by Jen Malone
“No! I’ve been trying to get through to you. You don’t seem to want to talk about anything real these days, you just want to pretend like none of this is happening and push it all away. Well, guess what? IT IS HAPPENING! To you. To me. To everyone close to you. It’s happening!”
“See, this is why I didn’t want to tell you I hated the idea of Prom with a Purpose, because you’d ask all kinds of follow-up questions and analyze my every response. This might all be happening, but I’m still me—I haven’t changed.”
Sibby’s eyes search the ceiling before she looks back at me and sighs. “Lia. Come on.”
“Come on, what, Sib?” She’s talking to me like I’m some child she has to school and it’s pissing me off.
“Babe, you’ve got this shit disease and, as much as it hurts to acknowledge it out loud, your future’s a bit of a question mark right now. Like it or not, that’s gonna do a number on your head. No matter what happens from here, this experience is gonna change you, Li. You can’t avoid that. That’s why they call these things life-changing.”
I raise my chin and set my jaw. “I really don’t appreciate the lecture, Sib. Just because I’m not reacting to this diagnosis the way you think I should doesn’t mean I’m wrong! What’s so bad about not letting myself wallow in everything? Huh? What exactly is so terrible about refusing to be Dying Girl?”
I forget about her mom somewhere in the apartment because my voice rises with each question. But Sibby’s only reaction is an eyebrow lift that reads as condescending, whether she intends it that way or not.
“Who the hell is Dying Girl? Of course you shouldn’t be her, whatever that means.”
“What then?” I snap. “What is it you think I should be doing that I’m not?”
“You should be . . . I don’t know.” She throws her hands up as she casts about for words. “You should be furious! Aren’t you hella pissed? None of this has to be happening to you! Not if there were enough organs to go around! What the fuck do these people think—that they can take ’em with them? Where is your anger? Where is your fire?” Sibby puts her hands to her head and yanks at her hair. “I don’t know what you should be doing! I just think you need to . . . let it in!”
If this were any normal day, I would counter with, “I’d rather let it go,” which would inevitably lead to Sibby singing “Let it go, let it gooooooo,” and I’d join right in, and in five seconds flat we’d be channeling Idina Menzel on all the high notes of the Frozen soundtrack.
But nothing about this exchange is regular Lia + Sibby.
“Let what in? The fact that my best friend, who I thought I could count on to love me through anything, is being a total shit to me?” I counter. “You’re not brave at all, Lia; that’s just bravado. You don’t have an artistic voice, Lia. You’re doing this all wrong, Lia. Well, guess what? You have NO CLUE what it’s like to be in my shoes, so step the hell off!” I take a deep but shaky breath. Then I lower my voice to deadly calm. “How about I skip letting it in, and let myself out instead?”
Her eyes, already wide at my outburst, open bigger, but before she can answer me, I jump up, grab my bag, and rush from her room. I duck my head low the whole way through her apartment, not wanting to encounter her mom because she’d undoubtedly report back to Sibby about the tears now streaming down my face.
It’s not until I fly down two sets of stairs and reach the lobby that I crash to a stop and slump against the wall. Between shuddering gulps, I listen closely for the door to Sibby’s apartment to click open, for footfalls on the steps that will let me know she’s coming to tell me how sorry she is about everything.
Instead the silence is earsplitting.
19
I STUMBLE HOME FROM SIBBY’S TO FIND BOTH CARS IN THE driveway and a bunch of lights on, but no sign of my parents.
“Hello?” I call but receive no response.
I’m about to abandon my search and collapse in my room when I hear voices through the open kitchen window. Of course. I should have known they’d be in the backyard now that spring has finally sprung.
My hand is on the knob of the mudroom door when I catch Dad’s words. “—been wondering whether we should bring Alex home. I know he only has three weeks left before exams, and he turned down the summer internship, but . . . do you think we should consider it?”
Turned down the internship? When? Why didn’t he tell me? We talked about this! He knows I don’t want that. And leave school in the middle of the semester? What?! I step away from the glass panes and flatten my body against the wall, out of sight.
“Maybe,” Mom answers, her voice small. “It would be nice to have us all under one roof. I’ve been debating handing a few of my cases off to Jeremy.”
Mom hates Jeremy.
“You hate Jeremy,” Dad says.
Exactly! Tell her, Dad!
Mom sighs. “When we were at Dr. Wah’s the other day, waiting for the blood test results, I felt so guilty that all I could think about was getting back to my files.”
“Honey, you’re doing important work and you love your job. There’s no shame in that. It’s probably really healthy that you have a place to escape from all this.”
“None of that’s why I wanted to get back, though. It was because—”
She takes a shuddering breath and I hear some rustling and a scraping of a chair. I lower myself carefully to the floor, in a crouching position, and waddle carefully to my right, positioning myself in front of the door so I’m hidden behind the solid lower half. Slowly, ever so slowly, I raise myself up a few inches to peek out the section that’s glass. My parents are facing one another, their chairs close enough that Mom’s forehead rests against Dad’s, and their hands are clasped in her lap.
My heart is in my throat and I can’t bear to watch anymore. But I also can’t bear to walk away. Instead, I slump onto my butt.
“Because why?” Dad asks. His voice wavers.
“I think . . . I think somehow I’ve convinced myself that if I can help this group of refugees earn asylum status, that’s twelve lives I’ll be more or less saving. And twelve lives saved has to equal one for Amelia, right? God—or whoever it is out there—can’t argue with those terms, can he?” Mom’s tone is pleading.
“Sweetheart—”
“Because I will save a thousand people, Jeff. A million. I will, I swear. I will work eighty-hour weeks until I’m a hundred and three, if it means—”
She breaks off and it’s silent for a long time.
I want to steal another peek, but I’m frozen in place. Between the fight with Sibby and now this . . . I’m scrubbed raw.
Then Mom speaks again. “The rational side of me knows it doesn’t work like that. The same way I know I’m doing this Weight Watchers thing all wrong, denying myself even when I have plenty of leftover points. I know I need to lose these pounds the healthy way so I’m a viable candidate once I reach an acceptable weight, but it’s taking too long! What if we don’t have ‘too long’?”
There’s a pause and then Mom asks, “Does this all sound insane to you?”
“No! Of course not!” Dad pauses and adds, more quietly, “You want to talk about insane? The other day at the hardware store, I was helping a customer with grout options when a siren passed by and my first thought wasn’t, ‘I hope everyone inside that ambulance is okay.’” His voice drops lower. “My first thought was ‘I hope whoever is in there dies and he’s a match for Amelia.’”
I squeeze my eyes shut and let my head fall against the door.
“It was horrible. I beat myself up for it the rest of the day.” I think Dad might be crying. I can hear it in his voice when he says, “But the truth is a tiny part of me genuinely still wants that person dead, if it means she—”
My pulse throbs in my veins and I desperately want to move, to leave. But I’m paralyzed.
“I think it’s time to consider Tennessee again,” my mom says, after a long stretch of quiet.
“We said we wouldn’t d
ecide anything about that until her MELD score hit thirty,” he answers.
What are they talking about?
“I know, but what if we could have all this behind us before that even happened? The odds of getting a liver in Region Eleven are three times better than they are in ours. Stats like that make it hard to justify sitting things out up here.”
Wait, what? They want to move us a dozen states away?
“Except for all the reasons we debated,” Dad says, his voice stronger now. “Dr. Wah is the best of the best. We don’t know anything about what the care is like down there. And Amelia’s so close to graduation, it would be cruel to pull her out of school and move her away from her support system.”
As angry as I am at Sibby right now, the thought of not having her mere blocks away . . .
I hold my breath for Mom’s answer. I want a new liver for me just as much as they do, but these are drastic measures they’re talking about. Are we really at that point?
“Crueler than what could happen if we don’t?” she replies. “She’d have you as a support system.”
“But not you,” Dad murmurs, so softly that I have to strain to hear him. “Could you really bear to be away from her right now?”
Mom is silent for a long time, but finally says, “It’s impossible to think about, but what choice would we have? I have to stay as a full-time employee so we can keep my insurance. If we switch to the store’s, we’d already be bumping up against your policy’s benefits cap and her operation would bankrupt us.”
The word bankrupt punctures my lungs. On top of all the pain I’m causing them, my liver could result in their financial ruin too. How much more of this am I supposed to be able to bear?
“I can dial back my caseload, though, and still be considered full-time,” Mom says. “And I could use family medical leave to be there between my court dates, which would be farther apart with fewer open cases. Babi’s not going to let us defer her offers to come home and help much longer; maybe she could go with you and be a second set of hands. I—I know it’s not an ideal situation, but . . .”
“There is another choice,” Dad replies. “We stick to our original plan to stay put unless she worsens.”
Please. Please say yes, Mom.
There’s more rustling, followed by another long silence, and then my mother instead says, “Jeff, what if we lose her?”
Her voice is practically a whisper, but it travels across the tiny patio and straight into my cracking heart. “What if we actually lose her?”
Go! Run! Get away! my brain tells me, and finally finally my body parts unstick and I can respond. I crawl from the mudroom into the kitchen and lean heavily on the counter as I clamber to my feet. I climb the back staircase sluggishly, as if there are boulders in my shoes, ignoring the window on the landing that has taken on new significance after that night on the ledge with Dad.
I’m on an entirely different kind of ledge now. The one between sanity and a tumble into an abyss.
I reach my room and burrow under my covers, pulling my knees to my chest. The only noise in my room is a steady click as my flip clock counts up each minute. Or is it counts down, in my case?
Click.
Click.
Click.
I am floating in nothingness. This day has emptied me out.
Click.
Click.
My parents are going to find me like this. They’re going to know I heard everything. Or I’m going to have to fake normal, so they don’t realize I did. I don’t know which option is more hellish. I have to get out of here.
Click.
Click.
Click.
I heave my legs over the side of my bed, a plan forming. It’s a little unglued—I’m a little unglued—but it’s all I have. Maybe it can let me find solid footing again, even just temporarily. Buy me enough time to figure out where to go—how to go—from here.
I throw a few items into a duffel, pull the blanket off my bed, and attempt to fold it, before giving up and crumpling it into a ball under my armpit.
I creep downstairs, using the front staircase this time, far away from the back patio. Taping a note to the banister, I grab my mother’s car keys from the pocket of her coat and slip outside.
I escape.
20
WILL’S DORM DOESN’T HAVE A DOORBELL.
It has a sign-in desk, where he’s already waiting for me. “You found it okay!”
I hold up my phone. “Your directions were solid.”
His smile is as easy and relaxed as ever, his stance assured. Yes, give me playful Will, who will hold my attention on him and demand full-effort flirting in return.
Stepping in, he examines me more closely and says, “Hey, are you okay? You seem a little . . .”
He doesn’t finish his sentence, but I laugh as if he’s said something hilarious. Even to my own ears, I sound manic. Unstable.
Get it together, Amelia. You’ll scare him away and be left with no distraction.
“I’m fine! Totally fine! Just keyed up for our adventure, that’s all.”
He hesitates for a beat, but then his shoulders relax. “I have to admit I’m curious. This is turning into a pattern, you luring me out with the promise of adventure.”
If I could get on an airplane right now, I would. Going anywhere, it wouldn’t matter, though my preference would be somewhere exotic, like Morocco or Istanbul or Nepal, where nothing looks or sounds or tastes like real life. Like my real life, at least.
But, as frantically reckless as I’m feeling right now, I can’t go full-on unhinged. I’m lassoed into a particular radius from the hospital, constricted by the mere hours of viability a healthy recovered liver has to reach me, anchored by the very people whose pain I desperately need to escape tonight.
So I’ve set my sights smaller. Adventure might be overselling it, but I needed Will to come along because doing this myself would be pitiful and desperate. Having someone else there makes it spontaneous and funny. Right?
“Do I need anything?” Will asks.
“Just your coat. I’m all set otherwise.”
And I am. On my way to Will’s campus, I stopped at our hardware store and used the keys on Mom’s ring to let myself in and “shopped” its aisles for a bucket, shovels, an umbrella. Everything needed for a day at the beach.
The fact that it’s neither day nor remotely beach season is irrelevant . . . because I say it is. When I was a kid, spending an afternoon digging holes at the surf line, tunneling my feet under sun-warm sand, splashing in the waves, was as close to idyllic as it got for me. I need a dose of idyllic in the worst goddamn way and I am going to make it happen. This minute.
There are a dozen quintessential New England-y beaches within an hour’s drive of Boston, but I steer the car to Revere Beach instead, by sheer basis of the fact that I can reach it in under twenty minutes—fifteen if I feel like speeding a little.
I feel like speeding a lot.
“Easy, Danica Patrick.” Will’s laugh as we zoom through the Callahan Tunnel tells me he’s okay with it, though, as does the fact that he turns the volume up on my Fever Ray playlist.
When we park and Will gets a peek at the contents of my trunk, he lets out a bark of surprise. “Um, are you sure we need all this gear?”
“We do if we’re going to have an old-fashioned day at the beach,” I tell him.
His laugh is wary. “Okay, when we pulled up, I was thinking moonlit stroll—a bit early in the season, but unexpected and different. This, though, is . . . next-level.”
“I don’t half-ass things, Will. You should know that about me by now.” My words are light, but there is an edgy undertone to them, daring him to disagree, to call me out on how my abrupt actions and out-of-the-box concept for tonight are less “adorable manic pixie dream girl” and more “just plain manic.”
To his credit, he seems down to roll with things, whether out of concern or cluelessness, I don’t know, but his voice is light when I hand
him the umbrella. “Pretty sure sunburn hours are eleven to three, Decks.” He peers at the dark sky. “I think we’re out of the danger zone.”
Something he sees in my expression shuts him up, though, because he hoists it under his arm without further comment and grabs the buckets and shovels with his free hand. I scoop the blanket from my bed into my arms and lock the car.
Revere Beach has a reputation for being a little . . . cheesy. It was once home to a seaside amusement park that rivaled Coney Island, but that closed in the sixties and there’s no trace of it now. There’s still plenty of amusement, though, provided by the catcalling potbellied old men in Speedos showing off their ink to the walking clubs of elderly women in velour jogging suits. People set up their lawn chairs in the parking spots and actually turn their backs to the beach to watch a steady procession of muscle cars cruising the strip, ignoring the fact that right behind them, separated only by a short sea wall and a wide sidewalk, is a flat stretch of sand and endless blue-gray water.
But at eight o’clock at night, off-season, there are only the low-flying planes lining up to land at Logan and the dim house lights of Nahant—far across the water where the land forms a horseshoe that circles back on our wide cove—to remind us where we are. It feels like we could be on any beach, anywhere.
“Down there,” I decide, pointing at a spot halfway between the street and the cresting waves.
We have the place entirely to ourselves, with the exception of one person shouting-distance away, who I can only make out as a shadow as they repeatedly throw something for their dog to retrieve. We shuck our shoes and leave them lined up on the retaining wall.
I smell the damp sand, taste the salt on my tongue, and hear the crash of the waves hitting the shore. It isn’t Morocco or Istanbul, but none of these sensations are part of my normal day-to-day and that’s entirely the point.
Neither is Will. Again, the point.