Fear of Missing Out

by Kate McGovern

  “I wanted to see the view from up here,” I say. “I want to see as many views as I can.”

  I feel his body rise and fall with his breath. “I know.”

  “Smile!” Chloe’s pointing her phone at us. Wrapped against his chest, I can feel Mo smiling, which makes me smile, too. But the buzzing in my head is louder than ever, and the numbness creeping through my back and legs says something isn’t right, in a new way.

  “I just want to say this one thing, and then I’ll shut up,” Mohit says.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. Here’s what scares me. What scares me is that you’ll take Dr. Fitzspelt’s offer, and you’ll want to charge ahead with it, even though the clinical trial is still a real possibility. And you’ll just give in to the tumor.” When he finally meets my eyes, he looks more hurt than mad. I put a hand to his cheek, which he hasn’t shaved since we left Boston. The dark stubble has grown into almost a beard in the few days we’ve been gone.

  “The trial won’t work.”

  “You don’t know that. You don’t.”

  “It will wreck me to try.”

  “Again, you don’t know that.”

  I sigh. There’s nothing I can say to convince him of what I know in my bones, which is that no matter what new treatment gets thrown my way, my body is ready to be finished.

  “Mo, I just want to do this my way.”

  “What does that mean, though?”

  “It means that whatever I decide, I want to decide. And I want you to be okay with it.”

  He looks out over the landscape in front of us. I’m used to waiting through Mohit’s thinking silences. But as the quiet moments tick by, this starts to feel like a long silence, even for him.

  Finally, he lets out a deep, long exhale. “I love you, Astrid Ayeroff. I’m afraid of my life without you.” He squeezes me tighter to his chest. “But we’ve come this far. Whatever you choose now, I have to be okay with it.”

  I blink away tears. “I love you, Mohit Parikh. I’m sorry for leaving you. And thank you.”

  42.

  And then, just like that.

  Everything.

  Goes.

  Black.

  43.

  Beep.

  Ping.

  Chirp.

  Beep.

  Ping.

  Chirp.

  44.

  My throat is coated in sandpaper. My eyelids are weighed down with magnets.

  That’s how it feels to wake up here.

  Foreign, and familiar.

  45.

  “Hi, baby. Hi, my love. Are you awake?”

  My mother, soft and sleepy, gradually comes into focus in my field of vision. She looks hazy around the edges, between my blurred eyesight and her mussed hair, the sleep-encrusted corners of her eyes.

  “Hi.”

  “Here,” she says, putting a straw to my lips. The water feels good. I suck down as much as I can.

  “How long have I been … whatever this is?”

  “It’s been a week, love. You had a seizure, and then they put you in an induced coma for the first three days. Since then you’ve been in and out. You’re fine now.”

  Fine.

  Fine.

  The word sounds laughable in my head, like it’s not even a real word.

  As the room comes into view around me, I see the usual signs of “fine”: the recliner with faux-leather cushions where my mother has probably been sleeping for days. The dry-erase board with drawings of faces from happy to sad—“How’s your pain on a scale of one to ten?” The IVs embedded in the backs of my hands, connecting me to hanging bags of fluids. The flat-screen television, news on a loop, muted. The bathroom door cracked open. The beeping monitor, the flashing green numbers indicating my heart rate, my oxygen levels—numbers that always define us but go unnoticed until they demand attention.

  But the view out the window is unfamiliar. There’s an Applebee’s sign rising up over a highway. Beyond that, red rolling hills. It makes me feel a touch Dorothy-ish, but without the yappy dog, waking up in a landscape I don’t recognize.

  Mom must see me looking.

  “We’re still in Arizona, babe.”

  “Where are…” I want to ask more questions, but my mouth won’t cooperate.

  “They went home, my love. I’m sorry. School and everything.”

  I try to imagine Chloe and Mohit driving the Tomato back east without me. The long stretches of silence, filled by the radio. I wonder what they listened to: Did Mohit let Chloe play Top 40 the whole way just to avoid a fight? They probably didn’t stop at any more of the sights in The Top 50 Roadside Attractions. Though I almost like to imagine that they did, just the two of them. My two favorites, taking in the world’s largest ball of twine together.

  “You’ll be out of here soon, once you’re cleared to fly,” Mom says. “Okay?”

  “Out of here soon” means home to Dr. Klein’s office, to my friendly neighborhood hospital. I know that once the seizures start, they generally don’t end. It probably means my cancer has grown, taken its own road trip to visit my better-functioning organs. Like I knew it would. I don’t feel panicked, though. Instead, I feel something more like a sense of relief. Like something that seemed really complicated for a long time is suddenly made clear.

  Mom lays her palm on my cheek. Her warm hand on my skin relaxes my body. My mother is here. For a moment, I really am fine.

  “Mom?” My voice is barely above a squeak as my vocal cords wake up after a week of silence.

  “Yes, my love?” She leans closer to me. “Don’t strain your voice, Astrid.”

  “Mom. I don’t want this anymore.”

  A smile flashes across her face for an instant, more like an involuntarily impulse than an indication of happiness. “What’s ‘this,’ my love?”

  “Hospitals. Chemo. The trial. I don’t want any more stuff. I want to go home.”

  Her face is immobile for a moment. Then she stands up abruptly, flustered, and feels my forehead. “I think your fluids are running low. I’ll get the nurse.”

  46.

  I can’t get out of bed on my own, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t need to. All I need is my phone and the password to the hospital’s wifi.

  When my mother has gone for lunch and the nurse has just been in to take my vitals and re-up my pain meds, I figure I have a few minutes to myself—rare, in a hospital. I take out my phone and flip the lens to face myself.

  Then, when I’m done, I go to YouTube, sign in as Chloe, and upload the new video.

  47.

  I want to die. I mean, I don’t want to die. I want to live, actually, but I don’t have that choice in front of me. I do have a choice about dying. I want to do it my way.

  I’m sure you know by now, since you’ve been watching these videos, that I have a high-grade astrocytoma. I’m in the hospital at the moment because I had a pretty bad seizure while I was on my way back from visiting the American Institute for Cryonics Research. I don’t know how much longer I’ll live. But I do know that it won’t be long enough not to miss out on all the things I don’t want to miss.

  I thought I wanted to cryopreserve myself after my death, so maybe I wouldn’t have to miss everything. You know that. That’s why you’re watching. Maybe you even gave me money to help me do that, and I really appreciate it. But one thing I realized when I visited the institute is that I’m going to miss things, whether I wake up forty years from now or not. Missing things is kind of inevitable.

  I guess that probably sounds obvious. The thing is, researching cryopreservation offered me something to do about dying. Cancer when you’re sixteen feels like a joke. It’s not like a real thing you can wrap your head around. And you can do all the treatments they throw at you, but at the end of the day cancer does what cancer wants. Dr. Fitzspelt offered me a choice—a way to have a say in the end of my life—when no one else was offering me one. And that’s really all I want.

  Now that I’m back here in
this hospital bed, I remember what all this is like. Not that you forget, really, but it sort of loses its sharpness when you’ve been in basically pretty good shape again for a while. Now I remember everything I don’t want the rest of my life to be. I don’t want to be in doctors’ offices. I don’t want to be in clinical trials. But I don’t want to freeze my body either. I don’t want strangers in lab coats hanging around, prodding me, waiting for me to kick it. I don’t want to feel like I’m dying on someone else’s clock. I just want to die—on my terms, in my time.

  So I’m choosing now to treat my pain only. They can do that, you know—just make you comfortable, make your pain manageable without trying to fix things that won’t be fixed. And when I’m near the end, I plan to stop eating and drinking to make the process go faster, so I don’t suffer. And so my family doesn’t suffer, any more than they have to. I intend to write an advance directive and share it with my parents, and I’m going to trust them to help me execute it.

  That’s what I want. The money you’ve donated will go to pediatric brain cancer research, by the way. I want to be part of the future of science, and that’s a better way to do it. Cryopreservation is a long shot, but these treatment advances are real. Maybe I’ll have to miss everything, but some other kid won’t. So don’t worry—I’m not just going to spend it, like, buying fancy shit in my last few months alive. Anyway, thanks for listening.

  Uh, over and out.

  48.

  Sunlight bounces off a tiny crystal pendant someone affixed to the window, sending a smattering of rainbows across the wall. Under normal circumstances, I would’ve complained about someone hanging a crystal in my room, but I can’t muster the energy to be snarky. And rainbows are pretty.

  I text Mo with a link to the new video.

  Okay?

  I send a similar message to Chloe, since I know she’ll see the video as soon as she checks our vlog channel.

  A few minutes go by, with nothing. Then my phone buzzes.

  It’s a sad-face emoji from Mo. He uses the man emoji with light brown skin and dark hair, which always makes me laugh because the hair is way too short for him and it’s impossible to imagine him looking so clean-cut in real life. Today, it makes tears well up in my eyes. It’s absurd, an emoji from my boyfriend in response to the news that I’ve posted my intent to die to the internet. Absurd, but also kind of perfect.

  Then my phone buzzes again. Actual words this time.

  Okay. Like I promised.

  I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.

  49.

  You know how, thanks to the internet, people can go from being mostly just normal to being Really Kind of a Big Deal overnight? People on reality television and whatnot. I always sort of wondered if they felt like they’d gone down a rabbit hole—if they woke up one morning and read near-fiction about themselves online and thought, “The world is not as I thought it was.”

  Turns out, yeah. That’s pretty much how it is.

  When I wake up the next morning, my latest video—my last video, presumably—has been shared on Reddit. Once it’s on Reddit, it’s off and running, and I can’t take it back.

  So this kid was collecting money to save her life, and now she wants to die? Do we think she even has cancer? Seems like a sham to me.

  I donated for Astrid’s future resurrection, not her suicide. Where is my money?

  Is there a money-back guarantee on this nutjob?

  Where r her parents?

  What did you do? Chloe texts. Why didn’t you discuss this with me first?

  I call her. “It was an impulse. I tried to talk to my mom, and it didn’t go well.”

  On the other end of the phone, I hear Chloe typing something. Multitasking. “And this was your response?”

  “I guess.”

  She clears her throat. “Well. If you wanted to call attention to your cause, it’s working.”

  Is that what I wanted to do? I don’t even know what “my cause” is. The vlog started as a way to raise some money. Granted, it was an uncomfortable way to raise money, but as Chloe has pointed out multiple times, asking for help on the internet is pretty standard these days. She showed me crowdfunding pages set up to send college students abroad, to buy groceries, to make movies, to bury newborns who never made it home. But gradually, my videos had started to feel like something different, like a way to tell secrets into the void, to sort out how I was feeling, out loud. I almost forgot the audience was even there.

  I click through more of the comments, which grow in number every time I refresh the page.

  Cancer kid is pretty cute tho. I’d do her before she kicks it.

  Or after. LOL.

  I close the page.

  “Astrid?” Chloe’s still on the phone. “You want me to take this down? You know it won’t really go away, though, even if I do, right?”

  I shake my head but then realize she can’t see me over the phone. “It’s okay. Leave it.”

  50.

  “Knock knock? Can I come in?” Dad says, poking his head into the room.

  I put my phone aside and try to erase the voices of the internet-commenting public from my head. “Hey, Dad.”

  I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but my father got to the hospital first, before Mom, since he had the geographic advantage. He must’ve rented a car, though it wouldn’t entirely surprise me if he had biked here all the way from the Ranch.

  “Good to see you awake, my girl. You scared us.”

  “Sorry.” Us. It’s a strange word, coming from him. I know he means him and Mom, even though they’re not a unit anymore.

  Dad hovers awkwardly. He looks around and catches a glimpse of the twinkling rainbows bouncing off the floor and walls. “Nice, huh?”

  “Um, sure.”

  “The crystal’s from Suzanne. She sent it with me—she wanted you to have a little joy in here.”

  Go figure. “Tell her thanks from me.”

  “I will. Look, I wanted to tell you the good news, now that you’re in better shape. You have a sister, as of three days ago. Alice.”

  A sister, born while I was in the darkness of a coma. “Alice Ayeroff,” I say, rolling her name around in my mouth.

  “Turner-Ayeroff, hyphenated, actually. But yes. Do you want to see a picture?” He takes a photo from his pocket—a real, hard-copy photograph; I wonder where you can even get one printed near the Ranch—and offers it gently. “That was the day she was born.”

  She’s a tiny, pink thing, swaddled in white muslin, barely human, just a squishy face with crystalline gray-blue eyes. She looks a lot like I did in my baby pictures.

  “She’s beautiful.”

  He nods. “She looks like you.”

  “You remember what I looked like?”

  Dad’s face contorts, and for a split second I see that I’ve hurt him. “Astrid, of course I do.”

  He’s caused me pain over the years, first by leaving, then by blaming me for my own illness. But it doesn’t feel good to hurt him back.

  I hand him the photo. “Congrats, Dad. I’m happy for you both. All three of you.” And I am, I think.

  “Thank you.” He looks at the picture for another moment, his face soft and affectionate. Then he puts it back in his shirt pocket hastily, as though he doesn’t want to appear too focused on his new, healthy daughter while sitting here with his old, sick one. “So you visited the facility. What did you think of it? Do you remember much?”

  I remember the rows of freezers, the strange fact of bodies encased in cold, hovering between life and death. Dr. Fitzspelt’s offer to test his newest hypothesis on me. The possibility of choosing how and when I die. I can’t even begin to describe it to my father. It’s really the ultimate “you had to be there.”

  “Is Mom around?” I ask, not answering his question. I need to have a conversation with both of my parents, and since there isn’t going to be a particularly good time to have it, I settle for now.

  Dad looks rel
ieved that I’ve offered him something to do. “I think so. You want me to go find her?” He hurries out into the hall.

  When my parents appear as a pair in the doorway a moment later, though, Mom’s face is completely devoid of color. She’s holding her phone in her hand.

  “Astrid.” Her voice is dry and flat, almost shaking. “What did you do?”

  There’s a long moment in which the room—the whole world—feels at a standstill.

  “A reporter just called me,” Mom says. “From BuzzFeed? To ask for a comment on why I’m letting my child choose to hasten her own death. Am I letting my child hasten her own death, Astrid? Because that’s news to me.”

  Mom’s not crying. She’s not even yelling. Her body language is screaming, but her voice holds steady. I can tell she’s gone way beyond the normal range of angry, sad, scared. She’s everything, all at once, and nothing at all.

  “How could you do this?” She’s speaking barely above a whisper now, full of hurt and rage and grief. The words barely escape her throat.

  I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t to get scooped by BuzzFeed. I don’t know what to say. Dad meanders to the corner and looks out the window at the Applebee’s sign.

  “Let me say that again.” Mom gets louder. “How. Could. You.”

  “I tried to talk to you,” I say. “But you wouldn’t listen. I had to make it public. To make it real.”

  Suddenly, it’s like my mother has woken up from a dream. She sends the facial-expression-equivalent of a torpedo right through my skull. “To make it real? What does that even mean, Astrid? This is your actual life we’re talking about here, not some Facebook meme.”

  I’m so surprised by Mom’s use of the word “meme” that I momentarily forget what we’re really talking about.

  “Maxine, maybe we should talk about this privately,” Dad says coolly, cutting in.

  “Why? It’s my life,” I say. “Why can’t you discuss it with me?”

  “Astrid!” My mother throws her phone on the bed. It bounces once, then careens off the other side and onto the floor with a clatter that’s probably a cracked screen. No one moves to pick it up. “You have got to be kidding me right now! Do you hear what you’re saying? Really hear yourself? Look at you right now. You’re talking to us. You’re breathing. You’re eating. You’re not in pain. You have life left in you! You’re just going to give up on the trial? And you told the YouTube-viewing public that without any discussion? With Dr. Klein? With your mother? Do I get no say here?” Tears pour from her eyes now. “You are still alive!”