“They’re removing the catheter tomorrow, right? Excited?”
I stared toward the ceiling to keep the tears from falling. “Yeah and testing. Finding out whether I’m special enough for a new treatment or immunotherapy, or dying for good.” Talking past the lump in my throat required effort. “Y-yeah, I’m excited for that. I’m ready for that. All over that.”
I pressed the red phone icon on my heads-up display to save her the trouble. More wetness dribbled from my eyes as I lay on my purple-and-white-checkered [XW8]quilt and stared out the window. There, next to my bed, I imagined my father — tall and strong. He’d approach, curl behind me, and tangle his fingers in mine. I formed my hand into a fist and squeezed. My blinking slowed along with my breathing.
The next thing I knew, it was late. The room’s atmosphere was dark. Jagged tree branches swayed outside my window, and rain tapped against the glass. According to the virtual reality clock, I’d slept for eight hours and it was two thirty in the morning. The almond soup Mom had left on my nightstand was room temperature, but I spooned it into my mouth anyway. She’d mixed too much garlic into it, but I was too weak to be picky. Heating it meant going to the kitchen, and the stairway was near Mom’s room. She could be awake and waiting for me to exit. A sneak attack lecture would be the worst. Besides, I could’ve sworn the human-sized shadow in my peripheral vision hadn’t moved. Death.
Was today my day?
I finished off the soup and crusty sourdough bread she’d brought me and fell back asleep.
The next day, I woke up, showered, and threw on a bra and a matching pair of underwear, both black, nothing frilly, a purple Zara Hristoff sweatshirt, black leggings, and a clean pair of black canvas sneakers. The muddy shoes I’d had were gone. Mom had taken them as a guilt trip. She’d achieved her purpose. I felt crappy, inside and out.
Morning light rays filtered through the kitchen window blinds. I’d gotten downstairs by seven thirty. My removal procedure was scheduled for nine, and the hospital was an hour away, so I had a minute to shove something in my mouth. We had cranberry bagels and cream cheese. I’d do one of those and green juice.
“No eating,” Mom warned me from behind the refrigerator door. “Surgery, remember?”
I’d already eaten past midnight. She didn’t know that, though, and tossed me a bottle of water. Good thing it was plastic because I couldn’t catch. I dropped it onto the floor. As I knelt to pick it up, a tsunami of dizziness hit me. The cabinets swirled around like a brown and gold kaleidoscope on a Tilt-A-Whirl. When I hit the floor and closed my eyes, Mom considered it a call for help.
“Lucy!” she called out to me.
I swallowed hard and waved her away. “I’m good.”
Though prayer isn’t part of my daily routine, I pleaded with God, the Virgin Mary, Vishnu, and whoever else would listen to prevent me from throwing up again.
My mother crouched beside me, clutched my hand in hers, and resumed the praying. Whenever situations got too real or her temper fired up, she went bilingual on me. I’d taken Spanish in school, and it might’ve been the only class I hadn’t miserably failed. When she said, “Amen,” I felt a bit better. This time, she handed me the water bottle. All I’d be able to do is let it cool my mouth and spit it out.
“Salud,” she said, touching her bottle with mine.
She drank while I swished the liquid around my mouth and spit it out into the sink. Mom had done a lot of good things for me and was unusually cool for all the things I’d said to her last night. I couldn’t have knuckled up and fought without her. Didn’t know if I would have wanted to.
A little while later, we were in her two-door Cougar transport and headed to the hospital. Mom turned on the satellite radio to distract me. Our musical tastes were worlds apart. She liked this station that played alternative and punk bands. I liked old hip hop and what she called “hood music.” I forced myself to listen to the guitar riffs and radio snow until I couldn’t take it anymore and activated my audial comm — a Bluetooth sound system topically implanted into my ears. A complete audio system would’ve sounded much better, but my treatment would’ve fried the circuitry. “Holophone? For music, I swear.”
“Music.” She opened a compartment in the transport and handed it to me.
Totally old school it was.
Right when I plugged in, a text came in from Natalee. She must be in first block by now. I glanced at it. “Good luck,” it read, followed by, in caps, “Don’t look.”
My best friend knew me. She’d known I’d want to see the mockery, and she also knew I was going to look no matter what she said. “Thanks,” I mouthed.
I’d forgotten my grounding, brought up all the social networking sites I could think of, and clicked on the profiles of people I knew hated me. Sure enough, there was an anonymous video. I waited for it to load.
Mom turned the radio down and calmly extended her hand. “Nope. Holophone,[XW9] please.”
I panicked. Hand it to her and the video would stop loading. She’d see the guy’s face who I was kissing and get him arrested. “No way,” I said, clutching the rectangular device.
Still driving, she pointed her finger at me. “Give me the phone, Luciana, or I will take it from you.”
Beneath the calmness in her voice was an authority I rarely saw, and I didn’t want to challenge it this time. Not in a moving transport. I obeyed. To my surprise, rather than toss it out the window, she swiped it off and stuck it in her pocket.
“A girl at my high school did something much worse than you did, and she found herself on the internet.”
“They had the internet back then?”
She didn’t crack a smile.
I held my breath. Mom knows. Even Murdoch didn’t know about my starring role. Either that or he didn’t say anything to Mom. Had one of the parents called her? I mouthed a curse word at the window and, for the first time in my life, wished we could get to the hospital faster.
“All right. What happened to her?”
Unlike all the other times she lectured me, I was interested in this story. My mother never talked about her high school days. My birth date was December 4, 2015. After I was born, she dropped out and received her general equivalency diploma [XW10]in 2017. I didn’t know much else about her past before those events. She didn’t have yearbooks, and when I had her investigated, the website I’d paid sent me everything I’d already figured out.
The stream of vehicles in front of us slowed to a stop. Rush hour traffic. Mom throttled the gas and exited the highway. We were taking the back way to the hospital. At the top of the off ramp, she turned right and headed down the hill. Once we hit the straightaway, she continued with the story.
“This girl got involved with the wrong guy and lost her virginity on camera.”
My skin flushed. People had become icons for having sex on camera, but I assumed that was not what happened to this chick. She agreed to it? Or she didn’t know? The way Mom told it made me think the girl didn’t know. Oh my God. A parent story I related to. “You watched it?”
Mom slapped the steering wheel. “No. Luce, you’re missing what I’m saying. Be careful about who you associate yourself with. You stuck up for both of those boys, but when things hit the fan, did one of them stay and fight for you?”
We both knew the answer to her question[XW11] though I didn’t want to admit it out loud.
“You don’t want a boy who won’t fight for you.” Her warm hand found mine on my lap. “You don’t want anyone who won’t fight for you. Do the right thing. Stay off the grid. Do you understand?”
I nodded. Do the right thing. Stay off the grid. Like I had much time left anyway.
CHAPTER TWO
We pulled into a parking spot at the emergency room entrance of the hospital. Dr. Keller was board-certified and one of the best oncologists on the East Coast. Of all the kinds of cancer I could have contracted, this one was a super rare and aggressive osteosarcoma. I’d been diagnosed in fifth grade, and I swe
ar Mom cried for four days until her eyes dried out. I’d had all kinds of memories and mental pictures of her emotional disintegration over the years, but the one when I found her weeping on her knees to God stuck in my mind. He hadn’t listened to her about healing me. Why, I wondered. Maybe He didn’t listen because He didn’t care.
My breath left my body as white smoke. Invisible icy daggers wormed between the buttoned gaps in my jacket and flew up my sweatshirt. Weather like this was common in November, and we often got snow. Last year, in 2028, we didn’t use the heat until after my birthday. This year, we’d turned it on last night, which was three days before Thanksgiving.
Since I’d started chemo, I’d been affected by temperature drops. In the past, I’d loved drinking steaming hot green tea and sitting by our cobblestone fireplace. These days, I couldn’t get warm by sitting in boiling water. Mom suffered along with me. She complained of joint soreness when the temperature dropped below fifty degrees, almost like she hadn’t lived in weather like this all her life.
Right after we hustled into the red brick building, I experienced a lapse in time leading up to the actual operation. I’d told the doctors before about the memory gaps, but they waved them off as “anomalies or aberrations” and not a side effect of my treatment. I remembered entering the ER, Mom and her expensive peach-scented [XW12]skin lotion, and her filling out forms on a tablet computer. That’s all I recalled before they rolled me in a padded wheelchair back to a room.
I was asked to strip down to my panties and a gown. Soon, I was shivering in a full body X-ray. An injection in the bend of my arm to start an intravenous drip. Blackness.
When I awoke, I’d noticed Mom by the window jerking beneath a thin white blanket. The holovision played some sitcom where the little cute kid overacted every line. My chest felt like I’d dove onto a beehive. I wanted to pat where the incision was, but the clear bandage on top of it let me know that probably wasn’t the best idea. Hopefully, my breasts were impressive enough to atone for the hideous pink scar on my light brown skin.
“Mom.” I cleared my throat and called out with a little more strength. “Mom?”
She stirred and walked to my bedside. “Hey,” she weakly sniffed. “How are you feeling?”
“Heavy,” I responded. “Tired. Cold. Buzzed. Not that I remember what that feels like.”
My wisecrack brought a smile to her face. She showed me a loose white tank top emblazoned with my favorite band on it and containing a shelf bra. “For when we leave.”
Not a minute later, Dr. Keller came in to check on me. She was an [XW13]older woman, late fifties, with a deep tan and crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. “How’s the patient?”
Her thick Middle Eastern accent was always difficult for me to follow. “Itchy,” I told her, “but otherwise, I’m good. Aren’t you going to congratulate me?”
She and Mom shared a look. There was something I didn’t know. “On what, exactly?”
Suddenly, I wasn’t sure I should be smiling anymore. “I got my catheter out. That means no more chemo, right? Clean bill of health? Mets haven’t grown…jump in any time here, Doc.”
Dr. Keller opened a digital folder with my X-rays in them and projected them against the wall. Living X-rays always freaked me out. Your entire body was a beating, vibrating sculpture of blue bones of light and pulsating red organs. Tumors were black orbs. Where there used to be three or four small throbbing globes,[XW14] I now counted sixteen all over my midsection. “Your cancer has progressed and spread,” she said. “To your lungs, hips, ribs, and liver. I’m sorry.”
The death sentence crushed what little happiness I’d conjured up over the past twenty-four hours. “So,” I said, my voice broken. “You removed the Broviac because…there’s nothing else you can do for me? Not the stem cell, immunotherapy…nothing?”
The doctor’s brown eyes avoided mine. “Care from here on out would be palliative, to make you comfortable. Hospice in two or three weeks. Pain management at the end. Lucy — ”
At the end. The end. My mother hugged me around the shoulders. I collapsed into her chest and sobbed. “I’m gonna die?” I repeated my question. “Like, I’m actually gonna die this time?”
Mom couldn’t bring herself to lie to me, and she couldn’t tell the truth. Instead, she cried with me and prayed in Spanish.
“Forgive me, Lord” was all I understood. Forgive her for what? He didn’t prevent it, and He wouldn’t take it away, so it might as well have come from Him, which was a reason why I didn’t pray in the first place.
They might as well have been mumbling while discussing the options of my treatment. I didn’t hear them beyond the sound of two different voices — one firm and the other shaky and high-pitched. When they finished, Mom helped me dress, and she set me back in the wheelchair. I followed wherever I was being led.
The trip through the white hallways reminded me of a maze, like the one on the back of children’s menus in a restaurant. It did not matter how hard I tried to navigate those by myself. Even now, I’d still end up at a dead end by myself. I always needed help. Once someone started me on the right path, we’d finish it together. I guess that’s what Mom and I would do now.
Outside, the midday air smacked me in the face and ran up my sweatshirt and tank top to my searing chest scar. We were outside, and my senses came back to me. The kind African-American [XW15]nurse wanted me to wait for Mom to pull up in our silver Cougar, but I got up under my own power. Through blurry vision, I followed her to the vehicle and got in.
Mom handed me a tissue to blot my tears, started the ignition, and turned the heat on. We didn’t move for a minute. I wondered why until I realized she wanted to talk. Since I’d been under the knife, she knew I couldn’t run. The worst I could do was ignore her, and I didn’t have the energy to be a jerk to her right now. “Go ahead. Say it.”
“We’ll find a way to beat this, Luce. Together.”
How? She’d put me on a raw food and vegetable diet. We’d done surgery, chemo, radiation — nothing worked. There was no beating. I had a dozen and a half tumors, and I’d have reached into my body and ripped them off my organs and bones if it’d work. “I’m tired of ways that don’t work, Mom. We did everything we were told to do, things we weren’t told to do, and I’m still gonna die. Give it up. I have.”
Mom faced the partially fogged-up windshield. She couldn’t look me in the eye and tell me something different. I’d dropped truth.
“How long did he give me? When’s my expiration date?”
“You’re not a bottle of milk, Luce, you — ”
I braced myself and watched her mouth for the answer. The words didn’t come out. I read her lips. “Six weeks. We can’t be sure. Maybe sooner.”
I’d celebrate another Thanksgiving, my fifteenth birthday, and die before New Year’s 2030. “I want to have a get-together, Mom. Tonight. At the house. Unchaperoned.”
She didn’t immediately answer. “You’re hardly up for that.”
“Please?”
“I’ll stay downstairs in the theater. And you don’t drink or smoke.”
We shook hands.
From the transport, Mom called ahead to the house and had the cleaning lady come in and remove anything valuable from the ground floor for my “party.” When we arrived, I freshened up in my bathroom. I couldn’t shower or bathe until the clear bandages dissolved over my incision. Another case of the nervous sweats tonight and I’d start to smell bad fast. Would a sink bath kill me? I doubted it.
Dry parties sucked, but I’d convinced Natalee to bail on studying for an hour and to bring over some of her gifted classmates with no social lives. Anyone who’d attend. I’d ordered pizzas and we’d dance or play games. Lame, I know. Truth was, she was my only friend. Everyone else I suspected of making fun of me behind my back, including the people she hung out with. The only thing sadder than a girl dying of cancer at a dry party was one where nobody shows up.
Now what? I had a couple minutes t
o burn. Nothing meant anything to me. Holovision? Every minute I watched was sixty seconds I’d never get back. I had 3.62 million seconds to live, give or take, provided I dropped dead when Dr. Keller said I would. I didn’t want to power nap. I’d lose that time, too. There were things I wanted to do, but I wasn’t sure what they all were. Mom always liked to watch the sun rise and set — maybe we could do it from another country on the other side of the planet? Or, at least the West Coast. We’d never left the state, and when I’d ask why, she’d avoid answering me.
“We have each other, and everything we need right here,” she’d say. “Why leave?”
I wasn’t so sure about that anymore, and I didn’t want to wonder what balmy weather was like at this time of year for the month and a half I had left.
At the edge of my room was a hand-carved [XW16]rosewood storage case. In the bottom drawer was a pile of old school spiral notebooks I’d handwritten in. Mom called them “Wish Journals.” The first time it looked like my cancer would be fatal, I started writing to the Make-A-Wish Foundation with the most outrageous things I could think of doing. Four wishes per page, front and back, for the entire year — practically the only thing I’d handwritten in years. There were three finished and the one I’d been writing in since New Year’s 2029. I’d planned to burn them once I was given a thumbs-up by Dr. Keller.
With the time I had remaining, there was no way we could do all two thousand wishes before I died. “Maybe one,” I convinced myself. I flipped open the cover of one. It smelled like a flowery perfume I used to spray all over myself. The first two wishes were to dance on stage with Justin Timberlake, which was weird because his son was my age and he stopped touring ages ago. The next two wishes were to kiss Billy Randall. I’d written my name with his last name a few times. Lucy Randall. Could I have been any more basic? He’d transferred schools after fifth grade, and I had no idea if he was hot anymore.
