anything. I don’t care.” Her hair falls over her shoulder and hangs in her face while she works. “First girl you kissed.”

  I think for a second because my brain seems to be processing things a little slower these days. The memory of a little blonde haired girl with a braid comes to the surface and I chuckle, but it comes out as a wheeze. “Her name was Melanie. I was seven.”

  “Hot damn. Look at you.” She’s grinning. “Did it rock your world?”

  “Nah. I’m sure there’s better to be had.”

  “I’m sure there is,” she murmurs and starts on my other leg. After a second of silence, she looks up. “Last person you had sex with.”

  There’s a possibility that I don’t have enough blood pressure in my body to make my face red, but it happens anyway. “Shut up.”

  “Come on. I’ll tell you.” She looks back down at my thigh to continue her work. “Guy named Ryan. Who met a girl named Tricia. This was pretty much the reason I fled home for the summer, you know. Because Ryan was an idiot and I’m a stupid girl. Had I not found out about it, then I probably would have stayed closer to him and then I never would have met you.” She stops and glances up at me again with a wry smile. “And then I would have missed out on all of this fun.”

  I shift on the bed and she moves away from my legs to lie down next to me, face to face on my pillow. We don’t touch; we just look at one another.

  “Rebecca. She was my one and only girlfriend. Junior year.”

  “First and only real girlfriend,” she muses. “Did you love her?”

  I ponder this and the answer becomes apparent. “No.”

  Hannah smiles and closes her eyes. Her head shakes back and forth on my pillow and I think I like the way she smells more than anything else in the entire world.

  “You’re such a boy.”

  “I am. And she was a girl . . . Actually, she was one of Kayleigh’s best friends.” It suddenly dawns on me that this might be the reason for the animosity between the girls.

  “Oh my God, Bishop.” She puts her fingers together like she’s about to say ‘here’s the church and here’s the steeple’ while making an over-exaggerated face of shock. “Puzzle pieces. Coming together, No wonder that girl hates me.” She laughs again and closes her eyes, shaking her head at her newfound knowledge.

  I close my eyes, too, and imagine what life would have been like if I’d never met Hannah. If I’d never fallen on that track during practice. If I’d kept seeing Rebecca and just gone about my life like everything was simply ‘fine.’ If cancer had never happened.

  Then I open my eyes and stare at her with hers closed, noting that this was definitely the better of two roads, even with a diagnosis.

  ***

  My hair begins to fall out right before my birthday.

  It’s not the present I was hoping for.

  I’m brushing my teeth and raise my unoccupied hand to shift the hair out of my eyes when the first clump falls out.

  It’s surreal, looking at the strands sitting there between my fingers, like I’d just used a trimmer to get rid of it.

  My first reaction is to call Hannah. I tell her in a hoarse and constricted voice that I need her; I know that she senses my urgency because she hangs up before she can say goodbye. And by the time she makes it to my house, I’m crumpled against the wall in my bedroom, my belongings scattered everywhere because I lost my damn mind and just started breaking shit. I’ve cleared the top of my dresser and strewn books all over the floor. And my face is soaking wet from my tears.

  Everything aches, and I try my hardest not to touch my head because I’m more afraid of pulling my hair out than I am of it coming on its own. I’ve got my face buried in my knees and I’m wailing, which scares the shit out of my mom, but I tell her to please go away. I need her to give me space. I need the minutes before Hannah arrives to come to terms with the fact that this is all real and not just something I made up.

  Hannah clears the room in record time, and I can hear her speaking to me in gentle reassuring tones as she caresses each elbow. My arms are squeezing my knees to my chest in an attempt to not completely fall apart. But it’s not helping. She wraps her arms around my legs, too, and rocks with me while I cry. And when I’m no longer making the god awful noises that she walked in on, she works her hands between my arms and opens me up so that I embrace her instead.

  “It’s okay,” she whispers.

  “It’s not.”

  “You’re getting better.”

  “I’m not. What if I’m not?”

  Hannah slips her hand up my neck and presses her palm to my scalp. I flinch but she holds me tighter.

  Clad only in pajama pants, I can feel her against my tear soaked skin, warm and soft, consoling me, and I start to cry even harder. She shouldn’t have to see me like this but I need her.

  “Shh,” she
coaxes me and runs her hand across my head. “My mom said this was the hardest part. The ‘physical manifestation of letting it go’ is what she called it.” Her hand continues to smooth back my hair. “Maybe when it grows back it will be curly and black. Wouldn’t that be something? You’d look completely different.”

  “Shut up,” I whisper and squeeze my eyes shut tighter.

  She nods against my chest and sits up a little so that I can feel her nose touching my own. “I’d do the same thing for you that I did with my mom. I’d shave my head and give you every last hair I own if it made you feel better.”

  It makes me laugh a little but the tears are still flowing. “Don’t.”

  “I could just shave my head for solidarity. I think I might not have the face shape for it, but I’d do that. Keep it long on top and dye it blue? I am pretty sure I have a perfectly symmetrical skull.”

  I open my eyes and stare into hers, to see that she’s not smiling. She’s serious. She’d do all of that for me. After all she’s already done, I know for a fact that Hannah Hartwell wouldn’t joke about this, of all things.

  She’s so close that I can see her irises dilating smaller to bigger as she searches my face for an answer. Some sort of response. So instead of saying how I’m feeling, I lean forward and kiss her on the lips.

  She hesitates for a heartbeat’s worth of time, and then she kisses me back.

  Her lips are softer than I imagined. I’m kind of fascinated by how they feel against my own, until I open my mouth wider and boldly touch my tongue to hers. It’s like every last inch of my body hurts, except the points where we’re touching. My mouth, my head beneath her palm, where her knees are touching my hips because she’s pressed up against me so closely.

  Her kisses remind me of fireworks. Every big kiss makes my heart swell and then she follows it up with small little peppered pecks against the sides of my mouth. I feel like I’m on fire, but nothing . . . absolutely nothing is happening below my belly button.

  I hug her against my chest and break the kiss to press my lips to her freckled shoulder. She kisses my neck softly and runs both hands across my scalp over and over until it begins to lull me to sleep. When my body finally relaxes, she helps me to my feet and leads me to my mattress, tucking me in before she walks back over to where we were just sitting.

  My eyes close just as I see her discreetly trying to clean up the hair that she had gathered in her hands and let fall to the floor.

  7.

  I THINK THE HARDEST part about my birthday would have to be watching my parents’ faces when they bring my cake to the table. It’s like the amount of candles on top are a final marker of my life. Like they’ll never get to do this again. My mom can’t hold back her tears this time, and while it makes me really uncomfortable, it makes Kayleigh and Terrence even more so.

  Hannah, on the other hand . . .

  “Make a wish, Bishop.”

  My lungs feel inadequately full of the breath needed to blow them out, and I give her a sidelong look to communicate that this might not happen. She just smiles and pulls out her phone, dipping her face next to mine. “On the count of three.” I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and start to exhale. Her breath rushes past mine as the flash goes off before my closed lids. “Two wishes are better than one,” she whispers. “Don’t tell me what yours was, though. If you say it out loud, it doesn’t come true. I learned that at Disney World when I was six.”

  It makes me laugh a little because we both know what I wished for. And I assume hers was the same as mine. Saying it out loud won’t change my fate. The extinguished candles are giving off curls of smoke that I stare at for a few seconds, lazily zoning out as my mom cuts pieces of cake and places them on tiny blue plates. Hannah’s hand rests on my shoulder as she chats happily with my parents, making an effort to include my other friends in the conversation while I concentrate on simply staying awake and trying to breathe.

  “My head kinda itches,” I say quietly. Without missing a beat in her conversation, Hannah removes the baseball cap from my head and scratches it lightly until I nod that I’m okay again.

  Kayleigh’s eyes are watery when she says goodbye, and Terrence is uncharacteristically quiet when he leans over to bump his fist to mine.

  “Want to hang out tomorrow?” he asks; his voice low and eyes wandering over the remainder of the people in the living room.

  “I’ll call you.”

  He just nods and stands back up to put his arm around Kayleigh’s shoulders. They say goodbye and I'm left staring at the door as they walk away. I listen to my parents and Hannah talk. Hannah excuses herself and comes over to me with an overly chipper look on her face.

  “I have a surprise for you.”

  “I don’t want it,” I counter, hoping she can hear that I’m teasing because I’m not so good with inflection lately.

  “Lying liar who lies. You love surprises.”

  “Did you knit me a hat?”

  Her eyes go wide and for the first time since we met, she appears to be speechless. “Damnit, Oliver. Did you want a knitted hat? It would have been lopsided and unintentionally Rasta. I’m sure of it.”

  I picture her trying in vain to knit something hideous and me having to feign appreciation and it makes me laugh a little, my lungs screaming in torture as I wheeze through it. “No. No hats. This one is just fine.”

  “I’ll be right back.” She bounds up the stairs to my room and I’m left with my parents for a few minutes.

  “Are you all right?” My mom is trying not to be a helicopter, but she’s unsuccessful. I’ll probably never get around to telling her, but I’m thankful for it.

  “Just another day in paradise.”

  She smiles and runs her fingers across my palms, heating them up the tiniest bit. “I told her that she could take you out for a while, but that you needed to be back in a couple hours. It’s chilly tonight, so I’ll grab something for you.” I watch her disappear and return a minute later with one of my hoodies. My dad helps me stand and they work in tandem to get it over my head. I’m so lethargic that I have to save all of my energy for the short walk to the car. They discussed a wheelchair but I asked them to hold off for just a little while longer. There’s something about relying on someone to push me around that feels so . . . final.

  Hannah returns with a bag under her arm and leads the way to the car. My dad assists and gives me a kiss on the head after he buckles me in. “I’ll be on duty when you get home, so don’t hesitate to call if you need anything.”

  “Okay,” Hannah and I say at the same time.

  When she drives us to the lake, I’m not surprised. But I am tired.

  “I can’t make it to the rocks.”

  “Sure you can.” She gets out of the car and I hear her rummaging around in the trunk before she appears at my door and opens it for me to see a lawn chair with a couple boogie boards duct taped to the legs. “Your chariot waits.”

  “Where . . .”

  “I’m an engineering genius, that’s where. Now come on. I need to get you across the dirt.”

  She pushes me from behind, and it’s a rough ride, yet I can’t help being amused by the entire situation. She’s huffing a little as we come to rest just next to the stack of rocks I’ve come to know as Ours. Hannah comically wipes her forehead and sits on the lowest slab, pulling the bag she brought onto her lap.

  “I didn’t want to give you this in front of your parents,” she says, dipping her hands into the bag.

  “Your dad got me some medicinal marijuana?”

  Hannah’s laugh is abrupt and the wind carries it off across placid water. “God, no. I mean . . . I wish. But, no. This is just from me and I wanted it to be ours or whatever. So . . .” She hands over a small box wrapped in newspaper. “I figured you didn’t care about wrapping paper.”

  “I don’t.” With a little effort, I get the box open and my eyes widen in disbelief. “How could you afford this? You barely make anything at the diner.”
<
br />   She waves her hand dismissively. “I work there to work. Never underestimate how powerful a parent’s guilt is. Both of mine pay for my ‘mental stability and affection.’ Divorce-kid bennies.”

  “They should give you more money for the mental stability.”

  She taps me on the shoulder and pretends to be offended. “Hey, asshole, I can take that back.”

  I’m completely in awe over the gift and I shake my head with as much conviction as I can. “You wouldn’t take something from a kid with cancer. Even you’re not that cruel.”

  She leans over and passes me the rest of the gift. “The camera is part one of your present. This is the second.”

  It’s a book; wide and respectably heavy. When I open it, I’m greeted with the picture that she took of the two of us as we blew out my candles just under an hour ago. In her sprawling handwriting, she’s written beneath the picture: ‘Where wishes come true.’ She looks beautiful, and I look sick. But there’s a certain hope in the photo that takes my breath away.

  “I went upstairs to set up your new photo printer. Because you need to remember this time so that when you get better, you can look back and see . . . I’ll take you anywhere you want to go, as long as you make it a memory in this book.”

  There’s a tightening in my chest and I have to look away from her to catch myself before I say something that may hurt us both in the long run. After I’m sure my voice won’t waver, I hand her the camera. “Show me how to work it.” So she does. And when I am confident that I have the basics down, I ask her to set it on the ledge above her head and start the self timer.

  She leans in and stares up at the camera as we watch the red light strobe for the ten second countdown. And right before the flash goes off; I turn my face to hers and kiss her cheek.

  When I have the time to develop the photo, I tell myself that under it I will simply write: ‘Where I fell.’

  8.