Ray of Sunlight (15 page)

“You can’t do that. You can’t fool with that type of person, Russ. God, if you do that when Pete isn’t there….”

“CJ,” I said gently, “that’s who I am. I goad people. I’m an asshole. I say the wrong thing… usually just to piss people off. Sometimes I pay the price, but it’s who I am.”

He looked like he was thinking about that. “I don’t want to try to change you, Russ. I love you the way you are, and I’ve never thought you were an asshole. I just… I won’t be around, and… not that I was any help anyway, but… if you got hurt, I….”

“CJ.” I kissed him. Only a quick peck. “I can’t promise you I’ll stop reacting like that…. It’s second nature. But I’ll try to be a little more careful, okay?”

He seemed to be thinking, but Pete chimed in. “I’ll try to keep him out of trouble for you, CJ, but you have plenty of time to do that yourself.”

I knew he didn’t have plenty of time. CJ knew he didn’t. I really think Pete knew too, but he didn’t want to admit it… or at least not address it. CJ nodded and let the subject drop.

We rode in silence for a while, and then Pete started talking about a dance coming up at school and that he was going to ask Jacob’s sister to go with him. I
knew
there was something going on with those two.

I
HAD
been really happy with my grades, but there were a lot more assignments throughout the rest of the school year, and I had to do just as well with those as I had been, and worse yet, the dreaded exams were looming large. Those could make me or break me. They were worth a lot of my grade. I didn’t test well. I never had. I got all choked up and any information that I might have had in my head just ran out my ears as soon as I saw the test.

Although, come to think of it, I had done well on that history test Pete had helped me study for, and I had been getting straight As and Bs in all the tests that CJ helped me study for, so maybe I had a chance.

But exams were different somehow, and they were really scaring me.

CJ must have picked up on that, because he was always bringing up stuff we had already studied, and even stuff from the beginning of the school year when I hadn’t yet been paying attention.

Pete finally admitted that he had given CJ a study guide for the exams even though the tests themselves were still months away. I don’t know how he got hold of a study guide that early, but between him and CJ, they had this voodoo thing they did down pat, so I was sure the teachers were just charmed into it somehow. I was convinced they had a huge
Book of Secrets
up in the attic or something, and they just chanted incantations when they needed someone to do something out of character.

I had a massive test… kind of a pre-exam, in trig. Which I actually did pretty well on. I always liked math, anything to do with numbers—when I bothered studying at all. So math wasn’t the problem. Science was a little difficult, but I could get through that. But I worried about English and history.

I had to memorize the order of all the events throughout the whole time period we had been studying in history. The teacher had told us that the whole test was going to be a timeline where we had to fill in, in order, the major events studied throughout the year along with their ramifications. Without a word bank or anything. I was doomed.

CJ came up with a fairly decent memory aid, though.

“Envision the hospital, Russ,” he had said, and I looked at him like he had purple ears. He laughed and went on. “Walk into the main lobby. That’s your starting point… a sort of map. Off to the left, you have all the events in Asian history that you have to worry about. Walk down that corridor and each room is a specific event in Asian history. Walk into the room and in your mind’s eye, place things around the room that remind you of everything you have to remember about that event.”

“I’ll have to do a lot more studying just to know what to put in the rooms, CJ.” I followed his suggestion. I knew what he was getting at, but I didn’t even know enough to study like that yet. All the Asian stuff was at the beginning of the year, and I really hadn’t been paying attention.

“I’ll help, and you know Pete will. And Lee, one of the nurses on night shift? She
is
Asian, and she loves history. I’m sure she’d help you study.”

“Okay.” I allowed that possibility. “But what about all the other stuff?”

“Put it all in other wings,” CJ answered, like it was obvious. Maybe to him, but I wasn’t a whiz kid like him and Pete. When I just stared at him, he added, “European History in the neuro ward, South American in Oncology, and North American in the burn ward.”

“I’d like to just burn the whole book, CJ,” I said, trying to joke, but he just rolled his eyes.

“Put different events in each room, and put things that remind you about details about each event around the room in your mind.” When I rolled my own eyes, he assured me that it was easy.

“For you maybe,” I whined. I honest-to-God whined. Not that I’d ever admit it to another living soul.

“You’ve got this, Russ,” he guaranteed. “No prob.”

I thought it was still a big “prob,” but when he started to help me populate the rooms on the various halls with different events, in order—up one side of the hall and down the other—and helped me figure out what to put in the rooms to remind me of the key information, it really started coming together. When Pete realized we were onto something, he wanted CJ to help him too. We all studied together, and it was actually fun. Who would’ve thought?

B
Y
THE
time Easter rolled around, we had planned another big blowout for the kids on the Saturday before. Hospital-wide Easter egg hunt, plus the games and stuff. The church people helped out again, but we had more time to publicize this time, so we got all sorts of donations from the community. We had enough hams to feed all the kids, their parents, the staff, and all the volunteers. Also, everything else for a glorious Easter lunch was donated. The hospital kitchen staff didn’t have to so much as turn on the stove.

I drew as many of the kids and parents as I could, and quite a few staff and volunteers. I also took orders for many more portraits that I would draw from pictures the people would get to me. Several wanted me to put a bunch of people together so they could have a portrait of all the grandchildren in the family or something like that: people who were usually so spread out across the world that actually getting a picture together was impossible. There was one family who wanted twelve kids of varying ages all put together from pictures, but they wanted them to interact. Have the baby of one family being held by a teenager from another family. Have hands on shoulders and children on laps… as though they really were all together in a studio or something. The lighting in all the pictures were coming from different angles, so I’d have to change a lot of that, and of course, I couldn’t see the hands of all the kids, or even all the bodies. It would be my greatest challenge to date. And I couldn’t wait to get started.

I was getting a backlog, though. With all the work I was putting in to try to bring my grades up, as well as all the time spent with CJ, in and out of clown persona, I would have had to draw nonstop to meet—in any timely fashion—all the orders I had already had before the Easter party, let alone take new ones. I gave projected finish dates about two months out, feeling sure that would deter most people, but it didn’t seem to. They seemed to be happy to wait. Word seemed to have gotten around that they had to put in orders early, and I actually had quite a few who just wanted the portraits by Christmas. I had branched out from just drawing people too. Customers brought pictures of houses or churches, their dogs, other pets, or favorite animals they wanted generic drawings of.

A local landscaping company, which was owned by Mrs. Thompson and her husband, from Pete’s church, asked me if I’d consider doing layouts for them to help sell jobs. They’d give me a picture of the house or business the way it was, and would tell me what their plans were for the landscaping, and I’d draw it the way it would be after they finished. Then they would present that to the customer. There was software to do exactly the same thing, but Mr. Thompson said that he liked the personal touch the hand-drawn layout would give everything, and felt that his customers would really respond to that. Mrs. Thompson had given him the idea because of the activity she had had the children do where I drew the building and they pasted flowers around it. She said it came out so well that she told Mr. Thompson he just had to hire me to do that for all their bigger customers.

When they had first approached me about it, my first inclination was to turn them down. I had so much going on already, and I really didn’t think I’d be able to do justice to what they were telling me, since I didn’t know a lot about flowers or anything. CJ insisted that I take the job.

There had been such changes in my life since August. If anyone had told me last summer that I’d be spending all my time at a children’s hospital and my best friend would be a kid with cancer… not to mention that I’d actually be making pretty good money drawing sketches for various people and even businesses, I would have told them they were full of shit, but here I was. And at the center of all the changes was CJ. I knew that.

So it didn’t occur to me that CJ didn’t.

O
NE
F
RIDAY
in late April, CJ was really quiet. His chemo treatments had been kicking his ass lately, so I thought that was what was going on. But it had worn on all week until I couldn’t take it anymore.

“CJ. What the hell is wrong with you this week?”
Way to be diplomatic, Russ.
It was probably that he was feeling bad, and I was being a shit. But this scared me. CJ had become so important to me. The fact that he seemed to be pulling away? Or worse, the fact that he was getting so much sicker that it was changing his personality? Both of those possibilities scared the shit out of me.

“I’ve been waiting for you to tell me. But, you don’t seem to be planning on it, so I guess I’ll just ask.” CJ answered my question with another question. “When’s your last day?”

“Huh?” I loved it when I was all articulate like that.

“Your last day of community service.” He couldn’t even look me in the eye. “I’ve been keeping track. With you spending almost all the time here, especially if you count the holiday parties for the kids and taking me out into the community… your five hundred hours were up on Monday.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. I knelt down in front of him where he sat on his bed.

“CJ.” I looked up into his eyes, and to his credit, he didn’t look away. “Do you honestly believe this has all been about community service?” When he didn’t answer, I rushed on. “It started out that way, sure. Even the Halloween party, coming by in the evenings, and the Thanksgiving party were still mostly about that. But I’ve always been happy as shit that they let all the time I spent with you count as community service. Not because I wanted to get it over with sooner—which of course I did that too, especially at first—but because I was going to spend the time with you anyway, and if they didn’t count that, I would
never
get finished with the community service. But somewhere along the line, I stopped even thinking about it. I’ve actually lost track of the hours. Mrs. Barton has been turning them in directly to Mrs. Dietrich every Friday, so I didn’t even know community service was up.” He was so unlike his normal effervescent self I just had to add, “God, CJ. Did you think I’d just stop coming around?”

He didn’t speak for a long time, then finally answered. “In a way, it would make it easier. You know, just cut ties before you had to watch me die. Since you don’t
have
to be here anymore.”

I wanted to rail at him, tell him he wasn’t going to die, but I knew that he would… and sooner rather than later. His health had declined noticeably in the months I’d known him. His cancer was now stage four, and they had told him, told us both really, that they didn’t know how much longer chemo would even slow the shit down, let alone stop it. Remission was out of the question at this point, the doctors had said.

I couldn’t argue that point, as much as I’d like to. So I went with the other point. “I never had to be
here.
With you, I mean, or even on Oncology. Remember, I was originally assigned to the burn unit. I’m here because I want to be.”

He didn’t seem to be convinced, so I continued. “I know you asked to have me assigned to you, and the staff went along with it because you work some kind of voodoo on everyone you meet, and they instantly want to go along with any harebrained scheme you come up with.”

So much for trying to inject a little levity. He still looked like he’d lost his best friend.

“But I didn’t have to go along with it. Mrs. Dietrich arranged for me to work in the burn unit, and if I had complained about my reassignment she would probably have straightened that out with the hospital, and I would have been right back over there. They had come up with a whole list of chores for me to do, CJ. Being your gofer and later, a second clown in your act? That was never part of the original plan.”

At least he nodded at that. He couldn’t deny those facts but it didn’t seem to convince him that I wasn’t going to stop coming around now.

I was desperate to prove that to him. “No one minded, CJ, especially not me, but it certainly wasn’t something I
had
to do. I did it because I love you… have always loved you on some level, even when I wouldn’t let myself admit just how much. But you have
never
been an ‘assignment’ to me.” He had moved his head away a little as I talked, so I scooted around so I could look into his eyes again. “Never.”

We sat there for the longest time, just looking at each other, with CJ examining my eyes for any hint of duplicity. I could see in his eyes the moment he accepted all I was saying as fact.