Fear of Missing Out

by Kate McGovern

  “Boo!” Chloe bounces into the room, and I jump about a mile out of my recliner. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “What are you doing here, Clo?”

  She sits down in the empty recliner next to me. “Keeping you company.”

  “Did my mother call you?”

  Chloe shrugs. “What are you watching?”

  I tell her about Aidan Wallace with his goofy ears and his choice to come so close to death on the regular. We watch for a few minutes.

  “Guy’s gotta be certifiable,” she says. “Otherwise, how could you possibly do that? Either that or his brain is wired not to feel fear.”

  “Eh, maybe,” I say. “Or maybe not. Maybe he just accepts the imminent possibility of death, and carries on.”

  By the end of my infusion, I’m grateful that Chloe is there to drive me home. She parks in front of my building and walks with me all the way to my bedroom.

  “So have you thought anymore about the vlog? And the road trip?”

  I have. I’m still not sure it’s the right thing to do, but it feels like the only thing to do. “I need to talk to my mother, Clo.”

  “Well, get on with it!”

  I relax into my mattress—the best, most perfect mattress in the entire Jordan’s Furniture showroom, firm underneath with a plush pillow top; a splurge purchase from the first brain tumor—and close my eyes. The darkness spins behind my lids.

  “I will. Just give me a minute.”

  16.

  Bacon is the first thing I register the next morning.

  “Good morning, my love.” Mom’s flipping omelets while the bacon sizzles on the other burner.

  “Morning.” I take a seat at the kitchen island.

  Mom frowns. “You all right?”

  I can’t feel the toxins coursing through me after yesterday’s session, but I know they’re in there. I’ve already done a mental checklist of my body, starting at the top. My head feels okay. It’ll throb later, but that’s par for the course. My vision is mostly normal, just the one slight dark spot on the periphery. Even my back feels pretty good. I’m fine.

  It’s the thoughts pinging around in my head—the trial, the vlog, a road trip to a cryopreservation facility I haven’t even mentioned yet to my mother—that are making me feel queasy. Not the chemo.

  “Fine. Just sleepy.”

  She brightens. “Eggs?”

  We eat together in silence. Liam’s already gone, left for school with a kid on the third floor who is two years older and therefore approved for walking the four blocks without a parent. It’s nice to have some quiet time with Mom in the morning. Usually I’m out the door while she and Liam are still tearing around the apartment trying to collect his fill-in-the-blank: homework, soccer cleats, lunchbox, show-and-tell items, library books.

  I take a small bite of omelet, testing the texture on my tongue to assess whether it’s going to stay down. It seems fine, so I eat a more generous forkload. Mom watches, satisfied. Then she clears her throat in a weird way that makes me look up at her.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Astrid, have you talked to your dad lately?”

  I try to recall the last time I called Dad at the Ranch. A few weeks, at least. Maybe a month. It’s not that I don’t want to talk to my father; it’s just that his life is so far removed from mine these days that it’s hard to convey anything over the phone.

  “Not that lately, no. If he would just get a cell phone like a normal human being, I could text him.”

  “Can you please call him?”

  “What’s your hurry?” Mom doesn’t usually micromanage my relationship with Dad, but I sense some urgency in her tone.

  She scoops a last mouthful of omelet off her plate. “He needs to know about the clinical trial. He’s still—we’re both still your legal guardians. So…”

  “So he needs to give his permission for me to participate? That’s what you’re saying?”

  Mom swallows and nods. “Exactly. And I’d talk to him about it myself, but I think—I think it’ll be better coming from you.”

  I push the rest of my breakfast away. It doesn’t taste great, all of a sudden. “Can I go to school now, please?”

  “You sure you’re up for it? I assumed you’d stay home today.”

  “I want to go. Really.”

  “If you’re sure. Get your butt up and moving, then. I’ll drop you.”

  * * *

  I feel fine all morning, but by third period, when I’m in Dahlmann’s class again, wooziness starts to settle in around me, like a storm brewing. At first it comes in little hints, but then it hits full force. My head starts clouding over, until I can’t think straight through the haze of dull pounding. My spine tingles. As we pack up our stuff after the bell, I take a few deep breaths.

  Mohit touches my arm from behind. “You all right?”

  I nod. “Fading a little.”

  My stomach is churning, too, and my mouth is starting to feel dry. He offers me his arm, and while we head to the cafeteria I lean on it, trying to be subtle about it so my classmates won’t get all whatever over me. Maybe some food will help.

  Mo gets me lunch while I wait at a table in the corner. He returns quickly with a tray: slice of pizza, Granny Smith apple, water.

  “Good?” he asks. His face is lined with anxiety.

  I force a smile. “Thanks. I’m okay.”

  “I’m going to get my own food. I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”

  I wait until he’s disappeared into the crowd before resting my head in my hands over the tray. The apple is spinning. I blink and breathe, but it’s still spinning. Then it’s like the whole tray is tilting away from me. I reach for it, swiping my hand toward the bottle of water, but all I succeed in doing is knocking the whole thing to the floor with a huge clatter.

  Now I need water. It’s all I can think about. My classmates are glancing over their shoulders at me—Cancer Girl just spilled all her food—but I don’t care. My mouth is on fire, and the bottle of water is rolling under the tables away and away and away from me.

  I move my body toward the water cooler in the corner. I think so, anyway. I think I’m moving that way. Everything feels hot and clouded. Blackness pools at the edges of my vision and then creeps in farther. Noise like radio static fills my ears. And that’s it.

  17.

  “Why didn’t you say anything at breakfast?” Mom is hovering over me. Her chipper mood from this morning has evaporated, and she’s returned easily to her stasis of motherly worry.

  “I felt fine until lunch,” I croak. My eyes sting as I force them open. As soon as the room comes into full view, my stomach churns and I grab for the trash bin next to my bed and dump my head in it. Whatever’s left in me—not a lot, mostly just sour stomach bile—comes up abruptly.

  Mohit strokes my hair and hands me a tissue.

  I take a long sip of water, letting it cool my throat, which still feels like it’s on fire. Then Mom puts her hand on my forehead for what I’m sure is the umpteenth time since she picked me up. “You feel warm.”

  “I don’t think I have the flu, Mom. You can stop worrying about my temp.”

  She grabs the empty water glass and a balled-up washcloth from next to my bed, and steps toward the door. “I’ll put some soup on. Mohit, you’re welcome to stay for dinner. Obviously.”

  “Thanks, but I’ve got an uncle in town. Pretty sure I have to be home.”

  With Mom gone, I resettle myself on the pillows and motion for Mo to get comfortable.

  “I really did feel fine to go to school.”

  He shrugs. “Eh, so you were overconfident. It’s sort of par for the course for you.”

  I whack him on the arm. “Hey, Mo?” I take a breath, hesitating for a moment. He looks at me expectantly. “Where have you been lately?”

  “When?”

  “You know when. Just in general. You’ve been MIA. You keep saying you have stuff to take care of.”

&nb
sp; He crosses his arms behind his head, and I can see the wheels turning in his brain, like he’s trying to decide how honest to be. Which is weird because, if anything, Mo normally errs on the side of being Mr. Candor.

  “What?” I prod. I’m starting to get nervous.

  “Well, I wasn’t going to say anything, but—”

  “Just spill it. You’re freaking me out.”

  “It’s nothing bad. It’s just … I was auditioning for a jazz quartet. At MIT.”

  “Like a college jazz quartet?”

  He lights up a little bit and I can see how excited he is, now that he’s not hiding this thing from me anymore.

  “It’s two undergraduates and a grad student, and they’re looking for an alto. One of them saw our spring concert last year and thought of me. Anyway, I auditioned, then had callbacks, and they want me to join.”

  “Wow, Mo. That’s amazing. Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I don’t know. At first I didn’t know if they’d offer me the spot. And also, they rehearse a lot on the weekends. And at least one evening a week as well. It’s a lot of time.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, so, it’s a lot of time away from you.”

  There it is. Time. Time we don’t have. Time we can’t waste.

  “What is time, though?” I ask, stroking an imaginary goatee. “Time is but a social construct.”

  “Time is everything. I promised you I was all in. With you. I want to be all in.”

  “And I want you to be in the MIT jazz quartet. When will you perform with them?”

  “Spring. They’re playing at the Regattabar.”

  “The Regattabar? Seriously?”

  “I mean, just opening for another group, but yeah.”

  He took me there once to see a band he liked, back when we’d just met and I’d told him I didn’t get jazz, which was the kiss of death because he dragged me from jazz show to jazz show until I surrendered. I still don’t really get jazz. But I get Mo when he’s listening to it, the way his face softens around the edges and his eyes flutter closed just three-quarters, like he’s so relaxed he can’t even hold his eyelids completely open or completely shut.

  I picture him onstage at the Regattabar, picture myself in the crowd, his eyes on me as he plays. Spring. Will I still be around in the spring?

  “You have to do the jazz quartet. So I can come see you play at the Regattabar in the spring.”

  Mo looks at me for what feels like a long time. At last, he nods. “Okay. I’ll do it, then. And you’ll come see me at the Regattabar.”

  Now I understand that we’re both going to start telling each other lies we hope will turn out to be true.

  “I want to talk to you about something,” I say.

  My head still pounds a dull drumbeat of pain. I know my body. I know this isn’t going to turn around, not this time, no matter how much magic Mom and Dr. Klein throw at me. No matter how much Mohit loves me.

  “Chloe thinks we can raise the money for cryopreservation online.”

  I watch Mo tense up. He blinks at me. “So you’re saying … what?”

  “I want to see more Regattabar gigs. I want to see you get famous. I don’t want to miss everything.”

  “And you think cryopreservation is the way to—what? Stave off death? It isn’t, Astrid. That’s not how it works. The clinical trial is a better chance at that.”

  “I’m not talking about the trial. I’m talking about … beyond the trial. We don’t know how this might work, one day. And you said you would try anything to see me again. Didn’t you mean it?”

  Mo rubs a hand over his face, then through his hair. He stares off into the middle distance beyond my head. “You know I’d keep you here forever if I had that power. Of course I would. I just worry…” He trails off.

  “What? What are you worried about? What’s the harm in taking this chance, even if the chance is so slim?”

  “I worry that you’ll put all your stock in it. That you won’t fight the real fight. The one happening in this actual lifetime.”

  I’ve never particularly liked the battle metaphor for cancer, at least not since I got cancer myself. It’s like there are two kinds of cancer patients: the fighters and the pushovers. And it’s so obvious to everyone that the pushovers are the losers, and the fighters are the ones deserving of respect. They’re the ones dying the noble deaths—because they do still die, of course; it’s not like you can actually outsmart cancer just by wishing you could. But the pushovers, the ones who say, “This is it for me, and I accept that,” they take the blame for their own mortality. As if, if we’d only hoped a little harder, begged the universe a little louder, we could’ve turned the tide of our own eventuality, but we didn’t, and so we don’t. Death is our own fault.

  “My illness has a mind of its own, Mo. I don’t own it. I don’t control it. It does what it wants. So shouldn’t I get to do what I want, too?”

  Now it’s Mohit who’s quiet for a long time. Finally, he sighs softly. “I hear you. I do.” His eyes, when he looks at me, are dark, watery oases. “So, then, what next?”

  “According to Chloe, we make a vlog.”

  “What’s a vlog?”

  18.

  The apartment is quiet on Sunday morning. I wander to the kitchen, looking for Mom, but it’s empty. There’s a note stuck to the fridge.

  A—I’m going to a birth, didn’t want to wake you. L will be at soccer and then Kieran’s house until I’m done. Hope you are feeling well. Page me if you need me. Loves.

  A birth. I wonder how much longer Mom will be willing to keep taking on-call shifts at the birthing center. Last time I was sick, they moved her to just business hours—she’d see patients at the office and follow their care, but she didn’t take on-call shifts or attend any births. Eventually, she went on short-term leave to be able to take care of me full-time. Her colleagues gave her their vacation time, days and days of it, so she could still take a paycheck. She was grateful for it, but I know how much she missed the actual birthing part of midwifery, the part she always called the pot of gold at the end of the nine-month rainbow. My mother loves helping other women have babies, says it’s the best thing in the world after having them herself. But being on call is grueling and unpredictable, and I know she won’t be able to do it forever. At least not while I’m still around.

  I feel like myself again today, just vaguely depleted, like my gas tank is lower than it used to be and, no matter what, I can’t get it back to full again. I pour myself a bowl of Special K and take in the quiet of the whole apartment while I eat. This is another one of those moments I’d like to capture in an app. Once you get really sick, people don’t leave you alone. It’s almost never quiet. In the hospital, obviously, you’re getting poked and prodded and woken up at all hours. There’s beeping and buzzing throughout the night, never quiet. But even at home, there’s always clanging in the kitchen, Mrs. Parikh or a neighbor cooking something for us, or Mom’s best friend, Thea, ordering takeout and talking to her not quite quietly enough.

  Home right now feels different. I remember when my father left, it was like this, too. It was like the tenor of the place shifted, and things got quiet and too empty, and Mom said to me one day, “We should have a space of our own, shouldn’t we?” We were in a house back then, of course, the one in the country, and that was part of the reason we moved. I mean, there was the money part, but it was also because of the sounds. I was twelve. Liam was only four. We’ve been in this apartment ever since. Only now, when it’s quiet, it’s on our own terms, a peaceful quiet, not the kind left behind when someone you love disappears.

  I wonder if Mom and Liam will move again.

  After breakfast, I get back in bed with a mug of green tea. Getting back in bed on a Sunday without feeling guilty about it is one of the rare perks of being Cancer Girl, and hell if I’m going to pass it up. I snuggle down into my comforter. For another moment, while I let the steam from the tea warm my chin and cheeks, I enjoy
the silence and wonder how Mom’s birth is going. Is the baby here yet? (Probably not, or I would’ve gotten a text.) When I was little I used to want to be a midwife just like her. I thought it was pretty fascinating, the idea that you could be there at the very moment when someone else’s life starts. Now it makes me happy that after I’m gone, once she’s gotten back to herself enough to return to work, she’ll be surrounded most days by new lives starting, instead of ending.

  I call Chloe.

  “Are you dying or something?” she mutters sleepily. “Because otherwise there’s no good reason to be calling me this early on a Sunday.”

  “It’s after ten.”

  “Don’t judge.” I hear Chloe stretching on the other side of the phone. “How are you feeling?”

  “Better today. Did everyone gossip about my impending death for the rest of the day on Friday?”

  “Only for like an hour. Lucky for you, at some point between fifth and sixth periods, Emma Lightfoot and Dylan Chung had a massive fight in the first-floor entryway and broke up in front of at least fifty very interested witnesses, so by the end of the day your nosedive for the water cooler was forgotten.”

  “Thanks, Emma and Dylan. I always knew I could count on you.” Emma Lightfoot and Dylan Chung are forever on and off again. It’s actually fairly boring, but for some reason my classmates find it an endlessly worthwhile source of entertainment.

  “Seriously though,” Chloe says. “No one was gossiping. They were just concerned.”

  The fact that my classmates might have shifted from being intrigued by my illness to being just plain worried is, for some reason, more alarming to me than the whole passing-out-in-the-cafeteria thing to begin with.

  I swallow the lump in my throat. “I want to go to Arizona. I have to see this place before I invest in my future as a science experiment. So let’s make this vlog.”