He hands me a brochure. “You seem smart. Call us when you’re looking for a job. I started as an intern. Now I’m the associate medical director.”
My mouth has gone completely dry, and I suck down the rest of the water in one long swig. When I’ve finished, Dr. Carl Vanderwalk is staring at me quizzically.
“Are you okay?”
“I won’t be looking for a job,” I say. “I’m dying.”
Before he can respond, I’ve walked away.
4.
Precalculus is not made for brain tumors.
“So what do you have to know about your triangle, in order to use the law of sines?” Ms. Dahlmann scans the room for her next unsuspecting victim. I avoid eye contact. The numbers and symbols on the whiteboard at the front of the room—even from the front-row seat I had to take when my vision took its recent nosedive—are blurring.
“Come on, gang, you know this stuff.” She keeps roving. “Mohit?”
Hearing Mo rustle in his seat, I turn around. He’s at the desk directly behind me. I cock my head at him ever so slightly, challenging him to give Ms. Dahlmann what she wants. He gnaws on the end of his mechanical pencil.
“Well, you need two sides.”
“And?”
He scrunches his face and stares at the board. “And … a corresponding angle?”
Ms. Dahlmann lights up. “Right, excellent. Or you could have … what?” She moves on from Mo, and even with my eyes planted on my desktop, I can feel her staring at me. “Astrid? What else could you have and use the law of sines?”
I sigh and shift my eyes back up toward her. I feel suddenly exhausted, and resentful. My teachers know about my … brain. Against my wishes, Mom told the principal that the tumor is back, that my energy might be low and my vision is increasingly affected. Dahlmann was the one who suggested I move to the front of the room. I didn’t want my teachers to know in the first place, since I’d prefer not to be branded as Cancer Girl all over again quite so soon. But if they must know, at least they could cut me some slack.
I shake my head. “Not sure,” I mutter.
“Come on, Astrid. You’ve got this.” Her voice is gentle, but she’s not giving me an out. Dahlmann is very comfortable with uncomfortable silence in her classroom.
“Umm…” I stare at the board. It’s not that I mind math, per se. I loved algebra, and precalculus is a lot of the same stuff, just more of it, like fancy algebra. But now I can barely muster the will to comprehend the equations and images staring me in the face. “I don’t know, Ms. Dahlmann. Sorry.”
Dahlmann looks at me for a moment more, as if she’s trying to ascertain whether she should push me any harder, and then she moves on. “Sofia?”
Sofia Mayhew, who has hair so long she can sit on it, squirms at her desk. “I mean, I guess if you had two angles and a corresponding side…”
“Thank you! See that? Was that so bad, my friends? I didn’t think so.” She goes back to the board and starts sketching out an example problem of each type. I zone out, figuring since she’s cold-called me once already, she’s not likely to do it again.
On our way out the door after the bell, Dahlmann stops me. “Astrid. A minute, okay?”
Dahlmann’s desk is sloppy with tests to be corrected and orphaned homework assignments. I try to focus my brain and eyes on her.
“Astrid,” she says again, slowly. She watches the rest of the class empty out before continuing. When we’re alone in the room, she clears her throat. “Look, I know you’re struggling a little bit.”
“I’m okay.”
“I know, but … you’re having trouble seeing. And you’re having headaches again, right?”
She waits for me to answer. Finally, I give her a nod.
“Listen, I don’t know what’s next for you in terms of your … treatment.”
It’s obviously awkward for her to talk about this. I can’t really blame her; it’s awkward for everyone.
“But … I just want you to know that you can be honest with me about how you’re feeling. Okay? If you’re not up for class, I can give you some work to do in the library. But if you’re here, I have to treat you like everyone else. You get that, right?”
I nod again.
“Okay. That’s it.”
“Thanks, Ms. Dahlmann.” I start toward the door.
“And, Astrid.”
Her eyes look a little watery. Please, don’t let a teacher cry on me. Come on.
“I’m praying for you.”
I swallow. “Thanks.” I guess.
5.
When I find Chloe after school, she’s rummaging urgently in her locker. On the floor is her navy canvas backpack, practically every inch of which is covered by pins with this or that social justice slogan—COEXIST written in symbols from different religions, STRAIGHT BUT NOT NARROW within a pink triangle, and CHILDREN BY CHOICE with a smiley face, among others. I pick up the bag and let it dangle from my wrist. I’ll never understand how Chloe just dumps her stuff on whatever grime-encrusted surface is nearby.
“Greetings,” I say, announcing myself.
“Found it!” She pulls her head out of her locker and holds the box aloft triumphantly—store-brand hair dye in a color called “Blue Razz!” The model on the box looks like Violet Beauregarde from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, after she’s chewed the blueberry gum, while also performing a musical number from Chicago.
“Good?” she asks.
“Works for me.”
“Where’s the Protector of All Things Astrid and Killer of All Things Fun and/or Inappropriate?”
I roll my eyes. “Come on.”
“Sorry, I meant your boyfriend.” Truce or no truce, Chloe still takes the opportunity to give Mohit a little dig where she can.
“Jazz band.”
She takes her bag from me and slings it over her shoulder. “Great, so your personal stylist can work in peace today.”
“You could cut him some slack. Like occasionally. Just saying.”
Chloe’s already halfway down the hall, and I hustle to keep up with her, even though my right leg aches a little. She pauses by the stairwell while I catch up. “I’ll cut him some slack when you’re dead. In the meantime, we have living to do.”
It never sounds harsh when Chloe says it. It just sounds honest.
* * *
We walk back to Chloe’s place, which is empty except for Stanley, her crusty old beagle mix. “Hi, Stan,” she says, nudging him with her foot as we enter the apartment. He whines at us. “He’s not adjusting that well to the current living arrangement.” Annalisa, one of Chloe’s moms and the dog person in the family, moved out over the summer for a trial separation from Chloe’s other mom, Cynthia. I can empathize with Stanley, since my father moved out when I was twelve.
Stanley trails us into the bathroom.
“Shirt off,” Chloe orders me. “Sexy, huh?”
Chloe and I have been friends since middle school, when it became readily apparent that if there are two kids in your whole school who can’t pick the latest boy band members out of a lineup and want to play word games and talk about science, they should probably team up.
In the bathroom, Chloe kicks aside various hair dryers and curling irons and mildewed washcloths and drops a towel on the floor by the tub so I can kneel on it.
“It’s clean,” she says. “I know with whom I am dealing.”
I’m not actually that much of a germophobe. I mean, I am, sort of, but not clinically or anything. It started with an episode of Shark Tank Chloe and I watched several years ago, in which two start-up bros from MIT pitched a product that was essentially a disinfecting pod for cell phones, and they had all this data on how much fecal matter is lurking on your phone. Your crap is all over your phone, in other words. That kind of thing is hard to get out of a person’s head. My head, anyway.
My head, which is spinning a bit now, like I’ve just stepped off a carousel that was moving a little too fast. I kneel on the towel and t
ake some deep breaths. Chloe gently eases me under the faucet. She massages my scalp like she works in a hair salon. Then she towels me off, settles me on the edge of the toilet seat, and starts combing out my tangles.
As soon as the first snips of hair hit the floor, I feel lighter.
When most of my hair is on the floor around my feet, Chloe uses an electric shearer to get the back even. It’s not a buzz cut like she gave me last time, when my hair started falling out in huge clumps, but it’s on its way: a soft, boyish pixie, the front a little bit longer across my forehead. She admires her work.
“Good, right?”
I have to hand it to her—she’s really very good at this. Years of YouTube self-haircut videos and experiments with varying degrees of success, coupled with tutorials from her “hairy godmother,” Steve—Chloe’s mothers don’t believe in God-with-a-capital-G either, but they did assemble a cast of friends to teach her important life skills, such as cutting hair—and Clo has become quite reliable with a pair of scissors. She even does the thing where she holds up a chunk of hair and comes at it from an angle, although I have a feeling that might be more for show than for any actual effect.
“Hey, if the whole astrophysicist thing doesn’t work out for you, you should really consider a career as an aesthetician,” I say.
“And if this whole brain tumor thing doesn’t kill you, you should really consider a career as a comedian.”
“Fair.”
Chloe turns my head gently to check each side. She nods, satisfied, then cracks open the box of dye and pulls on a pair of rubber gloves.
6.
Our apartment smells like fish when I get home hours later. Delightful. I wrinkle my nose and follow the scent into the kitchen, where Mom is taking a dish of salmon out of the oven.
“It smells in here.”
“Keen observation, my girl.” Mom turns around. “Whoa! Look at you!”
“Chloe.”
“I assumed.” She kisses my forehead, then steps back and examines my hair, fluffing it with one hand while she considers my new look. I duck out of the way. “Chloe learns how to do this stuff online?”
I pull up a chair at the kitchen table. “And from her hairy godmother, Steve. But yeah, she’s sort of obsessed with YouTube how-to videos.”
Mom stares at me, her brow furrowed. “You know what, though?”
“Yes, Mother?”
“I like it. I really do. It suits you. You know I’m not massively into the artificial hair colors, but … what can I say? The blue works.”
“Thanks.” I nod toward the salmon. “The kitchen’s going to stink for days, you know.”
“Omega-3s!” She turns back to the fish and starts fussing over it. “The better for a healthy brain!”
“A little bit late for that, don’t you think?”
Mom pauses. From behind, I watch her back tense and relax and tense again. Even without saying anything, I know she’s focusing on her breath for a moment, her way of collecting herself. Then she turns to me.
“Astrid, I understand that you’re cutting your hair off in anticipation of losing it again.” Her voice is calm and flat. My mother is nothing if not a master of her own emotions, ninety-nine percent of the time. “I get that you are preparing yourself for what’s next. But for my sake, and Liam’s, and frankly your own, how about laying off the total morbidity just for a night, huh?”
I swallow. I want to object, since it’s my life and my death and I should get to react however I want to react. But then I think about the sound of my mother’s grief in the bedroom that night after our last visit to Dr. Klein, and the look on her face—absurdly full of hope—whenever she talks about the stupid clinical trial. It’s hard for me to begrudge her what hope she has left. I’ll be dead, after all. And she’s going to be the one left behind.
The front door opens and Liam comes bounding into the kitchen, smelling of soccer practice, all little-boy sweat and mud.
“Whoa, whoa, shoes off in the hall, mister!” Mom says.
Liam ignores her, just romps over to me and throws his arms around me. “Your hair is crazy!” he exclaims, ruffling it just like Mom did a minute ago. I mind it less coming from my little brother.
I breathe in his musty smell. “You stink, kid.” He does, but I love it. “Want to bowl a round while we wait for dinner?” Liam’s face lights up like he’s just been told he’s going to Disneyland, which makes my heart contract.
“Clean yourself first!” Mom says over her shoulder as we bound out of the kitchen. “And you only have ten minutes!”
I get the Wii set up in the living room while Liam scrubs down.
“All right,” I say, handing him a controller when he reappears in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. “Lightning-round bowling.”
“That’s not a thing.”
“Whatever. I just meant, let’s do this fast. Before dinner.”
Liam bowls first, and he’s much more expert at maneuvering the Wii controller than I am. His little Liam-like avatar bounces on the screen, and then he sends the ball straight down the center of the alley. Strike.
“Shit, dude,” I say.
“Quarter in the swear jar!”
I roll my eyes. “Come on. That’s only for when Mom catches us swearing, Lee.”
Liam’s blue eyes are wide and twinkly, and for a moment, it feels as if he’s looking at me like he’s never seen me before, like I’m not the sister he’s never known his life without. There’s a smudge of dirt on his forehead that tells me he didn’t quite wash up the way Mom intended him to.
“Give me one free swear?” I whisper. “Our secret?”
He gives me an earnest thumbs-up. This kid, I’m telling you. I love the guy.
I bowl, first a two, then a goose egg. Liam giggles.
“Hey!” I say. “Don’t laugh at the cancer patient! I should get a handicap or something. Brain tumor, automatic five-point bonus.”
His smile dissipates, and I immediately regret mentioning the brain tumor.
“I was kidding, Lee. It’s a joke.”
He stares at the floor and mutters something.
“What? I can’t hear you when you mutter like that.” His teacher says he does it in class, too, more and more frequently, withdrawing into himself.
He raises his voice only slightly. “I said, do you only want to play with me because you got your tumor back?”
I put the controller down. “Bro, come on.”
He won’t make eye contact with me, so I pat the couch next to me and wait for him to saunter over on his own time. Eventually, he perches next to me, leaving plenty of air between our bodies. “I always liked playing with you. BT and AT. Before Tumor and After Tumor.”
“Not true.”
“It is true, Lee!” Realizing that arguing with an eight-year-old about this is not going to yield any satisfactory outcomes, I try a different approach, one Mom has always drilled into us—feelings. “Okay. I’m sorry. How does it make you feel when I don’t play with you as much?”
He shrugs. “I miss you. And I feel like when you weren’t sick, you didn’t have time for me.”
I resist the impulse to defend myself. It’s not exactly accurate, but he’s not totally wrong either. I think back to the last year, my good year, and all the time I spent away from home, exploring the city with Mohit, lying on the floor of his bedroom, talking nonsense, slipping back into the apartment after Liam was already asleep. Mom let me get away with it, probably because she’d almost lost me once for real, and losing me to a boyfriend didn’t seem nearly as objectionable. When I wasn’t with Mohit, I was with Chloe. So I can see Liam’s point.
“I didn’t mean to abandon you, kid. You know, when I finished my treatment the last time, it was kind of like having a new life. And I wanted to do all the living I could. Does that make sense?”
He shrugs. “I guess.”
“But I didn’t mean to leave you hanging. I always want to spend time with you. You’re my favorite brot
her.”
“I’m your only brother.”
“Okay, well, that makes you lucky, because the competition for favorite is not that stiff.”
He sticks his tongue out at me. “Your hair looks crazy.”
Mom clears her throat, and I wonder how long she’s been hovering at the living room entrance. Her eyes are glistening a little bit, which makes me think she’s been there for a few minutes, just watching. “Dinner, guys.”
* * *
In bed later, I think of Liam with his big eyes staring at me across the dinner table like a freakin’ lost puppy. Goofy, sweet Liam. Hopeful Liam. Next year, or next month, or whenever the end comes, he’ll be the kid with the dead sister. In school, other kids will watch him for signs that he’s coming undone. He’ll come home to a sad mom who will buy him too many Christmas presents to make up for how absent she’s been. He’ll become the worst kind of only child, the kind who’s lonelier than if he’d never had a sibling in the first place, because he’ll be living with the ghost of me.
I roll over and watch the neighbor’s motion sensor light flash on. A raccoon going by, maybe, or a skunk, hunting in the trash cans for dinner.
I can’t quiet my brain, thinking of my brother being that kid.
Dammit, Liam.
I guess it won’t kill me to apply for the clinical trial.
7.
A few weeks after Mohit and I met in homeroom, after we’d started accidentally-on-purpose finding each other at lunch and in the hallways at random intervals throughout the day, he told me he wanted to show me something I’d never seen before.
I raised an eyebrow. “You’re pretty confident. How do you know I’ve never seen it?”
“I’m fairly certain.”
I was intrigued, by him and his West Coast swagger and everything else. “So what’s this something?”
“Just a thing. You’ll have to wait and see.” When he smiled, it was like death-by-dimples for me. (It still is.) Those deep pockets of joy dug into Mo’s face, and I had to go along with whatever absurd plan he’d come up with.
That Friday evening, just as the sun was setting, he picked me up at my apartment and took me all the way downtown on the subway. It was a new thing, going on a “date,” and my mother had looked apprehensive and enthusiastic and nostalgic, all at once, when she closed the door behind me.
Fear of Missing Out Page 3