I want him to stay, I want him to never let me go, but Will has to leave to have dinner with his own family. Even though I can do it myself, I let Mom help give me a sponge bath. She cries as she wipes the dirt and whatever else is on my face. She says, “I was so scared when I got home and you weren’t here. I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you.”
But you do know, Mom. You’ve known for a long time. It’s my living you don’t know what to do with.
I tell her I’m tired and don’t want dinner. She helps me into my pajamas and tucks me into bed before Dad even gets home.
“Does it hurt?” she says, stroking my hand. I tell her yes and she gives me two Norcos. But it is not my leg that needs them.
As soon as she leaves, I take Stella’s magic box out of my sock drawer where I’ve been hiding it. I pull out the two pills I’ve been saving for an emergency, the ones I hid in my cheek after Mom gave them to me yesterday.
This is it. This is the emergency. This is the pain I need to not feel.
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sixteen.
HALFWAY THROUGH LISTENING TO STELLA’S CD, I REALIZED I was no longer solid. My body had turned into steam. It turned into the opposite of pain.
And then sleep.
Then my mom shouting, “Evie, wake up!” in the middle of my head. “Evie, we’re going to be late for your appointment with Dr. Jacobs.” Her shrill voice, scraping my skull.
And now back to zero pills. Now an anxious emptiness I don’t know how to fill. I remember the school assembly about prescription drug abuse. I am fully aware that’s what I’m doing. But after everything I’ve been through, I’m really not that worried about taking a few extra Norcos once in a while. It’s amazing the kinds of things people worry about, all their stupid ways to be careful and avoid getting hurt. Wear your seat belt! Look both ways when crossing the street! Don’t abuse prescription painkillers! But I had cancer. Cancer. Survival is hard work, and sometimes survivors need a little help dealing with all the surviving they’re doing. Some have support groups and counseling; Caleb has church and faith and Jesus; and I have my pills.
I also have a box full of weed sitting in my sock drawer, waiting for me to figure out what to do with it.
On my way to the hospital, my anxiety grows with every block we drive closer. The air is getting denser, like we’re entering some other dimension with different gravity that wants to crush the breath out of my lungs. Mom is listening to NPR, and they’re talking about a civil war somewhere in Africa, about starving orphans, refugees, mass graves. How can she listen to this all day long? How can it be background noise on her way to the grocery store or post office? How can she hum to the tune of murdered babies and genocide and the international community not wanting to get involved?
Things have been happening all over the world and I know nothing about them, and I don’t want to. Turn the radio off. Put cotton in my ears. I don’t want to hear it. All these things so much worse than what has happened to me. I know I should be grateful I am alive. I should be grateful for my mom and her car and the stupid hospital and doctors and their great medical training. I should care about the orphans. I should care about something, anything. But I don’t. I can’t. It’s caring that’s the problem in the first place. It’s caring that gets hearts broken.
As soon as we enter the hospital lobby, I can’t breathe. All those parents’ faces. All those kids. All those supposed-to-be-cheerful decorations.
Mom is ridiculous, strutting in and greeting the security guard like they’re old pals. “Hi, Al! It’s been a while.” She’s desperate to find someone she recognizes. She wants to gloat. She wants everyone to know her kid isn’t dying anymore. She’s showing me off.
“After we see Dr. Jacobs, we can go see Caleb and some of your friends,” she says. “Would you like that?” She is talking too loud. Her voice bangs around in my head and makes my brain hurt.
I shake my head because it’s impossible to speak when you’re not breathing.
She doesn’t understand. She thinks the hospital is just a building, just a place. She doesn’t understand how dangerous it is. It takes people and doesn’t give them back.
I fight the pounding in my chest on our way up the elevator. How can she not feel it? How can she act like this place didn’t almost take me, too?
Breathe.
I close my eyes and conjure Stella. I hear her voice. I feel her hand, cool on the back of my neck. We’re in the chemo dungeon, sitting side by side on those horrible beds with tubes pumping poison into our chests. And when I have to lean over the side to puke in the bucket, she is somehow next to me, even though she is as strapped in as I am. I always got sicker than her. She was always the one helping me.
“Pretend we’re getting pedicures,” she said once. “These chairs are like those ones, don’t you think? The big, cushy ones. Except without the massagers.” She always talked nonsense while I was puking, and I was always grateful. “I wonder if anyone’s ever gotten off on one of those chairs. Like what if you’re sitting there getting your nails done, and some housewife came in her panties in that exact same spot just a few minutes ago.”
“Gross,” I managed to say through my heaving.
“You know what’s gross? The contents of your stomach. What have you been eating?”
I try to imagine she’s with me in the elevator. She’s with me in the exam room while Nurse Moskowitz draws my blood. She pretends to knock her hand while she’s inserting the needle into my portacath. “Oops,” she says. “Did that hurt? Hope we didn’t puncture a lung.”
She stands behind Dr. Jacobs doing obscene things as he asks me his questions. “How are you feeling?” he says.
“Okay,” I say. A lie. There’s no way I can even begin to truthfully answer that question in a way he can understand.
“How is the pain?” he says.
“Still pretty bad,” I say. Also a lie. But I know how these things work. As soon as I say the pain’s gone, he takes away my pills.
He doesn’t like that answer. “It should be getting much better,” he says. “You shouldn’t need the Norco for much longer. Ibuprofen should really be enough.” Be he’s only a doctor; he doesn’t know anything about pain. “You only have two more refills, right?” he says.
“I don’t know. Mom is the one keeping the bottle.”
“Yes,” Mom chimes in. “The bottle says two more refills.” She seems confused. This is nothing like the conversations she’s used to having about me.
“Evie,” Dr. Jacobs says. “How many have you been taking per day?”
“I don’t know. Probably around six or eight.” I don’t tell him sometimes I save pills up so I can take three or four at once.
“That seems like kind of a lot.”
“The prescription says up to twelve a day.”
“That’s for severe pain. You shouldn’t be having severe pain anymore.” He’s looking at me the way he looked at Stella all the time, with his eyebrows raised and his chin folded against his neck, looking over his glasses like he knows I’m hiding something from him. “Can you rate your pain for me on a scale of one to ten?” he says.
“When? Right now? I’m not in any pain because I just took a pill before we left.” I can hear him thinking, Smart-ass.
“What about when you ask your mom for a pill? What is it then?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a three or four? I thought I was supposed to stay ahead of the pain. That’s what you always said before. So I take a pill before it hurts too bad.”
“That was before. You shouldn’t be having anywhere near as much pain as you were having before.”
I shrug my shoulders in my best angsty-teen impression. I imagine Stella behind him, giving me the thumbs-up.
“I want you to taper off the pills so you’re off of them by the time we check in ne
xt month, okay?” he says. “Do you think you can do that?”
“Sure. Okay.”
“Nurse Moskowitz will get you a handout about how best to do that. Mrs. Whinsett, can you help Evie keep track of how much she’s taking?”
“Of course,” she says, because she knows that’s the right answer, but I can tell she doesn’t understand what Dr. Jacobs is so worried about. This doesn’t have anything to do with cancer.
“Now I bet you want to say hi to Caleb,” he says. “I think he’s down in the teen lounge with Dan.”
My throat closes up and I can’t breathe again. My heart pounds fast in my chest. It pounds so hard I can hear it. It pounds so fast it will jump out of me. I shake my head. That’s all I can do.
“I’m sure he’d love the surprise,” Dr. Jacobs says. “He’s been pretty down lately.”
Something inside me cracks a little. A fissure threatens to spread and break me into pieces. But somehow I manage to say no. I manage to say I’m not feeling well and want to go home.
The thought of seeing Caleb, even just texting him, makes my throat close up. As Dr. Jacobs and Moskowitz leave the exam room, a train car full of history comes barreling toward me, heavy and reckless with things I want to forget.
“All right,” Mom sighs, turning away from me to grab her purse. “Are you ready to go, then?” But when she turns back, I’m leaning forward with my head between my knees. I’m sucking in air but none of it is getting to my lungs. I can’t see. I can’t feel anything except the absence of breath. I have to get out of here. I’ll die if I don’t.
“Evie!” Mom says, her hands instantly on my back. She instinctively starts rubbing the way she’s always done when I’m sick, ever since I was a little girl with the flu. The tightness in my chest releases, just a little. I try to stand up, but I’m too dizzy. “I’ll go get Dr. Jacobs,” she says, turning toward the door.
I grab her arm. “No,” I say. “Please, Mom. He’ll make it worse.”
She sits down next to me on the exam table and continues to rub my back. “Oh, honey,” she says. “You’re having a panic attack. Just breathe.”
“I’m trying!” I am sobbing now. I am sucking in huge gulps of air that are going nowhere.
“Come on, count with me. In—one, two, three, four. Out—one, two, three, four.”
I do what she says. Over and over until the world becomes solid again. Her hand smooths a circle on my back. I let her comfort me. I let her remind me how to breathe. When my panic finally subsides, she collects me in her arms. We sit like that for a while, rocking. Maybe I can let myself be held. Just this once. Maybe it’s okay to be weak, but only sometimes.
I keep my head down as we walk out of the hospital and back to the car. Luckily, we don’t run into anyone I know. The farther away we get, the better I can breathe. Mom tries to talk to me on the car ride home, but she gives up when it’s clear that I am only capable of silence.
All I want when we get home is to be alone, but I’m not even allowed to lock the bathroom door when I take a shower. “In case something happens,” Mom says. In case I fall. Her fear, ruling me.
When I remove my brace, my leg is shriveled and gross, white and dry and scaly, like some kind of albino reptile. I have special, gentle, fragrance-free soap. I have instructions to be careful. I have a big jagged hole in my leg, the flesh at the incision still purple and raw and weeping, laced together with black stitches. Inches away on my hip is the faded smaller scar from my first surgery to remove the sarcoma when it was still a little dainty thing, before it spread. I am spotted with other scars from laparoscopic procedures and biopsies. I have been cut apart and stitched back up. I am Frankenstein’s monster.
I wash gently like I’ve been instructed. My skin is tender everywhere, not just at the incision. There is an army of microscopic cells working overtime to repair this damage, to give me back my leg, to make all of this pain and history go away. Then I’m supposed to walk again like nothing happened, like every other normal girl. And I’m supposed to do things normal girls do, like go to school, drive a car, eat dinner with my parents, fight with my sister, maybe even have sex with my boyfriend one of these days. But all of it seems so stupid. The cells are wasting their time. What’s the point to all their hard work if all I’m going to do is take a math quiz in a few days, or go to the movies, or take the garbage out, or ride a bike, or babysit, or maybe get a job someday making a big corporation richer? What’s the point of any of it?
Stella would know. She would know exactly what to say to make me not feel so lost and crazy.
I have to find out where Mom is hiding my pills.
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seventeen.
“ARE YOU NERVOUS?” KASEY SAYS.
“A little.” I’m in the passenger’s seat of her car, my crutches in the backseat, my gimpy leg stretched out in its brace, on my way to my first day of school in almost six months.
“Everyone is going to be so excited to see you,” she says.
“I’m just excited to get away from my mom.”
“Oh, come on, she’s just happy to have you home. She likes taking care of you.”
“She needs a better hobby.”
Kasey’s laugh is too loud for such a lame joke.
A minefield of hugs is waiting for me at school. Hugs everywhere. Open arms and tearful eyes around every corner. I smell so much body odor, so much laundry detergent and deodorant and cheap perfume. By the time I get in the door, I am already sneezing from the artificial fragrances.
“How are you?” they say. (Depressed.)
“How are you feeling?” (Shitty.)
“You look great.” (Liar.)
“We missed you so much.” (Oh, really? Then why didn’t you visit me in the hospital?)
But of course I don’t say any of these things. I smile and let them hug me.
Am I really back? My body’s here, but I don’t feel connected to it. My mind is somewhere else, a place where time stopped. What was the last class I went to? What was the last homework I turned in? What is my locker combination? Everything feels surreal, like the world is going on without me, and I’m a ghost, invisible. Everyone’s smiling, but they look right through me.
Will is waiting at my locker with a single red rose, and despite my growing disdain of his flower choice, I warm a little at the sight of his big, handsome grin. He kisses me on the cheek, takes my bag from Kasey, and hoists it over his shoulder with a pleased grin. Part of me is grateful, proud to still be the one on his arm. But part of me wishes I didn’t need his help. Part of me wants to say I can carry my bag by myself.
First period is European History. We’re somewhere in the Reformation now, but the last thing I remember is the beginning of the Dark Ages. My teacher is weepy and interrupts herself in the middle of her lecture to tell me to take all the time I need to get back in the swing of things, to come see her for help anytime. She says this in front of everyone while they all stare at me. Maybe she knew someone who had cancer. Maybe someone she loved died from the same thing I had. That is the only excuse for her behavior.
The whole cafeteria claps when I enter at lunchtime, and I want to die.
I probably shouldn’t say that.
I sit between Kasey and Will. The same old people are at the lunch table as were here six months ago, plus a freshman girl who managed to work her way up, and minus Alex Monroe who moved to the East Coast last month. “What else is new?” I say, and everyone kind of looks at each other and shrugs.
“Alison and Justin broke up,” someone offers.
“Oliver Kent got expelled for selling weed.”
“Missy Chang almost got on Teen Jeopardy!.”
“Keyshawn Duncan came out.”
“The theme for this year’s prom is ‘A Night in Paris.’”
I can’t believe I came back from the d
ead for this.
Will has baseball practice after school and Kasey has cheer. She invites me to come along and watch, but that’s just too depressing.
My exciting after-school activity is riding a stationary bike or hanging out in a lukewarm swimming pool with Sandy the physical therapist. She says she’s amazed at how fast I’m progressing. She calls it a miracle. My parents call it a miracle. Everyone throws the word around like it explains everything: a miracle’s doing all the work, not me. They don’t say anything about how I stay long after my physical therapy appointments are over to keep working, how I go to the pool even when I don’t have appointments, how I come home exhausted and sore and strong, how I’m down to one crutch weeks before expected. They think I’m tired in the evening because of weakness. Mom puts her hand on my forehead to check my temperature. Dad says maybe I should rest after school instead. But I spent the whole past year resting. I am done with rest.
In the water, I am weightless. Nothing hurts. I am not clumsy. I don’t need crutches. I can do flips like I used to, but now they’re in slow motion—dreamy, graceful. In the water, I am not broken and I do not need anyone’s help.
But then I return to reality. I eat dinner with my family and listen to Jenica complain. “Evie tries to get herself killed hobbling around the neighborhood and you practically throw her a party,” she whines. “I get an almost perfect score on the SATs and no one says anything.” Even two weeks later, she’s still harping on my not getting punished for that. At least she doesn’t paint a smile on her face and pretend everything’s perfect like Will and Kasey and everyone else I know.
This is my life now: Conversations stop when I enter rooms. Words are replaced by empty smiles, as if I am too fragile to be included, as if I need to be protected. People talk to me like I’m a child. I’m getting stronger, but no one sees it. When I make jokes, people look at me like I’m speaking a different language. Apparently dying girls aren’t supposed to be funny. And apparently nobody got the memo that I’m not dying anymore.