It´s All for You

by Tici Pontes

  As he read the contents, I looked at him attentively, observing the change in his countenance, trying to decipher what was going on in his mind. When he finished reading he looked at me and I noticed concern in his eyes.

  “My name is Cristiano and...” He scratched his head with one hand and pointed to the letter. “Is Leo's case that serious?”

  I widened my eyes in surprise.

  “You-you know him?”

  “My mother's a friend of his mother's,” he answered.

  How I love small towns.

  “So you'll... help?” I asked hopefully.

  “I'm giving this to the mayor today, Alice.” He gave a kind smile. “In this very day.”

  Everything was going as I had planned. The meeting with the mayor went smoothly and although he had given me the bad news that the city hall was out of funds to sponsor the event, they would support me and help spread the word about the campaign if I got the sponsors to cover all the expenses that were going to occur on the day.

  From then on it was a rush to go after money, but most people knew Leonardo and it wasn't hard to get support to help him.

  I got the printers for banner prints, pamphlets and posters, stands for some activities like pressure measurement, blood sugar check, haircut, a jumpsuit for the children, anyway. These things that happened in events held for the population.

  Hemoce — which was the center of Hematology and Hemotherapy in Ceará — was also spectacular. When I contacted them explaining the whole situation, I received all the necessary support to carry out the campaign and they even gave two mobile units so that people could donate blood and register in the bone marrow donation database, REDOME .

  Everything would be perfect.

  I knew it wasn't much, but what I expected, from the bottom of my heart, was that somehow I would help Leo in his fight against Aplastic Anemia.

  Finally, after a month of hard work, everything was almost ready for the big day.

  The hard thing was to hide it all from Leonardo who was becoming more and more suspicious. I wanted to surprise him, but he had already smelled a rat for a long time.

  I needed to keep our routine unchanged, and try to focus on my studies —which was being extremely complicated — and find time to visit the sponsors was being difficult. My mother was giving me a lot of help in this and Cristiano was a true campaign enthusiast because he was my right arm in the organization.

  Even so, Leo was not a fool. He knew something was happening. Especially when I spent a good part of my time studying on my cell phone answering messages that Cristiano or my mother sent me.

  “With whom do you talk so much, Alice?” He asked me one day when I got so excited that I smiled as I answered Cristiano, completely forgetting about Leo's presence next to me.

  “I-It' s just the girls, Leo,” I lied brazenly. “The group is busy today and they are having fun.”

  “Give me the phone.” He reached out his hand, which made my eyes go wide.

  “You won't look at my conversations, Leo,” I replied indignantly. First, he couldn't figure out what I was planning, the day of the event was near and I couldn't ruin it, second... Look at my conversations? What was this invasion of privacy?

  As much as I was in love, as wonderful as Leonardo was, I couldn't allow him to do that. Trust was the basis of the relationship. He probably understood what was going on in my head, because he spoke in a reprimanding tone:

  “I'm not going to look at your conversations, you crazy person. You know I'm not like that.” I breathed a sigh of relief. Both because I was, in fact, hiding something from him, and also because I saw that he was not one of those possessive and ultra-civilized men. “But I will confiscate your cell phone until you finish this exercise block. You're too distracted.”

  I rolled my eyes without believing it was happening.

  “You can't be serious.” I narrowed my eyes towards him.

  “I'm deadly serious.” Leonardo kept his hand out and signaled with his fingers for me to hand over the phone.

  I stared at his serious expression and realized he wasn't kidding. I reluctantly handed him my cell phone, which he kept inside his backpack without even spying on the screen.

  I only accepted the audacity, because I knew that if I insisted on keeping the device with me he would end up increasing the suspicions and I wanted to avoid a new wave of lies — I was terrible at that.

  I tried, unsuccessfully, to focus on studies, but it was impossible. I kept staring at Leo's backpack, wondering what ninja blow I was going to apply to get the phone without him noticing.

  “I'm not giving the phone back to you, Alice,” he decreed, categorically.

  I was caught in the act.

  I showed him my tongue, like I was three years old and sank into the fucking math book where I was trying to remember the rules of sine and cosine, which I knew had something to do with a fucking hypotenuse.

  “When we have a son, Leo, I want them to be triplets, and they're gonna be called Sine, and Cosine and the girl is gonna be called Hypotenuse,” I rambled.

  I didn't have any bags to think about calculus, so I was going to use math to get some conversation with my boyfriend.

  “How's that?” Did he bow his eyebrows?

  “Oh, Leo!” I closed the notebook tight. “I don't have the head to think about math right now.”

  The only thing I had in mind at the time was the urgency of knowing if the pamphlets my mother had been asked to pick up had worked, confirming the time of delivery of the awnings that would be set up and the band that would play to cheer the people up.

  And the hardest of all.

  To prevent Leonardo had any access to the pamphlets that were being distributed inviting the population to the event, and any unaware person that, perhaps, would talk with him about what we would do. His parents were helping in this matter and practically watched him the whole time.

  “What's going on with you, shorty?” That was the new nickname he decided to give me. “You've been acting weird for a while, what are you keeping from me, huh?”

  I looked around hoping someone would save me from that mess, but there was no one to come to my rescue.

  I stared at my boyfriend for a few seconds, thinking of some answer I could give that would be convincing enough to fool him for a few more days.

  Just a few more days.

  “E-er...” I fought the stuttering that dominated me. “It's just...”

  Think, Alice! Think!

  I started to grab my hair, a clear sign of nervousness. I stuck my hair in a ponytail, then undid it, then stuck it back in a coke, trying to find somewhere in my brain a satisfactory answer.

  “You're starting to worry me,” he said, leaning toward me. “What's going on, tell me, please!” He came even closer and took my hand in his. “Is that us?”

  Oh, my God! Did he think I was having doubts about us?

  That's so cute!

  I think Leonardo had no idea how much I was in love to doubt my feelings that way. If that's what he was doing.

  His words were hammering in my head.

  Is that us?

  I took a deep breath thinking about what to say.

  “I don't feel the same way about you as I did about, for example, a month ago, Leo,” I started and felt his body harden, the muscles in his face tightened, and Leo cracked his jaw. My hand was slightly tightened. I could see the restlessness in his eyes. “I feel doubly in love.” I smiled as I leaned towards him and kissed his lips lightly.

  Leonardo took a heavy sigh, his hand loosened and the expression on his face relaxed.

  “Don't give me a heart attack, woman!” he said, gasping, with one hand on his chest, pretending to be in pain. “Feel it.”

  He took my hand and put it on your chest. I felt his heart beating and pulled him into a hug, so I walked away a little and kissed his temple.

  “I'm just worried about everything that's going on and whether I'm going to be able to handl
e all the study, Leo,” I spoke in one breath, pointing to the books scattered around the library table. This time it wasn't a lie. The anguish that I wouldn't be able to do everything as I planned was still true.

  “Don't be like this, Lice.” He walked away a little and put his hand on my face. “You're hard-working, intelligent, and you have nothing to worry about. You'll cope with so much study, the problem — he pointed to his backpack — is that you get distracted by seeing bullshit on your cell phone.

  Well, I guess I'd been able to shake off the mistrust.

  At least momentarily.

  I returned the kiss and reopened the Mathematics book, pretending to study so hard that I ended up studying for real!

  “I finished,” I spoke, feeling victorious after breaking my head with so many calculations. “Suck it, hypotenuse!” I shot to the exercise book.

  “You don't exist.” Leo shook his head from side to side with a smile on his lips.

  “And the book?” I pointed to the copy he was reading.

  “Almost finished,” he answered still staring at the pages of the book. “The ETs are almost all dying because of the viruses and bacteria on our planet.”

  Leo was reading the book War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. Yes... it's the same title as Tom Cruise's movie, actually because the movie was inspired by the book.

  “That movie makes no sense at all.”

  “Of course it does.” Leonardo closed the book and looked at me.

  “The film and also the book are called War of the Worlds, but theoretically there was no war at all,” I spoke. “The aliens invade the Earth, dominate the whole fucking thing, kill thousands of people and then die because of... I don't know... ...the flu?”

  “Exactly.’

  “And what's so funny? I wanted to see the battle between the men and the aliens.”

  “You didn't understand the point of the film, my love.” Professor Leonardo went into action. I knew a class would start, because he set himself up on the couch to face me. “That's exactly the lesson they want to get through. That the beings were arrogant and were overcome by their arrogance. They spent thousands of years studying us, preparing the attack, thinking they were better and stronger than us, but it was exactly the opposite.”

  “But they were stronger than us.” I didn't know if we had really seen the same movie. “They buried the machines before humanity came along, which were gigantic and very powerful, they had that force field that prevented the army from doing anything. They killed thousands of people and nobody could do anything at all. We were mere food for them. What about us? What did humanity have that they didn't?”

  “Immunity.” Leo smiled.

  “I hadn't thought about it from that angle.’

  “That's why the story's spectacular.” With the smile still on his face, he hit the hardcover copy he was holding in his hands twice. “Our bodies can often seem fragile and we always end up complaining about why there are thousands of pathogens that can end our lives, but everything in this life has a reason.”

  Then I realized there was a much bigger lesson there than alien invasions.

  “Like your disease?” I asked in a low voice. “Is there a reason for it to exist?”

  Leo then stared at me seriously.

  “Probably,” he paused and stared at the ground “but I still haven't figured out what it is.”

  I realized then that no matter how hard it was to organize the campaign for Leonardo, in the end it would all be worth it. And I would show him that the reason this illness arose in his life was only to show everyone how much of a fighter he was and that in the end he would win this battle.

  Despite the tiredness I would work even harder to find a bone marrow donor for Leonardo.

  It was all for him.

  There was something strange in the air.

  Insecurity visited me every time Alice acted in a way I knew was not hers.

  There were many different glances at the phone and I was absolutely sure she was exchanging messages with someone I didn't know.

  I wonder if...

  But it didn't make any sense.

  Why would Alice stay with me and then leave me for someone else?

  She didn't even know many people here in Mar de Areia. Always together with me, except when she was at home watching the online courses or helping her mother take care of her little brother.

  Unless... she was lying to me, but for what reason?

  It didn't make any sense.

  I was definitely getting paranoid about the idea of losing her. Imagining a thousand theories where she'd decide overnight that standing next to me was no good and that's why she'd end the relationship we'd barely begun.

  We had a conversation about our relationship, she had told me that she was more in love with me than before, yet I still knew that she was hiding something from me.

  I didn't want to pressure her afraid that I might somehow scare her, so I ended up keeping everything to myself. Until when, I could not say.

  That particular morning, Alice was completely weird. Said she couldn't meet me at the library because of some late classes to attend her online course, but she had said a few days earlier that she was relieved to be up to date with the whole course and the whole course revised. That if she continued to follow the study schedule it would give her time to review every subject that fell into ENEM.

  Why is she lying to me?

  I had only gone to the library that day to unwind, because I had no concentration to read. Aside from the fact that a sound noise being tested was pissing me off.

  ‘Hello sound. 1, 2, 3. Sound. Hello. Testing. One, two, three.’

  I knew the noise came from the town square, which was practically facing the library. From the window I could see tents being set up, an incessant movement of people and a small stage near the church.

  I sank onto the couch, an open book, reading and rereading the same page several times. Looking at the clock the time seemed not to pass.

  The messages I sent to Alice were deliberately ignored, because the damn two sticks were blue, indicating that she had received and read what I had sent.

  And simply decided not to answer.

  That only made me more anxious.

  Giving up reading, I concentrated on my cell phone. I put on my headphones to isolate the noise coming from the square and started spending all my 4G watching videos on Youtube.

  Only then time passed. Even so I knew that something was wrong, because to make the situation even worse everyone was acting weird.

  Maria and Neide practically put me in a private jail when at lunchtime I got up to eat something on the street.

  “No!” Neide shouted running towards me. “Where are you going?”

  “Lunch,” I said surprised. “It's already giving me hunger.”

  The two receptionists exchanged glances and then faced me again.

  “We... we'll bring you a snack,” Maria said.

  “That's right, we will!” Neide encouraged her. “We'll bring you a snack.”

  I looked at Neide, then at Maria without understanding anything about what was happening. Why didn't they want me to leave?

  “Girls, you know it's forbidden to eat in here,” I explained what they normally explained to people who stubbornly ate in the library. “What's going on?”

  “It's too hot out there,” Neide said.

  “And it looks like it's going to rain,” Maria completed.

  The two of them then looked at each other and realized that they had said something totally meaningless.

  “What's the matter?” I spoke trying not to sound too authoritarian. “You're not making any sense out of anything.” I crossed my arm over my chest and waited for either of them to explain.

  “Leo...” A well-known voice appeared at the library entrance and I turned my head to find a radiant Alice.

  “Hallelujah,” exclaimed Maria lifting her hands to the sky. “I didn't think you'd show up anymore,” she complaine
d to Alice.

  “We were already wondering how we could tie him up.” Neide pointed to me.

  “Can someone please explain to me what's going on?” I asked for the thousandth time, starting to lose all my cool.

  “Calm down, calm down,” Alice finally spoke up and positioned herself beside me, holding my arm. “Come on, I need to show you something.”

  She took my hand and pulled me towards the library exit.

  As soon as I set foot outside the building the movement I had seen earlier had increased. The whole structure that they were assembling was already properly ready and now the place was crowded with people. We crossed the street towards the main square of the city and I saw many tents set up, stands all over the square and two small buses with the inscription of Hemoce on them.

  The entrance of the minibus was full of people lined up, probably to donate blood. Some held umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun, others held bottles of water in their hands, but none of them left the queue.

  In some stands people cut their hair, in other two professionals dressed in white checked the pressure, food trucks were parked on the sidewalk, a huge jumper in the shape of a castle served as fun for children of various age groups.

  And on the stage near the church, a band played forró of the old ones.

  Já vem montado em seu alazão, chapéu de couro e laço na mão, seu belo charme me faz cantar. The song "Meu Vaqueiro, Meu peão" by the band Mastruz com Leite was playing cheerfully and several people were dancing in front of the stage.

  “What is all this, Alice?”

  We kept walking through the crowd and I stopped when I saw a huge banner with the following inscription: Let's find a marrow for Leo, donate life.

  “You didn't do it,” I said it without believing it. “Alice...” I turned to her without any reaction. “You organized all this?”

  She nodded yes with a smile that went from ear to ear.

  To my amazement, a huge banner, with a picture of me and my name was hanging right next to the minibus.

  I covered my mouth with my hands still in shock. I remembered Hemoce's cars and the huge queue and I realized that all those people were there with only one goal: to try to help me. Some I knew, but most were strangers to me. And they were standing in that line to try, maybe, to become marrow donors.