Till it Stops Beating

by Hannah R. Goodman

  “Guys!”

  “Shhh!” Susan says. “This is the best part—” Susan mouths along with Dawson, “All that matters right now is what you want.”

  “F- Dawson and his stupid creek! I’m having an epiphany!”

  “Can you just wait, like, two minutes?” Susan says.

  “No!” I reach for the remote.

  “Hells-to-the-no!” Susan snatches it back.

  Peter and Susan (together as Dawson) recite, “You want him like I want you. You love him like I love you. Only the difference is, he loves you back the same way.”

  A tear falls from Susan’s face. Peter sucks his breath in.

  “Are you guys kidding me?”

  Peter turns away from the TV. “I just can’t watch the rest.”

  “Good!” I pluck the remote from Susan’s hand. “’Cause it’s time for Maddie’s Creek, okay?”

  Neither of them protests. I click off the TV.

  I stand and face them, pointing a finger. “Listen to me: I can’t keep doing the same thing—” I think so fast I almost miss it. “I’m gonna go out with a boy. Not just any boy, either. Someone I like.”

  “Really?” they ask together. “Today?”

  “Soon.”

  “Okayyyy,” they say, slowly, I practically see the radar signals between them. “Who?”

  “I don’t know.” That cute guy who sits in front of me in Physics? Or maybe the other editor of the literary magazine, with the puppy eyes? Why can’t I remember anyone’s name?

  “We’ll help you!” Peter says.

  “Yes…mmmm.” I pace back and forth in front of them. “No. The one time I let you do that…”

  “Oh, come on. Roy was sweet.” Susan pipes in.

  I stop pacing and shake my head. “His breath smelled of moth balls and…he farted on the date. I mean, come on.”

  “Valid point.” Peter taps his chin. “How about Charlie?”

  I make a who’s-that face.

  “Come on, Maddie.” Susan reaches out and tugs at my arm. “Adorable Physics Charlie who always asks you for your mechanical pencil?”

  “Maybe.” That’s his name!

  I squat in front of them and they lean in close as I tell them, “Most of all…I’m gonna stop writing bad poetry about Justin…and stop replaying the make out session we had.” Our hands and mouths roaming all over each other, telling me that he still loved me.

  They look at me funny but then burst into applause, and I leap up and take a bow, as Susan says with a smile, “You know, I think this year Maddie’s Creek is going to be a whole lot more interesting than Dawson’s!”

  Chapter Two

  Goin’ back to Cali…I don’t think so.

  September 18

  There goes my promise to stop obsessing over J. Just finished watching The Princess Bride and BAM! I’m back in time…Whenever The Princess Bride was on TV, J would call me. This began way before we were dating, back when we were just kids, back when it was just the four of us, me, Justin, Susan, and Peter…The Jew Crew (even though some of us were halfies). He would call me and then we would sit on the phone and watch it together, saying the lines:

  Me/Buttercup: Farm boy, polish my horse’s saddle. I want to see my face shining in it by morning.

  J/Westley: As you wish…you silly wench

  Me/Buttercup Farm boy, fill these with water—please.

  J/Westley As you wish. Please my ass.

  Me/Buttercup: Farm boy... fetch me that pitcher.

  J/Westley: As you wish. ...Where’s my please?

  He would ad-lib. I, of course, always stuck to the script.

  CUZ THAT’S WHAT MADDIE DOES.

  Then when Buttercup and Westley would be making out, we would get all quiet. Sometimes Justin would say stuff like how come girls say one thing but mean the opposite? Or I would offer, of course they’re making out…Girls always like boys they aren’t supposed to be with.

  How prophetic…

  October 4

  Why do I still want him? Why do I still think about him? Why can’t I let go? I don’t even really know him anymore. Yeah, we had a random make out session in my back yard when he came home at the end of the summer. Yes, clothes almost came off. Yes, I wanted them to all come off.

  I’m so sick of myself.

  October 15

  I think I have to do what my Bubbie always says she does when she’s down…

  Act as if…

  Act as if I’m happy.

  I’m not sure if that’s what she means, actually.

  But I’m sick of myself so…I’m gonna act as if.

  Friday, November 8th

  I got a new laptop. Dad bought it for me at the Apple store in town. “A pre-college gift,” he said. “Something to make senior project and applying to college a little easier.” Then he winked. He’s so obvious. I know what he’s trying to do. He knows I haven’t opened one of those college guidebooks he bought me.

  We had just finished a run outside and were freezing, so we went to get coffee at Starbuck’s. He turned a relaxing Sunday morning into an opportunity to give me his favorite mini lecture about how important college is: “Socially, Madeline, socially this is crucial. You will meet all kinds of people, and you and I both know that you won’t get that staying here in Lincoln.” Other lectures of note have been the: Education Is The Ticket To Success, and Knowledge Is Power.

  I’ve rewritten my college essay five times, and no it’s not in verse as Mrs. Dubois suggested. I’m signed up to take the SATs for a second time. But only because this is what I’m supposed to do and what everyone else is doing.

  As if.

  My cell phone vibrates, dancing down the table toward my empty cup of coffee. My usual English Breakfast tea just doesn’t do it for me like a sugar-infused, extra-foam latte. My heart pounds at the thought of all that yummy sugar and caffeine. Gotta cut down. I take a breath to calm my heart. Gotta cut down.

  The phone teeters on the edge of the table. I just stare at it. Then it vibrates a last time and tumbles into my bag under the table. “Good,” I say out loud and flex my fingers over the table. “Time to tackle chapter 1 of my senior project.” Yeah, right, I think. I’d rather read my pathetic journal entries. “Way to go, Maddie,” I say.

  “Did you say something?” The hipster guy next to me pulls out his ear buds and asks.

  “Just talking crazy to myself!” I say, all chipper. As if.

  “Cool.” He nods and sticks his ear buds back in.

  “How is that possibly cool?” I whisper to my empty coffee cup. I am talking crazy to myself. Time to end my journal obsessing and get to work.

  I close the red, cloth-covered notebook and push it to the side, then slap down my notebook filled with my senior project stuff. Thumbing through it for inspiration, I lean on my elbow and read from the first page of the summary of my yet-to-be-titled book:

  Mya is heartbroken after both her boyfriend and sister fall off the deep end because of drinking and drugs…

  Totally borrowed from my life.

  Determined to get closure, Mya travels across the country to the boyfriend who is in rehab. On the way, she meets a group of Jesus types who take her into their compound for a few days and try to convert her to Christianity… until she starts chanting her haftarah from her bat mitzvah. It works like garlic to vampires and they show her the door.

  Although heavily influenced by Lifetime’s Deprogramming Amy, (about, you guessed it, a heartbroken high school girl who runs off with a cult), it’s not quite the same. Poor Amy in the movie was for
ced to dress like an Amish person and make out with one of the old dudes in the cult. Bummer.

  Mya flashes her Star of David a few times at the Jesus freaks, which results in one of them yanking it off her neck just as she escapes.

  Mrs. Dubois wrote in the margin, in bold green letters, “reconsider the cult aspect.”

  She escapes and makes her way to boyfriend Dylan’s rehab where, after a series of obstacles mainly in the form of a nasty front desk clerk and security guard, she steals into Dylan’s room and pours her heart out.

  Blank pages follow. Pages I am supposed to fill with chapter 1 due Monday. Today is Friday. Luckily, the entire rough draft isn’t due until late January, and it’s only November. “I have two whole months,” I add out loud. Hipster guy looks up and raises an eye. Maybe he’s listening to silence?

  The phone vibrates again and again, bobbing in my bag between the chewing gum and the tampons. Do I want to know who it is? I twirl my pen. Nope.

  Taking the cue from Hipster dude who hasn’t stopped working save for his concern about me, I pop my ear buds in and blast the saddest love song I know, Nothing Compares 2 U, and begin to write chapter 1, title: The Break Up.

  Mya’s hands shake as she rushes to the front door and throws it open. Before she can speak, Dylan leaps up the two steps and barks, “What the hell were you thinking going to my mother and ratting on me? Now, I have to go to fucking rehab. I may be an asshole, but you’re a nosy bitch!”

  Maybe I should “reconsider” the word “fucking”? Hmmm…I chew on my pen for a moment but then go back at it:

  Mya pushes him back down the stairs. “Shut up, Dylan. I don’t need my parents to hear this, okay?” She grabs his arm and pulls him down the driveway.

  I stifle a laugh because this is so not how it went down with me and Justin those few years ago when we broke up. He did come to my house to tell me he was being shipped off to military school (his mother was sick of him getting high all the time and blowing off school), but we actually wound up making out on my driveway right before he said goodbye…

  But he yanks his arm away from her. “So, we have to protect your perfect parents, but my mom has to know everything?” A car roars by, quieting us for a moment.

  When it’s gone, Dylan runs his hands through his hair. “I told myself I wasn’t going to do this,” he says. “But you make me so mad sometimes. You always have to be right and I always have to be wrong. I always have to be the asshole.” He turns around, jamming his hands in his pockets.

  God, I loved it when he would do that. Shove his hands in his pockets. Adorable, with his silky black hair falling over his blue eyes. “Stop swooning, Hickman. Get it together,” I whisper to myself.

  Mya’s heart swells and aches. “I’m sorry” she whispers to his back. “I’m sorry for telling your mother about everything. I just wanted to help you. I was scared.”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  I only wish I had been smart enough to say that to him. I was just scared and so I told his mom about the drugs.

  She takes a step toward him and reaches out to touch him.

  He turns around, his blue eyes cold and hard, and grabs her wrist. “I don’t want your help. I don’t need it. Just stay the fuck away from me.”

  Mya can’t stop the tear as it rolls down her cheek. “Dylan—”

  “We’re over.” He spits. “Don’t call me. Don’t follow me when I walk away.”

  The last few lines are more inspired by Deprogramming Amy who dumps her b-friend when he comes out to rescue her from the cult. “Don’t follow me when I walk away,” she tells him through her tears. Took my breath away, that scene did. Gripping.

  I sit back and crack my knuckles again, a smile creeping on my face. Mrs. Dubois always tells me “show don’t tell” and “show” is certainly what I just did.

  . . . . .

  Then the phone rings again, and I dig it out of my bag and finally pick it up. The number is from California.

  “Bubbie?”

  “Hi, Mad!”

  “How’s the sun?”

  “Shining!”

  “How’s the beach?”

  “Sandy!”

  I close my eyes to imagine the beach in her backyard. “Mom got the tickets, Bub,” I start to rap, “Going back to Cali…”

  “Actually, that’s why I called...”

  My stomach sinks like when you expect an A on a paper, and you get it back and in big bold red ink it says F. “What’s the matter?”

  “I went to the doctor…and the long and short of it is I had a routine colonoscopy this week and they found a tumor.” I hear a muffled sound like a sniffle or maybe a cough. She clears her throat. “They say it looks contained and that’s a good thing. But, it’s kind of large. The size of a fist.”

  I push the mouthpiece away and gulp. Bubbie takes a breath and says, “I’m having it taken out next week. Recovery will be a month.” I hear the same muffled sound again. “You there, Maddie?”

  “Yes,” I squeak.

  “Christmas vacation should still be fine, Maddie. As long as you don’t expect me to walk across Golden Gate Bridge or anything.” She attempts to laugh. As if.

  Aside from that last line, there are these rare moments when Bubbie sounds so creepily like Mom. Moments of crisis where she talks like she’s reading me a to-do list. Moments where I think, so they are related.

  I look at the hand that’s not holding the phone and it wants to grab something to hold on to. But there’s nothing and no one there.

  Except good old Hipster dude. He glances up from his laptop and smiles.

  I try to smile a little like I’m on the phone with the boyfriend I don’t have.

  “Maddie?” My ear is enormous as I listen to my Bubbie tell me about her tumor stuck to her colon. She says something about possibly needing radiation but not being certain until the tumor is out and tested. Now my hands fly to my laptop.

  I interrupt her, glad to actually have something to do, to say, to maybe offer her. Control. I know that’s my M.O., but screw it. My grandmother is dying.

  “Do you know if it’s stage one, two or three because—” I scroll down and click on treatment. “The treatment varies depending on—”

  “Sweetie, we don’t know anything until after they take it out.”

  “The Mayo Clinic website says—”

  “Madeline Jane Hickman…”

  “—that even stage three and four have a decent prognosis with chemotherapy and they say that—”

  “Maddie!” Her voice has the edge to it only reserved for when I obsess over something.

  My call waiting beeps and cuts Bubbie off.

  I pull the phone away and glance at the number. Barbara. Shit.

  “Bubbie.” I inhale and exhale like my shrink Josephine has instructed me to do. “I’m sorry. Okay. I’ll chill out for a second.”

  “Good,” I can hear her face relax. We have the same smile, wide, large teeth, full lips.

  My eyes fill with tears: CANCER.

  “Maddie, I’m not even really sick. This could just be a little nothing that they simply scoop out. I actually feel great.”

  I nod.

  “We’ll talk later. I love you, sweetie.”

  I breathe. “Love you, too.”

  I press the button and swallow all tears.

  “Barbara?”

  Big sigh.

  Uh oh.

  “Barb?”

  “Yeah, hi. I just wanted to call you. Hey, did Bubbie call you? She left a message for
me, and she sounded kind of weird.” She lowers her voice, “Oh and Mom is up in her sewing room, trying to stitch the world straight for most of the day that I’ve been here doing my laundry. Anyway, I want to tell you something else.”

  “If you’re going to tell me you’ve fallen off the wagon or that you even smelled alcohol, I will kill you. I swear I will. This is not the time.”

  “Ah, Maddie! Have a little faith. This is good news.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I met someone! His name is Cliff and—wait, before you even try to tell me it’s too soon after Michael and no I haven’t told Mom...”

  I pull the phone away and shut my eyes. What the hell is she talking about? God, there are so many times I just want to—

  “…I like this guy. A lot.”

  “I gotta go, Barb. We can talk when I get home.”

  I press the end button on the phone and feel burning in the back of my throat, and I try to swallow the tears or indigestion or both. I put my phone into the pocket of my jeans and shove my notebook and pen into my leather backpack that Bubbie got me in London just this past summer. I look over at Hipster dude.

  He pouts and shakes his head. “Gonna get one for the road?”

  “Yeah. A latte.” Then I add, “Extra sugar…extra foam.”

  . . . . .

  No one is home when I get there. Good. I dash out to get Peter and Jack. Third wheel status is better than dealing with Things I Can’t Do Anything About (Mom’s compulsive sewing, Barb’s love fantasies, Bubbie’s cancer, especially Bubbie’s cancer.)

  Chapter Three

  Put a Cork in It

  Peter, Jack, and I spill out of the double doors and into the parking lot. The navy sky is dotted with stars. The air tastes fresh when I inhale.

  Next to me, Peter bumps playfully into Jack. I dab my eyes with a rough movie theater napkin.

  Jack says, “Poor Maddie”, and Peter wraps a long arm over my shoulder. “You okay?”