Alive (4 page)

I smile wanly. “Fine, yeah, thanks. Just catching a breather.” I stand up straighter and push the fallen wisps of hair out of my face. Though it’s sweet he asked, I take his
comment as a context clue about the rest of my appearance and, to put it in medical terms, the prognosis isn’t good.

“You must be new here. I’m Harrison.” He extends a hand. “You’re a senior too?” He points to my copy of
The Awakening
. Harrison, who I’ve known
at least in passing for six years, is built like a screwdriver, knobby head attached to a rod-straight body.

My eyes widen. I don’t know when the last time we talked was. Maybe never. But at a small private school, you
know
people. “I—I—” I stammer, unsure of what
to say. I’ve been in and out of school for over a year, but could people have possibly forgotten me? I pause for a second. Nobody takes this long to answer with her name. Then, on instinct, I
answer, “I’m Veronica Leeds.” I use the name Brynn and I once invented to talk to boys online. I couldn’t bear the embarrassment of introducing myself as
Stella—he’d surely recognize the name and afterward realize he was talking to a girl who’s completely unmemorable.

We shake hands and—after exchanging a few excruciating niceties about how friendly the people are here and how the class ranking system blows and how the worst thing about Duwamish by far
is the uniforms—part ways. By now I feel confident that I’ve turned an unattractive shade of Pepto-Bismol pink, so I duck into the women’s restroom, which smells unmistakably of
Lysol and French fries, just as I remember.

It’s hushed. The sound of running water trickles in from the boys’ restroom next door. Feeling all but invisible in this school, I’m halfway relieved to see a reflection in the
mirror. I unzip my bag and take out a travel-size Clinique makeup carrier. I lean over the counter to apply a soft layer of lip gloss and a dash of blush. The last thing I want now is to look sick.
I’ve done the whole sick thing and I’m so over it.

At first glance I think that I spilled my compact on my shirt. The hint of color on my white polo draws my gaze downward. Tucking my chin, I frown at a glob of red on the fabric. I try to scrape
it off with my nail. No luck. I feel my eyebrows squinch into a
V
at the top of my nose.

When I step back to look in the mirror, crimson handprints cover my shirt from my stomach all the way to my chest. My hand flies to my mouth and I catch a whiff of something metallic.

“Oh my God.” My voice is a whisper. I stare at the blood. “Ohmygod.” I repeat faster. “What
happened
?” my voice shrieks.

I turn on the faucet and pull my shirt underneath it, where I scrub furiously at a handprint. It stays put. Blood crusted on fabric. Smelling like spare change. Blood in the shape of hands.
Grabbing at me. Gore. Plasma. Bodily fluid.
Get off me. Get off me.

Beginning to panic, I flee from the bathroom, walking fast the rest of the way outside to the lunch area.

It’s only when I’m surrounded by other people in the quadrangle that I let my stride slow. My pulse throbs in the two glands at the top of my throat and my hands tremble even though
they’re clenched into fists at my sides. I glance down at the gory blots, ready to find someone to tell, but when I do my breath hitches in my chest.

They’re gone.

As in, they’re not there.

I thumb the fabric, looking for even one of the stains, but the only thing remaining is a giant wet spot where I’d doused myself with water from the faucet. Even my fingernails are clean.
It doesn’t make sense.

I press my knuckles into the side of my head and take a deep breath. I’m tired. I must be tired. I rub the heel of my hand into my eye socket and try to shake off whatever it is I thought
I saw.

I was wrong. Confused. Meanwhile, the teeth in my chest gnaw at the new heart in response.

“How was your first day back at school?” Mom shouts as soon as my foot crosses the threshold into the entryway. She has the uncanny ability of a golden retriever to
know exactly when any member of the family will be getting home. For my dad, that hasn’t been often since the surgery.

“Exhausting,” I call back, plopping my backpack next to the large South African man-sculpture my parents bought on their honeymoon. I’ve always loved our house because it
isn’t all Pottery Barned out—except for our coffee table, which Mom got on sale and which she insists looks like an authentic frontier piece. My parents used to travel a lot before I
was born and sometimes after, too, right up until the time when I’d gotten sick. They had a one-week trip to Santorini planned, but had to cancel on account of the fact that my heart started
giving out.

Who knows? Maybe they’ll go now.

I drift into the living room, where Elsie’s busy knocking blocks together on the floor and Mom’s supervising from the kitchen, looking at one of those fifteen-minute-meal cookbooks
filled with recipes that will inevitably take her, like, forty-five.

“Stel-lah!” Elsie shouts at me. Lately, she only has one volume, and she punctuates it by slobbering all over her chin. “Lah! Lah! Lah!”

“Hi, Elsie.” I plug my ears until she stops repeating the last syllable of my name. Remind me what’s cute about baby talk again?

“Shhh, Else,” Mom says. She’s been reverse-aging
Benjamin Button
–style since I woke up from surgery. She looks at least ten years younger without all the worry.
Makeup’s part of her daily routine again, and she uses the curling iron to tame that patch of frizz around her temples.

For me, the memory of a briefcase and high heels cling to my mother like the Ghost of Christmas Past. But Elsie will never see that. It’s a piece of my mother that was carved away, yanked
out the same way my heart was yanked out of me. It’s simply no longer part of her, like swimming is no longer part of me. Another victim of the aftermath of my surgery.

“Come sit down and let me make you a cup of tea.” The familiar worried look flashes over her face, wrinkling her forehead. I must look tired. But she doesn’t say anything, and
I sit in one of the whitewashed kitchen chairs and try to look more spirited. She turns down one full-color page and gets up to start rattling around the kitchen.

“When’s Dad coming home?” I ask, trying not to sound resentful.

Mom levels her chin and peers over the top of her glasses. “He’ll get home when he gets home.”

I blow at a strand of hair that’s getting in my face. “Will he be home for dinner tonight?”

Mom pulls out a ceramic mug from the cabinet. “I’m sorry.” She lifts her eyebrows. “I guess we just assumed you’d want to go to college someday.”
There’s a sly twinkle in her eye. “Or would you rather just live with us for the rest of your life? Because your dad and I would be happy to arrange that, you know.”

I bury my forehead in my arms. “Fine. Fine. Gratitude. I get it.” My dad used up more than his allotted time off during my surgery. He’s a lawyer at a midsize firm in town, but
lately you’d think he was on the brink of curing cancer, given how much they’re making him work to catch up. Sick-girl consequences…and yet another thing for me to feel guilty
about, I suppose.

“Any headaches today?” she asks, as if offhandedly. Her look’s practiced. Face perfectly relaxed, not even a crease of worry. But I know better. This is how she asks the
questions that keep her up at night. Light and airy, so as not to startle the patient.

“I told you. They’re not headaches.” I pick at a hangnail.

I can feel Mom tense. She hates when I snap at her. She hates the fact that she can’t understand what I’m going through and hates it even more when I point it out.

“I called Dr. Belkin. Are you getting enough rest? He wants to know if you’re getting enough rest.” My “headaches” are probably already a three-page entry in the
Stella binder. Google searches have been run. Doctors have been phoned. And all the while, she’s still calling the pain that lights my body up like a Christmas tree a freaking
“headache.” But that’s my mother. She’s got to turn each part of my illness into something she understands. A one-word label. Honestly, I can’t really blame her. She
cocks her head. “Maybe you’re back in school too soon. Do you feel it was too soon?” This again?

“Mom. I was already having the…the
pain
before today. Remember?” I put my elbows up on the table. “It’s fine. I’m sure it’s fine. Now can we
please talk about something else?” If my parents had their way, they’d swaddle me up in Bubble Wrap and stick a
FRAGILE
sticker on my forehead. If there’s
one realization I’ve settled on since my surgery, it’s that I can’t let this happen. Not even figuratively.

Of course, the first time I had the pain, it was terrifying. We rushed back to the hospital. I cried. My parents cried. They ran tests. Nothing. But now…now I just do my best to forget
about it each day. At least until it’s time.

“What about college applications?” I say. Since I joined the swim team in sixth grade, I’d had one goal: a scholarship. And once I hit ninth grade, it became more
specific—the top-ranked Stanford team, which suited my parents, it being their alma mater—and we all became part of the same team. We were going to get me into Stanford. That all
changed the day of my diagnosis. “Can we talk about those? Deadlines are coming up in a few months.” While it hasn’t been officially opened for debate, now that we’re
subtracting swimming from the equation, I’m not sure I’m dead set on going to Stanford. Not sure I’d get in now either.

Mom frowns, pausing at the sink with one hand on the faucet. “Stella, we’re not finished here. If you insist on continuing with school right now, we need to get a handle on these
headaches, on what’s causing them.”

“Mom, please,” I whine. “Not now.”

“Then when?” She sets the timer on the microwave to thirty seconds so that she has to talk over the radioactive hum. “I’ve read about this. All transplant patients suffer
a certain amount of acute rejection. The biggest risk of hyper-accute rejection falls between weeks one and twelve.”

“Does everything have to be so life-and-death? I’m not a ticking time bomb.”

Just then, there’s a big belch—a sound somewhere between what might emanate from a frog and an overweight fifty-year-old—coming from the living room. Mom sets the mug down on
the counter and freezes.

“Elsie?” she says, eyes wide.

But it’s too late. The next noise is more liquid, like the gurgle of a toilet unclogging, followed by a sickening squelch. Mom rushes into the living room, wiping her hands nervously on
her jeans.

I turn around to see Elsie, covered in yellow slime. Mom kneels beside Elsie, taking her shirt and blotting at Elsie’s chin. “It’s on the carpet, too.”

Before I can get out of my chair, Mom has whisked Elsie off the floor and is scrambling to the closest bathroom. The door clicks shut behind them and I hear the bathtub start to run and Elsie
begin to cry. Meanwhile, my cup of green tea sits untouched on the counter.

I snag my bottles of Avapro and Imuran from the cabinet and my backpack from the foyer, and trudge down the carpeted hallway to my bedroom.

“Great talk,” I call over my shoulder, knowing Mom won’t be able to hear me. Even though she means well, it’s exhausting being the subject of my parents’
containment strategy while Elsie reaps all the cutesy baby nonsense.

My bedroom smells like vanilla. Mom must have lit the candle in it before I came home from school, which softens my mood slightly. Plus my bed is made, the fluffy lavender comforter tucked
underneath the pillows. The yellow sunflowers Brynn’s parents sent are starting to droop on the nightstand but are still pretty, and I make a mental note to water them so they don’t
die. The rest of my room still shows signs of the fact that I’ve been living in it nonstop for the past month. Magazines are stacked on the floor. The trash can’s filled with Starburst
wrappers and empty Doritos bags. A short stack of books is piled near the foot of the bed, either finished or almost. None of them are on the school reading list.

In the far corner is a bin filled with trophies and medals. I asked Mom to take them off my shelves because I want them thrown away, but she says I’ll regret that when I’m older.
Honestly, I doubt it. By now, my legs and arms have atrophied beyond the point of recognition. Sometimes I dream about swimming, about the smell of chlorine and the way it feels to churn up a
frothy path with your feet. About the moment when you pass a girl in the next lane who’s two years older and should be five seconds faster but isn’t. Not that it matters, since
I’ll probably never swim again and I don’t think anyone—even Future Stella—will be super impressed that I won All-County in a swim meet freshman year.

I check my watch. I’ve got less than an hour, so I slide my laptop out from the bottom shelf of my nightstand and log on. There’s a green circle next to Henry’s screen name, so
I click on it. I need to have some sort of human interaction before the pain starts.