by BC Powell
Chapter 11
I must have drawn twenty pictures of Sash and twenty landscapes of the view from the Tall Hill while propped up in my hospital bed during the days of recovery. My mom never left my side, just like after the surgery when I was twelve. My dad and sister spent every minute they could with me. Connor and his family visited every day I stayed in the hospital.
Despite the biopsy revealing a benign tumor, my doctor recommended chemotherapy just in case there were undetectable traces of the growth left that could lead to cancer. After the surgical wounds healed, three weeks of radiation treatments were immediately followed by the start of chemo.
When each of my chemo treatments ended, I stayed in the hospital for a few hours of monitoring prior to being released. I was wheeled into a common room filled with toys, video games, and DVDs in the children’s cancer wing. After my second treatment, I saw a boy, maybe eleven years old, with sandy hair and green eyes, sitting alone in a wheelchair. The back of his head was shaved, and he stared despondently at the floor.
“Hey, I’m Chase,” I said after getting out of my chair and walking over to him.
“I’m Davis,” he said quietly, looking up at me.
“Are you here alone?”
“My mom had to pick up my little brother,” he replied.
“Me too,” I said. “My mom had to get my sister. What are you here for?”
“I had a brain tumor,” he answered, “and I have cancer.” The despair in his voice betrayed the brave expression on his face.
“That sucks,” I said, resting a hand on his shoulder. “I’m really sorry.”
“You have it too?” he asked, sounding like he was afraid of my answer.
“I had a benign tumor in my head. My second one in five years.”
“I’m really glad you don’t have cancer,” he replied.
“Thank you. Me too. Hey, feel like playing?” I asked, motioning my head to the video game box.
“Sure,” he answered with a smile, so I wheeled him over to the monitor and set up the game.
I’d planned on letting him win, but that strategy quickly proved to be unnecessary as he thoroughly kicked my ass over several rounds of a fantasy warrior battle. Little things like brain cancer and chemo couldn’t stop the flurry of his fingers moving from button to button on the controller and his expert steering of the miniature joystick.
“Do you want to see something cool?” I asked when I’d had enough of his virtual thrashing.
“Sure,” he replied.
I walked to where my backpack was lying on the ground, took out my sketch pad, and returned to the seat beside his wheelchair.
“Did you ever have hallucinations before they removed your tumor?” I asked Davis.
“No, not really.”
“Did you have seizures?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’d get a really bad headache and see, like, bright lights.”
“Did you have other hallucinations?” I asked.
“No, why?”
I opened my drawing tablet and held it in front of him. “This is where I went and what I saw during my seizures.”
His eyes widened and his mouth opened with amazement. A smile of wonder gradually took over his face as I turned the pages of my sketch pad. I explained each full-color drawing of the Krymzyn landscape, the Disciples, sustaining trees in motion, the waterfall inside a cavern, and pages and pages of Sash. He jerked backwards at one sketch, shivering slightly as the smile left his face—a reaction to the detailed depiction of a Murkovin.
“Those are incredible!” he exclaimed when we finished looking through the tablet. “That should be, like, a video game or something.”
“Thanks,” I said. “It’s really cool when I go there.”
“But it’s just a hallucination?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s real. I know it’s real.”
I didn’t show him one drawing that was buried on the last page. It just felt too personal to me. I often looked at the close-up portrait of Sash when I was alone. Her facial expression was exactly the same one she’d had after disclosing she’d seen me in her Vision of the Future. At the bottom of the page, I didn’t write the last three words she’d spoken to me before I’d left. Instead, I drew a question mark.
What I always wondered when I looked at that question mark, knowing that she knew things about the future, was When would I return? A week? A month? Ten years? I had no way of knowing and never had a chance to ask her. The only thing I knew was that a brain tumor was somehow the trigger to send me there. Unless a new tumor developed, I didn’t think I’d go back.
As clumps of our hair fell out in the weeks that followed, Davis and I shaved the rest of our heads together. The backs of our skulls were already bare from our surgeries. We spent hours playing video games after our treatments, and I taught him how to really draw.
I learned that he stayed in the hospital twenty-four hours a day while they tried to eradicate the aggressive cancer spreading through his brain. His parents and little brother spent as much time as they could with him, but he still had hours of solitude each day. I began going to the hospital most afternoons when school let out, even after my round of chemo treatments were completed.
My driver’s license had been suspended because of the seizures and surgery. On days my mom couldn’t take me to the hospital to visit Davis, I walked to a bus stop, transferred to the subway, and then walked the rest of the way.
When weekends came, I’d sometimes spend an entire day with him, taking walks outside, tossing a ball around when he felt up to it, or just playing games. Even when his family was there, they didn’t mind my presence. They knew that my own medical history, surviving a tumor when I was his age, created a sense of security in Davis.
Whenever we were alone, he asked me to tell him stories about Krymzyn. We’d look through my drawings while I shared most of what happened to me there. My short-term memory was sporadic at best, a frightening by-product of chemotherapy that lingered for many months. I started writing down every detail of my experiences in that world, starting with my first trip there when I was twelve. The journal served as my reminder, a way to refresh my mind, in case I ever did return.
* * *
“Hey, guys,” I called out to a group of kids from my school. Connor and I were hanging out at the mall on the first Sunday after school had let out for the summer.
“Hi, Chase,” a girl named Stephanie replied. “Hi, Connor.”
Trim with blond hair and blue eyes, she was the consummate California girl. Stephanie was at the mall with a group of her friends, a mix of guys and girls from our school. We all stopped in front of each other and quickly said hello. I knew most of them pretty well, and while I’d describe them as friends, they weren’t close friends.
“How are you feeling?” Stephanie asked me. The pity in her eyes was obvious. Her reserved body language made her look uncomfortable standing beside me or, I don’t know, maybe that was just my imagination.
“I’m doing great,” I said enthusiastically.
She quickly scanned my body, her eyes starting at my feet and rising up to my face. Dressed in cargo shorts and a T-shirt, both baggy due to my weight loss, I know I looked like the walking dead. My healthy tan was gone, my muscles had suffered severe atrophy, and coarse, brown hair was just beginning to grow from my bald head. Like menacing racing stripes, two distinct surgical scars lined the back of my skull.
“I’m really glad to hear that,” she replied. “You look like you’re doing better.” She didn’t sound very convincing.
“What are you guys up to?” Connor asked the group.
“We just saw a movie,” Stephanie said. “Now we’re going to Justin’s to go swimming. What about you?”
“We’re headed to see a movie,” Connor answered.
Another group of kids about our age weaved through the bag-laden shoppers strolling by us. They weren’t from our school and we didn’t know them. Out of the co
rner of my eye, I caught a few of them staring at me. When I snapped my head towards them, they looked away.
“We have to get going,” Stephanie said. “We’re kind of in a hurry. You guys have fun.”
We all exchanged good-byes before Stephanie and her friends turned and walked through the crowded mall. Stephanie turned her head over her shoulder, looking straight into Connor’s eyes.
“A few of us are going to the beach on Thursday. If you want to go, just text me.”
Connor didn’t answer as she looked away. I clenched my jaw to keep my own face blank, but the sting of rejection burned my eyes.
“They’re assholes,” Connor said, resting his hand on my shoulder. “You don’t need them.”
“It’s just so weird,” I complained. “She used to flirt with me all the time. Now it’s like she and her friends think if they’re anywhere near me, they’ll get cancer or something.”
“You know who your real friends are,” he replied firmly.
He was right. The track team had all been incredibly supportive of me. I’d gone to every meet through the spring to cheer all of them on. It was the only real activity I’d felt up to, other than visiting Davis. The team never once distanced themselves from me or looked at me with pity in their eyes.
Connor and I had a small group of close friends that had been together for years. Many of them had gone to the same K–8 school we had attended and were now at the same high school. They did everything they could to support and encourage me, but they also tried to make sure I felt as normal as possible. The last thing I wanted was for people to feel sorry for me, making me feel different, and pity sure wouldn’t help my psychological recovery. But I’d seen and felt plenty of the distant treatment that Stephanie and her friends threw my way.
“I guess I do,” I said. “It just gets to me sometimes. Like I don’t already have enough to deal with?”
“You can’t let it bother you,” he insisted. “Your real friends always have your back.”
“Thanks, Connor.”
We slapped our right hands together, gripped them firmly, and pulled each other into a tight hug.
* * *
The next Saturday morning, exactly four months after my surgery, I was getting dressed in my room when I heard the phone ring. My mom was about to drive me to the hospital to spend the day with Davis and his parents. His prognosis hadn’t changed much over the months that had passed since I’d first met him.
The door to my bedroom swung open a minute later, revealing my mom’s face. Her eyes were red and tears stained her cheeks. I didn’t need to hear the words that were going to come out of her mouth. I knew what she was about to say.
“Davis is gone,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “Last night in his sleep.”
She walked to me and reached out her arms. I sank into them as my stomach knotted and tears clouded my eyes. With my face buried in her neck, I was unable to contain the waves of excruciating sorrow and grief.
I carried a thin twelve-by-sixteen-inch brown cardboard box in my hand when we went to his funeral. I’d barely slept for the past four days, working on the painting well into the early morning hours. I’d had just enough time to dry mount, matte, and frame the picture before we left home for the service. The close-up portrait of Davis—a beaming smile on his face, sparkle of life in his green eyes, and a full head of sandy-blond hair—was exactly how I wanted to remember him.
At the cemetery, his mom, dad, and little brother stood across the grave from me and my family. The casket had already been lowered into the hole in the ground, a pyramid of flowers at the head. A large circle of people watched as a handful of dirt was tossed into the grave.
I looked at his mother. Light glistened on a single tear that fell off her face from the streams running down her cheeks. As though the world slammed into slow motion, my eyes followed the tear for what felt like thirty seconds, until it splashed on a blade of grass at her feet. A flash of crimson glowed around the green edges, but I knew that was just my imagination. I walked around the grave, slipped the frame from the box, and handed the painting to his father.
“I want you to have this,” I said. “This is how he always looked to me.”
The family all smiled at the painting while tears continued to fall from their eyes. His mother reached her arms around me and held me close, her chest heaving against mine.
“I hope you know how much he cherished the time you spent with him,” she whispered hoarsely in my ear.
“I did too,” I said. “Every second.”
I didn’t tell her that I’d learned a lot about life from that really cool, incredibly brave little eleven-year-old. Like that sometimes wonderful things happen to assholes who don’t deserve it, while shitty, horrendous things happen to really good people. No matter how you want to spin it, no matter what God you do or don’t believe in, the reality is that life isn’t fair and never will be. That’s just the way it is, and all you can do is suck it up and accept it and go on with your life. But that doesn’t mean it won’t hurt sometimes.
Chapter 12
With cloudless azure skies overhead and warm, dry air surrounding me, I spent the entire summer and fall doing nothing but running. Residual chemicals from chemotherapy were gradually sweated out of my body as I tried to make up for months of lost training.
Due to the brain surgery, every muscle in my body stung with constant torment when I ran. At times, the pain amplified beyond description, but I didn’t care. The pain just made me run harder. I remembered Davis when I ran, the agony he and his family had suffered with no reward, and any pain I felt couldn’t begin to compare.
As my feet and legs pounded across endless miles of hilly dirt trails, my thoughts inevitably drifted to Sash. The time we spent together on the Tall Hill was replayed over and over again in my mind. I tried to analyze and understand the undeniable connection I felt with her, the same connection she’d admitted to feeling with me. Running was my only real chance to be alone with those thoughts. So I ran . . . and ran . . . and ran.
At the last regular cross-country race of the fall season my senior year, I qualified for the regional meet. With a furious sprint to the finish line at regionals, I passed two other runners to earn the last spot in the high school state championship.
When I bounced up and down at the starting line of state finals, loosening my arm and leg muscles, my physical condition was only at about eighty percent of where it had been before the surgery. What I lacked in muscle strength, I was determined to make up for with mental focus.
Just before the starter’s gun fired, I glanced at Connor standing with my family and coach by the side of the course. Connor clenched a hand into a fist, pounded it against his chest several times, and mouthed one word to me.
It was the same word he had said to me before the start of my races for many years. The same word that, as he’d crouch in the starting blocks before a sprint, I’d yell at him from the side of the track. That word had become our private credo—not only for sports, but for life.
Believe.
Neither of us was religious. The only connotation was to always, beyond everything else in life, believe in ourselves. That word had never had more meaning than it did in the moments before that race.
Mom, Dad, Ally, and Connor were cheering, jumping up and down when I sprinted across the finish line of the three-mile course. Despite the November chill in the air, I was drenched in sweat. Everything I had inside me, physically and mentally, had been sacrificed to that course. I had nothing left when the race ended.
“You know, if it weren’t for the tumor, I know you would’ve won this race,” Dad said as he hugged my panting, sweat-soaked body at the finish line. “You should be really proud of fourth place, Chase. Awesome run.”
I smiled when our embrace ended, leaned over, and rested my hands on my knees. “I didn’t need to win,” I said, looking up at him. “I just had to finish the race.”
His smile beamed with a
pproval, pride, and understanding.
The rest of my senior year was difficult. Since I was unable to drive, always being dependent on my parents and friends was a huge inconvenience. The feeling of separation, of being viewed as different, damaged, even pitied, was always with me. I spent more and more time alone, running, painting, and thinking about everything that had happened to me in Krymzyn. I tried to understand how I knew beyond any doubt that Krymzyn was real. More than that, I believed that there was a reason for my visits there, but I had no idea what that reason was.
During my senior year, I went to the hospital every three months for preventative scans, not that a scan would prevent anything. The checkups always created apprehension and anxiety in both me and my family. I never wanted to be the source of agony for my parents again, to watch them suffer through another surgery and recovery because of me. Guilt couldn’t begin to describe how I felt when I realized that a small part of me was always disappointed when the scans were negative. I longed to see Sash again, but only a tumor would take me to her.
I never mentioned Krymzyn to anyone other than Davis, but they all saw my paintings. I’d told them that the images were just from my imagination, but they also had to have realized they were the same things I’d drawn since I was twelve. I assumed they thought that my drawings were part of my own internal therapy. My family let me know that they were always there for me if I wanted to talk, and while we discussed my physical and emotional recovery, “hallucinations” never entered the conversation.
The mile wasn’t my best race—longer distances were my strong suit—but I made it to the state semifinals in that event at the end my senior year. I’d already decided not to run competitively in college despite a few partial scholarship offers from smaller schools. I was sure the larger schools feared my medical history, but none of that was important to me. When I was accepted to one of the most prestigious art schools in the country, The Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, nothing else really mattered.
My parents insisted that I live at home and commute for the entire four years of college. I was allowed to start driving again after being seizure-free for a year, but my parents and doctors still wanted me to live at home. The forty-five-minute drive to school never bothered me. I often took running clothes with me so I could trek through the hills over Pasadena in the evenings.