She got sick the second time when she was seventeen. For a while it seemed like she had a really bad flu, which was strange because it was the end of the summer. Then one day I came home and found Mom and Dad crying together at the kitchen table.
When the school year started, Melanie’s teachers gave me homework to bring home to her. I felt weird going into her classes and then lugging all her printouts home. But I felt even worse a few weeks later, when those same teachers stopped giving me her homework.
I would’ve let the doctors take more bone marrow from me—I would’ve let them saw my fucking legs off and pull every tooth out of my head—but they said a marrow transplant wouldn’t help this time.
My parents visited Melanie in the hospital every day, but they only brought me on the weekends, because during the week I had school. But one Wednesday, Mom took me out of school to visit the hospital while Dad was working.
When we got to the hospital, it was weird. Mom and I didn’t go into Melanie’s room together. Instead, she stopped me in the hallway outside her door. The hallway smelled like bleach, white lights humming overhead like hungry mosquitoes.
Mom kneeled down and looked me in the eyes. “Go talk to your sister.”
“Aren’t you coming in?”
“Not right now. Just go in and talk to her yourself. It’s all right.”
But it wasn’t all right, and I knew it.
Even though I had been visiting every weekend for the past couple of months and had spent countless hours sitting in the vinyl-covered easy chair next to Melanie’s bed, I hadn’t talked to her much since she’d gotten sick. It’s not that I didn’t want to talk to her; there just wasn’t much to talk about—aside from the obvious subject that we all tried to avoid. Mom and Dad spent most of their time in the room standing over her bed, watching her sleep. She slept a lot near the end.
I wasn’t sure why Mom wanted me to go into the room alone and talk to Melanie—but I had a bad feeling that if I thought about it for a second, I could figure it out.
Mom nudged me again. “Go talk to your sister, honey.”
I tiptoed in, afraid to break the delicate silence of the hospital room. White machines on poles surrounded Melanie, beeping and breathing quietly like little animals attending her. She was awake, but just barely.
My big sister looked very small in the middle of her huge hospital bed. The bed had all these complicated controls on the side of it and thick metal bars around it, and it seemed strange to need something so big and sturdy to support her thin body. The head of the bed was elevated, and Melanie was staring vacantly at the top corner of the room. There was a TV bolted to the wall across from her bed, and it was playing Die Hard with the sound off, but she wasn’t watching. Who the fuck puts Die Hard on in the cancer ward? I thought, then realized they probably just tuned it to TBS like six hours ago, and no one had been in the room since then.
The room was all white and gray except for the rainbow-colored bracelets that hung loose around Melanie’s wrists. They were friendship bracelets that she had woven herself. She would clip a safety pin to the bedsheet and then take a bunch of different colors of thread and attach them to the pin, as an anchor, then weave them around one another for hours and hours until they formed a bracelet. She had made so many during the time she’d been in the hospital that she had gotten really good at it. She’d even made one for me, which I was wearing, already a little dirty and falling apart because I wore it nonstop.
She was bald, and had been for a while, because of the chemotherapy. Remembering it now, picturing her frail body on top of the white bed, barely making a dent in the sheets, I recall her looking very pretty with a shaved head, although I must be remembering that wrong. You don’t look pretty when you’re dying of cancer, right?
I sat in a chair next to her, and slowly, slowly she turned to look at me. She moved like she was underwater. She gave me a sleepy smile. Her eyes had a faraway look, looking at me but also through me. I wondered if she was seeing things I couldn’t see, like the future or the past. Then I realized I was being silly and that she was just on a lot of morphine.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she whispered back, and it felt so good to hear her voice, even if it was cracked and barely there.
I knew this was going to be the last conversation we ever had—that’s why Mom had brought me today—so I savored every word Melanie said. The only problem was, I couldn’t think of any words to say! All the normal conversation openings didn’t seem appropriate.
How’s it going?
Not great.
What’s new?
Not much. Just dying.
The moment was so big, it seemed inane to fill it with small talk. I felt like we should talk about something important—but I didn’t want to. I wanted to share one last normal moment with my sister.
But I couldn’t hold on to the present. I felt the unstoppable weight of the future barreling toward us.
I closed my eyes and retreated into the past. Melanie and I were sitting together in the station wagon’s rear seat, facing backward, watching the road unspool behind our car. It was nighttime, and we were driving away from our home in Bethlehem, the dark road illuminated by streetlights, our house shrinking smaller and smaller as we drove away.
Something small and warm touched my hand, and I opened my eyes. Melanie was looking at me and holding my hand.
“What’s . . . this . . . movie?”
She was looking at me, not the TV, so it took me a second to realize she meant Die Hard.
“Uh, it’s Die Hard,” I said.
Her mouth opened in a soundless laugh. “Too soon,” she croaked.
I wanted to laugh at her joke, but I just couldn’t. I wanted to scream. She squeezed my hand, and I calmed down a little bit.
“Please say something,” I said.
She was very tired and struggled to focus. “It’s hard,” she finally said.
She blinked slowly and smiled at me, and that smile broke my heart. I had always thought that a broken heart was just a figure of speech, but I could feel the break, a deep and irreparable break inside me. I embraced the pain, an extension of her, and hoped it would never heal.
“Do you remember when I had a broken leg?”
She nodded.
“Do you remember sitting on my bed and keeping me company?”
She nodded again. We sat in silence for a minute. I looked at the machines around her and wondered what they were supposed to do. They breathed and beeped quietly, dribbling life into her. I looked back at Melanie. She was beautiful.
“I love you,” I said, trying very hard not to cry. I didn’t want to make her sad.
She nodded again, and she said, “I love you, too.” Her voice was smaller than a moth. It flapped in front of my face and then flew away.
Her eyes closed, and that was the end of the conversation.
I stood and turned to look into the hallway, but Mom wasn’t there, so I walked into the little bathroom next to Melanie’s bed. I closed the door behind me and stood in the dark.
I waited there for a while, and as my eyes adjusted to the dark, the hard geometric planes of the bathroom emerged around me. I put my face close to the wall and looked at the little tiny bumps in the paint. The texture of the wall.
After a long time I finally turned on the bright fluorescent light over the sink. Everything looked different. I realized that the bathroom had been a time machine and I had traveled years into the future—how far I wasn’t sure. I prepared myself to step out of the bathroom and find Melanie’s room empty. The bed is empty and dressed in fresh, smooth sheets. All the machines are gone and the window curtains are drawn back, letting warm morning light stream in. A janitor pushing a flat mop down the hall sees me standing there and stops. “Are you lost?”
I wondered what future-Kirby looked like, so I turned to inspect myself in the mirror. I was rather alarmed that I didn’t recognize the guy staring back at me. Tears were streaming
down his face. He stared at me for a long time, until I looked away.
Someone knocked on the door.
It was Mom. “Kirby? Are you in there?”
“Yeah, hold on.” I ran cold water and splashed it on my face, then dried off with a couple of scratchy paper towels.
I came out of the bathroom and Mom was waiting for me in the hallway, purse on her shoulder. We were leaving. Melanie was asleep in her bed, a deep sleep, her mouth open.
I hesitated in the doorway. I wanted to go back and talk to Melanie again, see her little smile again, but I was worried that if I walked over to her bed now and nudged her, I’d discover that she wasn’t asleep; she was dead. Or—somehow this possibility was even worse—I’d nudge her awake and she’d look at me with drug-fogged eyes, not recognizing me.
— — —
Jake and PJ stand up, and PJ notices me still sitting. “Kirb, are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I lie. I stand up unsteadily, pins and needles prickling through my legs. I wobble, and Jake grabs my arm before I fall off the roof.
“Whoa, easy, tiger.” He grins.
Like an idiot, I give Jake a big hug, almost knocking us both off the roof. “I’m going to miss you, man.”
Usually he’d push me away or punch me in the balls, but he’s either still high or more human than I thought, because instead he actually hugs me back. “Jesus, it’s just California,” he mutters into my shoulder. “Besides, the day’s not over yet. So soak it up while you can, jerk.”
He’s right; the day isn’t over yet.
Still hugging Jake, I reach into his back pocket and feel that the knife is still there.
“Hey, whoa, what are you doing?” Jake asks, kind of laughing. “Don’t grab my ass—wait.”
He realizes my intentions a second too late and tries to push me away, but I pull the knife out of his back pocket and squirm out of his reach as he tries to grab my arm.
“Motherfucker!” Jake yells, fingers curled like a jungle cat, lunging at me.
I twist and duck under his arms, then take two quick steps toward the edge of the roof and throw the knife over the edge. I lob it lightly, like a dove taking flight from my hand, and for a moment it floats up into the blue before dropping into the courtyard below.
Jake grabs my shoulder and spins me around, eyes burning like green flame. He’s about to say something when a sound on the other side of the trapdoor makes us all freeze: the loud crackle of a walkie-talkie.
From the other side of the trapdoor in the middle of the roof comes a muffled voice that’s unmistakably Mr. Hartman. “I’m heading up to the roof now,” he says. “The cage was open. Tell Mr. Reali to make sure he keeps that thing locked in the future.”
We all stare at one another, petrified, then spin around wildly looking for a place to hide. There’s no cover. The roof is wide open.
There’s only one option.
PJ points to the edge of the roof and says, “The ledge!”
Oh shit. Oh no.
PJ drops down over the edge of the roof, onto the ledge that he pointed out when we first came up here, then frantically waves for Jake and me to follow him. There’s no time to think. We get down on our hands and knees and drop over the edge too, onto a ledge that I’m dismayed to discover is only a little wider than our feet, barely enough to stand on. As he steps down, Jake slips on some pebbles on the ledge—probably friends of the little pebble I threw to its doom, hell-bent on revenge—and almost falls two stories to the courtyard below. PJ and I grab the front of his shirt as he windmills his arms desperately. We pull him to the wall, and he hugs it for dear life. We all do.
I reluctantly pry my fingers off the roof’s lip above our heads, and a second later we hear the rusty creak of the trapdoor opening. Mr. Hartman huffs and puffs as he hauls himself up onto the roof.
“What’s he doing up here?” PJ whispers to me.
“He’s probably grabbing the raccoon,” I guess.
Standing on the ledge, pressed flat against the wall, we’ve got maybe six inches of ledge between us and the wide blue yonder. The top of the roof is just above our heads. We have to crouch down to avoid being seen.
I hold my breath as Mr. Hartman’s shoes crunch on the pebbles. He’s walking away from us, toward the raccoon, like I hoped he would. I hear the flap and ripple of a trash bag opening. Mr. Hartman stops walking, and I expect to hear a heavy thump as he scoops the raccoon into the trash bag, but instead there’s a long silence.
“What’s he doing?” PJ asks.
“I don’t know.”
I want to peek over the edge to see him, but I’m afraid he’ll see me. What if he’s looking over here?
“I’ve got an idea,” PJ says. He pulls out his phone and turns on the camera, then slowly raises it above the ledge like a periscope just in time for us to see Mr. Hartman bend down and pick up the joint that’s next to the raccoon.
“Well, this is interesting,” Jake says.
Mr. Hartman stares at the joint and then looks around the roof. He couldn’t be more conspicuous. His bright checked sports coat screams against the blue sky and white pebbles. He glances back in our direction but doesn’t see PJ’s phone. It’s just the tip sticking up over the edge. He scans the roof one more time, considers the joint again, then pulls a lighter out of his pocket.
No.
Way.
I tap record on PJ’s phone just as Mr. Hartman lights the joint and takes a deep pull from it. He holds the smoke in for a long time before letting it out with a grateful sigh. He closes his eyes and turns his face toward the sun. He takes a couple more puffs, pinches the joint out, then slides the butt into his jacket’s breast pocket. He grabs the raccoon by its tail, flops it into the trash bag, and heads back down the ladder, closing the trapdoor behind him with a loud clang.
None of us can believe what we just saw. We climb back up onto the roof and watch it over and over on PJ’s phone.
Jake points to the screen, like a referee watching an instant replay. “He’s clearly smoking the joint there, right?”
“Absolutely, yeah,” I say. “I mean, he lights the damn thing. Why would he do that unless he was smoking it?”
“And look, you can see the smoke there when he exhales,” PJ says.
We watch the video maybe a million times, then climb back down the ladder and out of the drama theater. As we hit the hallway, the bell for fifth period rings.
Looks like I missed English class entirely, which is good. Lunch is next, and I should be worried about Mark, but I’m not. I’m not worried about him at all. I threw Jake’s knife away, so I don’t have to worry about him killing anyone. And if Mark wants to beat me up? Let him. Who gives a shit? It’s like getting that little bit of altitude on the roof really did change my perspective. You realize how small each of us is in the grand scheme of things.
We join the crowd of kids heading toward the cafeteria, a general air of fun and happiness in the crowd, everyone excited that for the next forty minutes they won’t be learning anything.
“Okay,” PJ says seriously, “regarding Vern, at lunch, let’s just play it by ear. I’ll bring the boom box and the other thing, and if you and Mark don’t fight, then we’ll still try to ask Vern out. Remember: Hit play when I do the split. Sound good?”
PJ’s single-mindedness should bug me, but instead it’s a welcome distraction. I give him a thumbs-up. “You got it, pal.”
He arranges his shirt and stops walking to pose like a model, leaning nonchalantly against a locker. “How do I look?”
PJ’s ruffled tuxedo shirt has gray smudges all over the front from clinging to the ledge. Bloody pinpricks run up the one sleeve and there’s a big bump on his forehead where the bear fell on him.
Jake opens his mouth, clearly about to say, You look like shit, so I give PJ a manly punch on the arm and say, “Dude, you look great.”
“Thanks! Ouch!” He rubs his arm where I hit him. “Careful, I’m still a little bruis
ed.”
CHAPTER 19
* * *
THE CAFETERIA IS ON THE far side of the Thunderdome, next to the gym, so we hit our lockers on the way there. Jake and I put our books away, and PJ pulls out two bulging duffel bags. I swear his locker is like the TARDIS; it must be bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. I guess one bag has the boom box. I’m not sure all of what’s in the other one, but there’s something rattling around inside that almost sounds like . . . Ping-Pong balls? After all the strange stuff I’ve seen pulled out of book bags in the past twenty-four hours, nothing would surprise me.
As crazy as the Thunderdome is in the morning, it’s even crazier during lunch, when everyone is wide-awake and rammy from sitting at a desk all day.
PJ, Jake, and I join the herd, down the hallway and into the cafeteria. Loaded up with his big bags, PJ bumps into people every time he turns to talk to Jake or me. “Tacos,” he says in an awed hush. “Tacos, tacos, tacos!”
The cafeteria is well designed to handle the crush of students. There are four different doors, each one leading to identical buffet setups with steam tables. Past that, the center of the room has a long island of premade food: chips, drinks, stuff like that. The rest of the wide space is long, tan Formica tables with attached benches.
A few teachers roam the cafeteria aisles to maintain order, although there really aren’t enough to cover the whole space; the light teacher presence, along with Mr. Hartman’s noticeable absence, makes this an ideal place for Mark to attack.
As soon as we walk into the crowded cafeteria—with the loud thwack of plastic trays slapping against tabletops and the redolent smell of cooking hamburger meat—my heart rate spikes. I thought I wasn’t worried about Mark anymore. I thought I had bigger problems that made this scuffle seem unimportant, but I guess my brain didn’t share that information with my body.
As we join the slow-moving line at the far-left buffet, I try to keep my head down. But Jake stands on his tiptoes, as visible as a lighthouse, swiveling his head and trying to see above the crowd. He’s happy, animated.
This Might Hurt a Bit Page 18