Invincible (12 page)

“The tests results came back,” he says.

“And?” Dad says.

“I can't quite get my head around it yet, but Evie's blood counts and proteins look normal. And the bone scan didn't show anything except healthy bone and the implants exactly where they're supposed to be. I think she'll be ready to get her cast off any day now.”

Mom and Dad look at each other. Their faces are blank, shocked. They are trying to process this impossible news.

“Her blood counts, Doctor,” Mom says. “What does that mean?”

“Well,” says Dr. Jacobs, looking at me sympathetically. “It means I want to do a bone-marrow aspiration.”

“No!” I say.

Imagine the most painful thing in the world. Then multiply it by a thousand. That's what a bone marrow aspiration feels like.

“Evie,” Dad scolds.

“Wait,” Mom says, her lips finally breaking into the smile she's been fighting. “You want to check her bone marrow? You think something may have changed?”

“The cancer in her bone marrow should have affected her blood work. But as I said, her results matched those of a perfectly healthy kid.”

“Oh my god,” Mom gasps, and starts blubbering. Dad blinks back tears and squeezes my good knee a little too hard.

I feel nothing. I feel numb. Stella is dead and they're talking about me being a “perfectly healthy kid.”

“Now, I don't want everyone getting too excited just yet. We won't know anything for sure until after we get the results. But there's a chance Evie has more time than we originally thought. I've never seen anything like it, but it's possible the chemo finally kicked in, to use precise medical terminology.”

Did Dr. Jacobs just make a joke?

“Oh, thank you, Dr. Jacobs!” Mom cries. I know she wants to hug him, but luckily she's controlling herself.

I zone out as they talk about the test. I try not to imagine the big fat needle slicing through my skin and fat and muscle and bone. I stare at the wilting flowers I spend so much time staring at. Why hasn't anyone removed them? Can't they see that they're dying?

“We need to throw away those flowers,” I blurt out.

“Oh, okay, honey,” Mom says, confused. “We'll deal with that in a minute.”

When Dr. Jacobs finally leaves us, Mom and Dad hover around me, beaming at each other like they just accomplished a great feat as a team—an Olympic relay race, the Super Bowl. And I'm the baton or the football, an inanimate object that gets passed back and forth, a prop without which the game wouldn't exist.

In a few minutes I will become a pin cushion for their needles yet again. I will be strapped down and drilled into and sampled so they can look for good news.

Stella just died and I might live and I don't know how I feel about any of this.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

I COULD BE ANYONE, JUST A REGULAR KID WHO BROKE HER leg doing something normal like riding a bike or climbing a tree. Dr. Jacobs says it's healing perfectly. Miraculously, no major nerves or blood vessels were damaged; the tissue remained healthy and supple while I was bedridden. The only thing that shows up on X-rays now is the small metal plate in my pelvis and the titanium rod and six screws holding my thigh together.

My white blood cells are at normal levels after being virtually nonexistent. According to the tests and multiple retests, there is cancer exactly nowhere in my body. Nowhere. Nothing. Zero. Zip.

There has been a mistake. Or a miracle. Or some twisted combination of both. Another one of God's jokes—but I don't know if I should laugh or cry.

I am the only kid on the cancer ward without cancer. My room is empty. All the decorations have been taken down, all the flowers finally thrown away. I am sitting on my hospital bed, waiting to be discharged.

I've already endured Caleb's tearful good-bye. I promised him I would visit and text, that we'd meet for coffee as soon as he gets out, but all I wanted was to get away as quickly as possible. I don't belong here now.

Mom is in the hall somewhere, looking for someone to officially sign me out. Jenica and Dad are bringing the car to the front, my suitcase packed and in the trunk. Will and Kasey both wanted to come, but I told them not to. My leaving is already getting too much attention as it is. Plus, we have all the time in the world now. This may be the last hospital room I see for a very long time.

I should feel something. Happy. Grateful. But I keep thinking about how the last thing Stella probably saw was a ceiling identical to this one, an empty expanse of flat, lifeless white. I keep thinking about how she was alone in that room, being kept alive by machines. Until she wasn't.

After I leave, the hospital sounds will continue without me—the constant beeps, the doors opening and closing, the rattles of equipment being rolled up and down the hallway, in and out of rooms. The low, serious drone of doctors and parents; the high, cheerful voices of children; the hospital's peculiar duet of laughter and crying.

I hear squeaking wheels and the shuffling of little feet. A girl I recognize from movie nights appears in my doorway, wearing pink footy pajamas that probably used to fit her but now droop off her emaciated frame. She has the look of a lifer, one of the kids who have basically been raised
here. I think she's somewhere around six or seven, but it's so hard to tell the age of the gravely ill. Teenagers can stay prepubescent for years; little boys can look like haggard old men.

Only a few stringy wisps of white-blond hair are left on her head. Stella would always have a fit whenever people failed to shave their heads when they got to this point. “No self-respect,” she'd complain. “It hurts my eyes.” But maybe this girl's parents have more important things to think about than their daughter's hair.

She is dwarfed by the oxygen machine she drags behind her. A floppy stuffed rabbit rides on top.

Before I have a chance to say anything, she walks over and climbs onto my bed.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi.”

“I'm Carla.”

“Hi Carla. I'm Evie.”

“I know.” She retrieves the stuffed rabbit from its perch on the machine and holds it out to me. “This is Piggy.”

“Hello, Piggy.” I shake his little soft hand.

“Can I sign your cast?”

“Okay.” I don't tell her that I'm getting it removed tomorrow.

She pulls a pen out of a hidden zippered compartment in Piggy's back. She has come prepared.

She bites her lip in concentration as she writes the wiggly words in a clean space between the faded names of kids who have come and gone in the three weeks I've been in here: “To: Evie. Love: Carla,” then circles it with a heart.

“That looks nice,” she says, nodding her head.

“It does.”

She scoots closer to me. “I have what you had. Ewing's sarcoma.” The heavy words sound so strange in her tiny voice. “It was in my arm but now it's in my lungs, too.” She holds out the rabbit and points to its chest. “Here,” she says.

“I'm sorry,” I say.

She looks around my empty room. “All your stuff is gone.”

“I'm leaving today.”

“I know.”

“Oh?”

“Everybody knows.”

“Oh.”

“Evie?”

“Yes?”

Her big eyes blink twice. If they made a sound, it would be
plink, plink
. “Can I touch you?”

“Why do you want to touch me?”

“Piggy and I were thinking that maybe some of your miracle will rub off. So maybe I can be cured too.”

Before I can even think about what I'm doing, I throw my arms around Carla and press her hard against me. I can feel her brittle bird bones through her skin. If I let go, she'll disappear. She'll shatter and turn into dust.

“Ouch,” she says.

I release her quickly. “Are you okay? I'm so sorry.” I look her over for signs of harm.

“This just got knocked a little,” she says as she adjusts the tube in her nose.

“I'm sorry. I don't know why I did that.”

She just shrugs her shoulders. “You probably needed a hug.”

“I guess.”

She slides off the bed and puts Piggy back in his spot on top of the oxygen machine. “Okay, bye,” she says unceremoniously. I fight the urge to grab her again.

“See you later,” I say, trying to act casual, struggling to not lose it in front of this kid.

She tilts her head to the side and studies me.
Plink, plink.

“Probably not,” she says flatly. “I don't think the hug worked. I don't think miracles are contagious.”

My mouth opens but no words come out. I watch her shuffle out into the hall, the oxygen tank following her like a loyal pet.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

MY BEDROOM IS LIKE A MUSEUM. EVERYTHING IS EXACTLY where it was when I left for my walk with Will at Lake Merritt what seems like forever ago. I can tell Mom washed my sheets because my bed is made, but other than that, it's like time stopped that sunny afternoon. The book I was in the
middle of reading is still lying open on my bedside table. My school sweatshirt is still hanging on the back of my desk chair. A dirty sock lies lonely in the corner.

I know it hasn't really been that long, but I imagine a layer of dust coating everything. It's my room, but I feel a strange reluctance to touch anything, as if I'll get in trouble for disturbing the exhibit. None of these things feel like they're mine. All these patterns and textures, all these colors besides white, all these smells besides hospital disinfectant—it's too much. I feel dizzy. So I reach over from my wheelchair and turn off the lights. The darkness makes it a little more manageable.

Dad left my suitcase in the middle of the room, where it now sits awkward, almost menacing. It strikes me that I don't even want to open it, don't even want to let the contents touch this air. I will never wear those clothes again, never use that toothbrush, never brush my hair with that comb. That is all Cancer Girl's stuff. Not mine.

I wheel myself over to the suitcase, wanting to move it somewhere out of sight. Maybe I can push it deep inside my closet, where it will be lost, unopened, and I'll never have to think about it again. But that's when I notice something on my desk that wasn't there before, a square package slightly bigger than a shoebox, wrapped in brown paper and a postage label with my address on it. The return address is the hospital.

Before I even open it, I know it's from Stella. It's just like her to send me a package from the dead. As I unwrap the paper, a familiar smell hits me so hard I choke on my own breath—Stella's smell. The musky men's cologne she somehow managed to make smell so feminine.

I open the box to find Stella's hat—the smooth black felt fedora, with the oval brim and center crease, like something Al Capone or Indiana Jones would wear, except this one has a special Stella flair with the shiny black ribbon around the crown, holding the iridescent green and blue peacock feather. It is mine now, the place where Stella kept her power. My hands shake as I lift it up, as I discover a second present hidden under it, a small wooden box, a little girl's treasure chest. When I open it, another familiar smell escapes—the box is stuffed full of more marijuana than I could imagine anyone ever being able to smoke.

A folded note sits among the densely packed buds. I open it to find the smooth, graceful handwriting of a ghost:

Dear Evie,

Don't forget to live big. Make me proud, Cheerleader.

Love,
                  

Stella
                  

“Honey!” Mom's voice calls from the living room. “Will's here!”

I don't have time to hurt. I don't have time to miss her.

I put the hat on my head and it fits perfectly. I imagine I absorb some of Stella's power as it hugs my thin, patchy hair. I hide the box of weed in the back of my underwear drawer and wheel myself into the hallway, my arms stronger than they've been in months.

Maybe Will can make me feel better. Maybe he'll take me into his arms and squeeze some joy into me. But what I really want to do is get into bed and sleep for as long as it takes for me to feel like doing all the things I used to love doing. I want to sleep until I can forget that Stella's gone.

Will's face lights up when I enter the living room. He hands me yet another bouquet of red roses. The too-sweet smell overwhelms me as he leans over to kiss my cheek. I feel so small, like I'm his child.

“How are you feeling?” he says.

“Fine,” I say. “Tired. Ready to get out of this chair. Ready to get my cast off tomorrow.”

We come dangerously close to awkward-silence territory, but a knock on the door saves us just in time. Kasey walks in without waiting for anyone to answer, a right she earned a long time ago from being my best friend.

“Evie!” she cries, and runs over to hug me. For a moment, it feels right, and I wish we could just go to my room and lie on the floor in our pajamas and pretend it's two years ago. But instead, it's now, and no one knows what to say.

“Well,” Mom says. “Your dad should be here any minute with the food.”

“Isn't that Stella's hat?” Kasey says with a hint of a frown.

“Do you like it?”

I can tell the answer is no, but she manages a smile and nods. I haven't had a chance to see what I look like, but I know this isn't exactly the style of a varsity cheerleader.

“What does everyone want to drink?” Mom chirps.

“Water's fine for me,” Kasey says.

“I have iced tea,” Mom says. “Milk. Orange juice. We might have a couple of cans of Coke in the back of the fridge.”