Once Upon a Wish

by Rachelle Sparks

  But there are some days no matter how much I’ve learned,

  That the road gets tough,

  And I don’t feel good enough.*

  Through this song, Darren had warned that life’s roads can get tough, but Serena never imagined just how tough hers was about to get.

  The blow came faster than lightning, a small fist, thunder cracking against Serena’s head. She hardly knew the girl’s name. She was a friend of a friend of a friend—one of those high school acquaintances whose paths you cross only by association. Serena had never spoken to the girl, never gave her a reason to hate.

  The power of the girl’s close-handed punch to Serena’s forehead shot her body—weakened from radiation, easily bruised from blood thinners—back in movie-like slow motion, instant pain freezing as her mind scrambled frantically to understand what had just happened.

  In that moment, every whispered threat, every blatant tease, every closed mind and judgmental stare pounded through Serena’s body. Her classmates’ disapproval, their haunting laughs, Serena’s cries, the town’s rejection, crashed into her. The emotional torment she had suffered from the time she had moved to that small town finally reached deeper than her soul, slapped harder than her outer shell could handle. This was a literal punch in the face, and Serena cracked.

  High school, to that point, had been something she trudged through day by day, living moment to moment. It was a place of misery but never a place of fear.

  As Serena sat across from the school’s assistant principal, a goose egg swelling and throbbing on her head, tears choking words, she instantly knew that’s what it had just become—a place of bias and fear.

  “She said you wouldn’t shut up,” the vice principal said, a combined look of you’re wasting my time and you deserved this settling into her stone eyes as they scooted from Serena’s neon Converse high-tops to her jet-black pants, to her Nightmare Before Christmas hoodie.

  Serena had already explained that, in the middle of a private conversation she was having with a group of her friends in the cafeteria, the girl—who, according to the vice principal, was “troubled with problems at home”—walked over to Serena, criticized her for an opinion she was sharing with her friends about a particular musician she no longer liked, and slugged her in the face.

  Serena didn’t care about the girl’s “problems at home.” She had plenty of her own, and she wasn’t taking them out on the faces of strangers. The vice principal knew nothing of the misery Serena had been through, and mostly likely, she wouldn’t care.

  The vice principal had spoken to the witnesses, had heard it straight from the girl who hit her that she “rapped her on the head because she wouldn’t shut up.”

  Rapped? Serena thought as the vice principal spoke. Is that some sort of Midwestern slang for hitting a person unnecessarily?

  Kevin and Sedra sat beside Serena, her eyes filling with tears at the very thought that she could get punched in the face for doing nothing and feel like the accused.

  Though she admitted to “rapping” Serena in the head, the girl was sent home for the rest of that school day but was back the next.

  This would never happen in Tucson, Serena thought, sickened by the injustice, disheartened by the thought of facing possible bullying for the next two years while worrying about cancer’s return. It seemed like too much, like more than any high school sophomore should have to deal with, but she did, and Serena made it to her senior year with bullying continuing only in the form of the judgmental stares and whispered laughs she had learned to live with before the punch she took to the head.

  Regular checkups during those two years always revealed Thyroglobulin, a “tumor marker” protein in Serena’s blood, but the numbers were never alarming to doctors until she and her family decided to get a second opinion.

  During Serena’s senior year, about six months before graduation, her new doctor didn’t like the persisting levels, so his solution was a “mega dose” of radiation.

  I don’t want to do this again, she thought, but there was no choice, no bargaining with the inevitable. She needed this treatment, which meant another month-long, low-iodine diet and a lot of pain.

  When Serena’s doctor took her off of her thyroid medicine once again, the instant weight gain grabbed at her bones and joints, tugging until fatigue came to her rescue. Fifteen-hour sleep nights felt invisible, forgotten, the moment after waking, forcing Serena back into bed or onto the couch to keep from falling over with open eyes in the middle of the day.

  She once heard someone say that stopping a person’s thyroid medicine was like exposing them to a slow form of death—“They try to kill you, and once you’re on the brink of death, they revive you”—and she concurred.

  After the “mega dose,” Serena was secluded to a small, corner hospital room for twenty-four hours. A week later, she was sent back to school.

  As graduation approached, Serena’s dad applied for and accepted a job as vice president of administration at Cochise College back in Arizona.

  They were going home.

  Things were looking up. Her cancer was gone. The town was about to be, too, and so were its people—gone from her life. She woke up on the day of graduation and made a very important, life-changing decision.

  I need a negativity purge, she thought.

  She had spent hours in the confines of her bedroom, pen in hand, letting her darkest thoughts, her greatest fears, bleed onto the pages of her hidden journal, becoming lyrics to depressing, handwritten songs scribbled within the pages:

  Holding on to shattered dreams, this life ain’t what it seems.

  Holding each breath in each and every way, maybe I’ll make it, make it someday.

  The cancer was behind Serena, but the negative thoughts that had consumed her during isolation and the months following lingered. She needed them gone. She was going to graduate today, and she was leaving high school, with its judgment and its disapproval; all of its forms of cruelty would be a thing of her past in just a few short hours. She decided to rummage through her old journals and find notebooks still in hiding that contained her darkest thoughts:

  Turn on the light,

  Get me out of the dark.

  Another fright,

  Today is only the first night.

  She shoved the notebooks to the back of her closet, their words to the back of her mind.

  I will wake up every morning and focus on something positive, she decided, whether it was taking a moment to enjoy the simple beauty of a sunrise, internally rejoicing in the success of her favorite sports team, thinking about upcoming concerts and CD releases, or giving herself an invisible pat on the back for accomplishing a personal goal.

  At the graduation ceremony, finding something positive to focus on was not a challenge—she was done with high school and she was moving home. “Pomp and Circumstance” played in the background as she walked down the aisle and across the stage toward her diploma, but the thoughts in Serena’s mind overpowered its gentle drum beat, its celebratory march. I don’t have to deal with any of these people again. I’m done. I can start fresh.

  6

  A few weeks later, Serena and her parents made the twenty-two-hour drive to Bisbee, Arizona, where they would be staying with Kevin’s parents in their one-bedroom guest house for three months before moving a half hour away to the town of Sierra Vista. Kevin and Sedra slept in the bedroom, Serena and Seanza squeezed on the tiny couch in the living area.

  No privacy, no bed of her own, no space to get lost in her music. But it didn’t matter. She was in a place with no humidity, no cornfields, no tornadoes. She could listen to the soothing clicks of cicadas in the trees rather than worry about the sudden darkening of the sky, its collapse and uproar threatening the towns below it.

  There were a handful of tornado warnings during the four years that Serena and her family lived in Nebraska, and when speakers surrounding the town had screamed their potential arrival, the family fled to the basement, waited, an
d watched.

  Rain poured, thunder crashed, and lightning flashed across skies the color of swamp moss.

  Skies the color of vomit, Serena thought during one particular tornado that flattened a town twenty miles from their Lincoln home. Only in Nebraska.

  Lying on the hide-a-bed of her grandparent’s couch at night with her sister, her parents in a tiny bedroom just steps away, the misery of their cramped living situation crept into her thoughts. She pushed them back and reminded herself, Hey, at least we’re back in Arizona. This isn’t so bad.

  Serena woke up the next morning and put all of her focus—her positive energy—into starting the next phase of her life. She enrolled at Cochise Community College in Sierra Vista and signed up for classes that would begin her journey toward a degree in art.

  She had turned eighteen and was starting her trek down a path that had nothing to do with disapproving classmates, cancer, or Lincoln, Nebraska, until one day, four months after returning to Arizona, a stumbling block rolled into her path.

  Serena and Sedra had spent the day at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, where Serena went through the usual routine—blood work, tests, and sonograms of her neck. When the results came back a few hours later, she sat next to her mom on a small couch in the office of her new doctor and she knew bad news was coming

  “We need to get them out,” said Dr. Whitaker, her endocrinologist. Her thyroid was already gone, so the only things left in her neck to remove were lymph nodes. Cancer had made its ugly return, and after receiving her “mega dose,” she knew that radioactive iodine treatments were not an option—she had already received a lifetime’s worth of radiation.

  “Let’s get you to the surgeon,” the doctor said.

  Serena sat with her mom in that quiet, uncomfortable room, with only one thought—All right, I beat this once, I’ll beat it again.

  No more questions of why me? or thoughts of I’m so alone … nobody understands. No more tears.

  Then another thought entered her mind. November 12—Darren will be here.

  A few weeks before, Serena had seen on Darren Hayes’s website that he would be traveling through Phoenix on that date, performing a small, intimate concert at the Scottsdale Borders bookstore. The anticipation of his visit had become her positive thought every morning, but she never imagined that anything, especially cancer’s return, would keep her from going.

  “When will you be doing the surgery?” Serena asked her surgeon, Dr. Michael Hinni, when she and Sedra met with him shortly after their appointment with Dr. Michael Whitaker.

  “We’ll schedule it around November sixth,” said Dr. Hinni.

  Six days before Darren Hayes gets here, Serena thought. I don’t care…I am going to see him. She had survived cancer once, and in her mind, this was just another surgery. The mere thought that this surgery would not be the cure never entered her mind. She wouldn’t let it. All she had to do was go in for surgery, recover, and life without cancer would continue.

  On the verge of

  On the verge of something wonderful

  A resurgence

  On the edge of something wonderful*

  Resurgence—revival, recovery, rebirth, she thought. Serena knew that the rest of the world found its own meaning in Darren’s music, its own interpretation, but in every song, in every word, she found something. She knew logically that Darren knew nothing about her, didn’t know she existed, but she believed his music was there for a reason, for her, for others. She listened to these lyrics, the words of “On the Verge of Something Wonderful,” every day until the day of her surgery. It somehow gave her hope that Darren, his concert, and his music, would be waiting on the other side.

  The day of her surgery was five days before Darren arrived in town. “I’m going whether you like it or not,” she told Dr. Hinni when the surgery was over.

  “Sure, you can go,” the doctor said, but his eyes may as well have rolled with the attitude of a teenager, as if to say, “There’s no way you’re going.”

  He thought he was safe telling Serena she could go, trying to offer the hope he sensed she wanted. He knew her mind needed something to think about, to look forward to, but, unaware of his patient’s stubbornness and her spirit’s determination to do what her mind gets set on doing, he was certain she would not physically be able to go.

  “She won’t feel up to it,” Dr. Hinni later whispered to her mother, offering reassurance.

  Comforted only slightly by his words, Sedra knew her daughter—if Serena was determined to go, she would go.

  7

  The surgery had been a smooth success of removing every lymph node from the left side of Serena’s neck, but two days later, lymph fluid that should have absorbed back into her body leaked from a duct in her upper chest, resulting in an emergency surgery to repair it.

  “There’s no way in the world she’ll be up to going now,” Dr. Hinni reiterated.

  Five days after surgery, on her day of discharge, Serena lay in her hospital bed watching the music video to Mary J. Blige’s song “Just Fine,” taking in every word she sang about the freedom of living life the way you want to live it.

  Time to continue living my life, Serena thought. My life. This was her decision.

  “Are you ready to go tomorrow?” she asked her mom when they got home from the hospital.

  It was just as Sedra predicted. “Are you sure you’re up to it?”

  Serena didn’t answer, just stared at her mom.

  “All right,” Sedra said, tilting her head and staring back. “But you’re taking a walker.”

  Urgh, I don’t need a stupid walker, Serena thought, but knowing her mom would not budge, she agreed.

  On the verge of

  On the verge of something wonderful

  A resurgence

  On the edge of something wonderful…

  This is something wonderful, Serena thought, pushing the walker to the back of her mind.

  The words, usually coming from speakers, were flowing from the lips of Darren himself, right in front of her. Ten feet away.

  Her mouth moved with every word, and she closed her eyes. Fields of yellow flashed in her mind’s darkness. The sound of his voice brought her back to the highway in Wisconsin, when his music had flushed out the word cancer as it floated through her head in the car on the way to her grandfather’s funeral.

  Sitting directly in front of her, singing “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” Darren brought Serena back to the hospital, white lights flashing above her, gurney bouncing, his voice filling the lonely operating room. Sitting in the middle of the crowd at Borders, lost in his music, Serena’s mind became the walls of her bedroom during isolation, confined to the echoes of his voice, as he sang the last line of the song, and once again, it was just the two of them.

  When Darren finished singing, Serena stood with her mom in the line to meet him. Her arms were weak under the pressure of pushing the dreaded walker, but her anticipation was stronger—the anticipation of the voice she loved becoming a person.

  “Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes…” Darren sang quietly when he saw her David Bowie T-shirt, a smile on his face.

  Serena laughed and thought, Wow, he’s real. And he’s right in front of me.

  Darren reached for her hand. He’s shaking my hand, Serena thought in disbelief.

  She smiled and explained the walker to Darren. “I just got out of the hospital yesterday,” she said.

  Serena wanted to tell him that he, through his music, had been with her every step of the way, through her surgeries, her isolation from the world, her bout with self-pity, and her determination to never visit that dark place again. She wanted him to know that he was the reason she wasn’t lying in bed at home that very moment.

  “You’re very strong for coming,” he said with a smile. “And you knew all the words!”

  He noticed!

  Serena beamed. There was nothing more she needed. Not one more lyric, or smile, or note—until he said the next two words.

 
“Stay strong.”

  She looked straight into his eyes and knew she would. Without realizing it, that was what she needed to hear.

  Over the next few weeks, Serena focused on recovering and turning her new Sierra Vista bedroom into a music haven, her walls becoming windows to her past. She hung posters of concerts she had attended, autographs she had received, album covers, vinyl, and CDs.

  Forced to drop classes for the semester at Cochise, Serena had time to alphabetically organize her collection of more than four hundred CDs, lie in bed listening to music, and watch endless movies and videos of concert tours with her favorite musicians.

  She traveled with Janet Jackson on her Hawaiian tour and the Backstreet Boys through Orlando. She got lost in the stories of Prince’s Purple Rain and Pink Floyd’s The Wall, felt immersed in the frenzied crowd of a concert scene in Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker and, in her mind, stood among hundreds beneath the balcony as Madonna sang “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” in Evita.

  Time passed slowly, painfully, as Serena’s shoulder, sore from hardening scar tissue surrounding the doctor’s incision that stretched from her ear across the front of her neck, began to heal. Her neck, stiff and tender, softened over time, and she worked daily to improve its rotation.

  A week after the surgery, Serena was surfing the net, visiting different artists’ websites and reading the latest music news, when she found an upcoming concert—three weeks away—of Avenged Sevenfold, Seanza’s favorite band. Heavy metal bands Operator and The Confession would perform as well.

  “I’m buying the tickets so we can go,” Serena told her sister.

  “You just got out of the hospital!” Seanza said. “We’re only going if you’re better. Otherwise, I’m taking a friend.”

  Three weeks passed, and every ounce of Serena’s body, every part of her mind, screamed, Let’s go!