“So . . .” I dig into the waistband of my pants to pull out the folded schedule of the day’s events. “Are any of these actually decent? I was thinking about the meditation one.”
Layla looks it over. “If we’re lucky, the watercolor lady might smoke a joint before she comes in and we can try to get a contact high off her hair. She thinks we like her a lot because we invade her personal space.”
“I think I’ll pass on getting high.”
“The Humane Society trips seem cool but I’m allergic, so I can’t go.” Her eyes shift to me, maybe hoping that if she’s out then I am too.
“What about the books thing?” I ask.
She shrugs. “It’s okay. Mostly a lot of people bring stuff that’s got to do with somebody dying and talk about how they can relate. I’d rather read about people falling into crazy love, something I don’t know the first thing about.”
She lets the sentence fade out, eyes still searching me. “You ever been in love?”
I let a little smile answer for me, no words necessary.
“So . . . the meditation?” I say.
Layla nods at me. “Meditation it is. You get breakfast yet?”
And suddenly I have a friend.
Meditation with Melody! turns out to be guided by a cassette tape player, not someone actually named Melody and certainly nothing resembling real music. Layla takes a mat next to mine, and we lie side by side, staring at the tiled ceiling. Another girl joins us, the one who Nadine had been attempting to teach chess. She takes a mat to the right and promptly goes to sleep. A nurse comes in and starts the tape, dimming the lights and clicking the door quietly shut behind her.
Something like a pan flute begins, tripping over a few bars to be joined by a soft male voice that encourages us to picture a safe, quiet place in our minds. Over by the wall, the girl who joined us lets out a long, protracted fart.
“Oh my Lord, Josephine,” Layla says, but the other girl doesn’t respond.
The voice from the cassette player urges us to concentrate on a calm memory, but my entire focus is on the fact that the pan flute in the background wasn’t tuned properly. It’s soon joined by the sound of running water.
“Great. Now I’ve got to pee,” Layla says, and I turn to look at her. “I don’t think I can meditate myself out of peeing.”
“You’re not into this at all, are you?” I ask her.
She sits up, her LVAD cord slipping out from under her shirt. “Nope, but you seemed interested so I thought I’d give it a shot.”
“I thought it would be better,” I admit. “Like with real music.”
“You into music?”
“It’s my whole life,” I tell her, my fingers going to the edge of the mat where some stuffing has poked through. “Used to be, anyway. I played the clarinet.”
“So what happened to your face?” Layla asks, waving away my startled look. “The other girls have a dessert bet going and if I can get the real info and an extra sugar cookie out of the deal, I’ll split the cookie with you.”
“My sister threw me out a window,” I tell her. “And you can keep the cookie.”
Layla lets out a whistle. One that starts high and ends low, like a bomb falling. “Damn girl. Is she your stepsister, half sister?”
I shake my head. “Twin.”
“No shit.” Layla crosses her arms, resting her head on them. “Is she in juvy now?”
I pick at the hole at the edge of my mat where the seams have come apart, digging my index finger inside as I wonder how much to tell her. “I don’t really like to talk about it.”
“Ohhhhhh . . . ,” Layla says, her voice making the same high pitch to low that her whistle had earlier. “She dead?”
“Why would you think that?” I ask.
“Honestly?” She cocks her head to the side like the question is more for herself than me. “Josephine read your visitor’s name badge the other day and we googled her. Didn’t take a genius to put together that a mental health worker coming to talk to a girl who was Humpty-Dumptied back together again means you’ve got issues. That’s still a doozy of an issue though, I’ll give you that.”
“My sister’s not dead,” I say, the warm pulse in my wrist agreeing.
Layla lowers herself back down to the mat, throws an arm across her eyes. “What’s her name?”
I pull my finger out of the mat and blow away some of the stuffing that snagged on my jagged nail. I lay back down next to Layla as the meditation tape switches over to the tide and seagulls, interrupted occasionally by Josephine’s snores. I swear I can feel the hollow bit in the mat under my shoulder blade where I pulled stuffing out.
“Shanna,” I tell her, thinking of darkness and sounds my throat can’t possibly have ever made, but my ears miss hearing.
“So you’ve definitely been in love before,” Layla says, and I start, wondering how she followed my thoughts.
I look over at her and she shrugs. “It’s all over you. Moony looks, vacant stares. You might be in a safe place right now, but I bet it’s not quiet.”
I laugh, causing Josephine to roll over in her sleep, arms covering her ears.
“Sure,” I admit. “I’m probably in love.”
“Nope. It’s you are or you aren’t,” Layla insists. “My mom always says you just know, and you can’t probably know something. You know it or you don’t.”
I think of all my lists of things I know, and things I don’t know. I don’t have a list for maybes, so Layla could have a point.
“Then how do you know?” I ask.
“According to books I have to tear the covers off of, or according to my own personal experience?” Layla asks. “Because I can tell you anything you want to know about the first. The second . . . guess I need a working heart first.”
“Why’s that?”
“Being near death scares them off.”
I giggle, my noise blending in with the pan flute. I do her the favor of not arguing with her about being near death. I could probably pick Layla up and throw her, and I’m not exactly the picture of health myself.
“So you know by”—Layla takes a deep breath, and closes her eyes—“feeling a little empty if you’re apart more than a day or two, like half your self wandered off without permission. By needing them closer even when they’re right inside you, by knowing the smell of their skin and being able to sort it out from your own, by sharing a glance and saying the world, by feeling like nobody will ever know you like they do, but being a little sad that there’s nothing more you can share. Because in the end it’s just you who has to be enough.”
She opens her eyes and smiles at me, slow and quiet, and I think she’s either read all the romance books in the world or there’s someone out there she needs to say something to before she dies. Either way, she’s put words to something I couldn’t, no matter how many lists I made. And maybe I need to add something to my last column of things I know, and that is that I messed up everything.
Heath didn’t want me by his side; he wanted whoever the girl with the highest GPA was, something to balance his own with. He wanted a girl who wanted the same things he did—to look like the best, the brightest, a clean, shining example of a good teen.
Isaac didn’t care about that. He wanted me, actually me, with the hard edges and all. He wanted it enough to scratch our names in rock next to pictures that had lasted a thousand years. And our names probably would too, for the people after us to read. And the people after them. Isaac and Sasha, next to each other. Forever. It looks like that’s the one bit of me that is going to be around for a while; all the supposedly good things I’ve tried to do are captured on a grade card for a girl who won’t make it to college, while a bad thing a boy did for me is going to say I existed beside him.
And I tried to erase it.
Layla is still watching me, waiting for an answer.
“Yeah,” I finally say. “I think I am in love.”
The words feel heavy, like a deep B flat. They’re pow
erful and all-encompassing, demanding my throat close up, threatening to make me cry. They matter more than a lot of things, I realize now. More than the bloodred As on my papers or a weighted GPA or Sasha Stone always being number one.
I smile again, thinking of Isaac with his middle finger up in the air, which leads to thoughts of his hands, and my mind wanders further. Future Sasha Stone and all her plans have been derailed, a train gone off the track as surely as if it tried to use the trestle bridge and collapsed into a burning heap of twisted metal at the bottom of the ravine. And if Sasha Stone doesn’t need to worry about being rewarded for anything, maybe Shanna Stone should have her way, in the little time we have left.
My breath catches in my constricted throat, a small sob emerging. Layla reaches over to squeeze my hand in the dim light, and I finally do relax, sliding down into meditation not to the sound of the sea breeze, but the quiet clicking of her mechanically pumping heart.
Will the LVAD hurt you?
Don’t k[no]w
Are you scared?
Not s(ur)e.
twenty-three
“Holy shit balls, dude.”
Brooke’s voice is loud in the cardiac center common room, like it could knock over furniture. Josephine looks up from her laptop, Nadine from a game of solitaire. Layla jumps, almost knocking over her bottle of nail polish. I’m on my feet in a second, highly aware that my friend from the outside is too alive, too vibrant for them. Already the room seems small with Brooke in it, her ponytail thick and healthy, her legs strong and sure underneath her.
“Hey.” I grab her by the elbow and steer her down the hall toward my room.
“I mean, your face,” Brooke keeps going. “Dog turds on a stick. I thought I was ready for it, but . . .”
“Thanks a lot,” I tell her.
“Can I touch your stitches?” she asks as I close my door behind her. “I’ll wash my hands first.”
“Sure,” I tell her. “As long as you brought it.”
Brooke flops onto my bed, her face suddenly serious. “Yeah, we’ve gotta talk about that.”
I cross my arms. “What? It didn’t work?”
Mom and Dad still have me on a no-phone diet, and they’re stricter than even the nurses with our individual nutrition plans. But Brooke’s old cell was the same model as mine, and she should’ve been able to power it up, call an activation line, punch in my number and passcode and voilà—my phone is restored to me without parental assistance or permission.
“It worked fine,” Brooke says, reaching into her pocket to pull it out.
“So what do we need to talk about?”
She switches it back and forth in her hands before answering me, her teeth clamping on her bottom lip. “I read your texts.”
I sit down on Amanda’s rolling chair, hard enough to send it back into the wall. “You did what?”
“I thought it might be smart, after everything that happened,” she says. “I didn’t know if there might be anything on here that would . . . upset you.”
“You didn’t pause to consider that maybe you reading my texts might be equally upsetting?”
“Sasha . . .” Brooke lets my name out in a sigh, like she’s giving something up. “I saw. When you went out the window. Lilly and I both, we . . . we saw you reading a text and then you—”
“And then I jumped out the window,” I interrupt. “I remember. I also remember that you called me a bitch.”
Brooke picks at the case on the phone, an older one of hers that she had made. Me, Brooke, and Lilly at band camp sophomore year, arms around one another, sweaty tank tops stuck to our skin in patches.
“I’m sorry about that,” she finally says. “But you know what? You kind of are a bitch, dude. But I don’t care, because you’re also smart and funny, and kind of a musical genius. So whatever. If you’re a little bit of a bitch too, then fine, I’ll take you that way. Because honestly the person you’re the biggest bitch to is yourself, Sasha Stone.
“You’ve always pushed yourself to your limits and never cut yourself any slack. I think you demand perfection out of yourself and everyone around you, and sometimes we fail you, and sometimes you fail yourself. And I think you hate that more than anything.”
We sit quietly together for a minute, the clock ticking off our breaths. Mine are coming in short bursts, analyzing the portrait of the person Brooke just painted for me. This is how I look to her. This is what a bitch is. Maybe being one isn’t such a bad thing after all.
Brooke powers on the phone, finally looking up at me.
“So you and Isaac Harver, huh?”
I feel a tick in my chest, the upbeat of a tempo change. “Did he text me?”
“Um, like a hundred times,” she says, thumbing through my messages.
“And you read them?” I feel a flush rising, embarrassment beating out anger.
“Yep,” Brooke says. “The newer ones aren’t all that interesting. But some of the old ones . . . I mean, wow. Who needs YouTube?”
“All right, enough,” I say, making a swipe for the phone. Brooke is quicker, pulling it out of reach.
“I’ll give this to you, but only if you promise me it’s not going to get you hurt again. You’re still my friend, and I got enough on my conscience as it is.”
I lick my lips, eyes on the phone. “I promise.”
“Okay.” She hands it to me, and I jam it into my waistband, the plastic case absorbing my body heat in seconds.
“So your mom said you’re having some kind of surgery in a couple of days?”
“Yeah. It’s called an LVAD. You should google it, right up your alley. I’ll have a cord coming out of my belly. My friend Layla out in the lobby, she’s got one.”
Brooke’s eyes go to my door, all calculation. “Do you think she’ll let me see it?”
“We can ask,” I say, twisting the knob.
“Listen.” Brooke stops me. “There’s something I want to tell you before you hear it from anyone else, and I don’t know how you’re going to take it. So . . . I don’t know, should you be sitting down or something? Do I need a crash cart?”
“Brooke, I found out my heart could stop working at any moment and I’ll drop dead. Nothing you can say is more shocking than that.”
“Heath and Lilly are together,” she says, closing her eyes and then screwing one back open slowly when she doesn’t hear a body hit the floor.
My hand grips more tightly on the door handle, and I wait for the shock, a wave of anger or jealousy, maybe the cold touch of wrath. But there is nothing, not even a jolt of surprise that spikes my blood pressure. Shanna rests, unperturbed, beating a steady rate that seems completely nonplussed by this turn of events.
“How’d it happen?” I ask.
“They were both pretty torn up about you, and everything. I guess they were comforting each other and got a little too enthusiastic or something, I don’t know. I wasn’t thrilled about it when she told me, but if it means anything to you, I think they’re both happy.”
“No,” I say, opening the door. “That doesn’t mean anything to me at all.”
twenty-four
My texts are a history of everything I’ve missed, my responses as absent from the record as I was in the world.
From Brooke
Dude? WTF? Did that just happen?
OK u need 2 call me I can hear sirens.
There’s a chunk of yr hair hanging from the window. Screencapping.
Like, b/c u can explain how u made it look real. Not b/c it’s awesome.
Alright. It happened.
WTF?
From Lilly
Sasha?? Sasha??
U NEED 2 ANSR ME! U R FREAKING ME OUT!!
Not funny
Now it’s really not funny b/c ur not at school.
Tlkd to ur mom. Will try to come and c u.
I can’t help but smirk at Lilly’s assertion that she’s only going to try to come see me, as if my fall from grace had bumped me down on her priority l
ist a few notches. Or maybe she was already making out with my boyfriend by then.
From Heath
Talked to Lilly and Brooke. Don’t know what’s going on.
Please call me.
At school. Everyone is saying different things and asking me questions. I don’t know what to tell them. Call me.
Got home and my mom said she talked to your mom. I don’t know what to think.
That’s the last text I have from my boyfriend, that he doesn’t know what to think. I’m sure it was excruciating for him.
From Isaac
Sorry had to go, dad’s truck wouldn’t start needed a ride to work
Hey lady, where are you?
hearing things @ school call me
You need 2 answr me crazy shit going on
where the fuck r u?
went to your house yr mom not happy to see me
WTF?
Is it b/c of me?
My eyes fill up at his last text. The others asked if I was okay, wondered where I was, or wanted the truth about what actually happened. Isaac was the only one who had the guts to ask if it was his fault. And it wasn’t, even if him leaving that night is what pushed Shanna to great lengths for his attention, it’s not his fault.
It’s hers. It’s the fault of a girl who doesn’t know how to live what little bit of a life she’s been given, a small space tucked into the dark cavity of my chest. It’s the fault of a girl who doesn’t know how to be a real person, the fault of a girl who maybe already knew that she only had so much time left.
I run my thumbs over the phone, not sure who to answer first or what to say to any of them. Brooke is the easiest, so I tackle that first.
From Brooke
WTF?
Phone works—ty!
From Heath
I don’t know what to think.
I talked to Brooke. Sounds like you figured it out.
I’m surprised when three little bubbles pop up right away, which means Heath is typing an answer.
Will come visit. You can be mad at me then.
Maybe I will be and maybe I won’t be. It’s hard to say. Whatever corner of my heart was reserved for Heath has been subsumed by Shanna, and she has no use for him. Even though he’s only coming to officially dump me to my face, I have to give him credit for making the drive and being a gentleman. Or maybe he just wants it on the official record for when he runs for governor that he didn’t abandon his terminally ill girlfriend. I can picture him as an adult wearing a three-piece suit, holding up one of my senior pictures and the cardiac center’s visitors’ log at a press conference. He might even manufacture a tear.