Where We Fell (3 page)

4.

HER HOUSE IS ENORMOUS, and when I first pull up in
the driveway, I hit the brakes a little too hard because I’m not sure I’m in
the right place. But when I get the nerve to get out and knock on the door, she
opens it within seconds. She’s barefoot, and wearing a grilling apron. Her toes
are painted bright green.

“Well, what are you waiting for? An invitation? Come
inside already.”

I follow her through a large marble entryway, a
lushly decorated living room, the nicest kitchen I’ve ever seen, and onto the back
patio where she has music playing and the grill covered in foil-wrapped . . .
somethings.

“I made a bunch of stuff because I wasn’t sure if
you’d like anything and I’m not interested in taking you to get a BLT.
So . . .” Her eyes are bright with mischief as she settles onto
one of the deck chairs. “How was your day, dear?”

“The usual,” I reply. “Saved the planet. All of
humanity bowed at my feet.”

She shakes her head. “I can picture you in your
room, all huddled up in front of your television, lights out . . .
eyes glued to the screen while you play video games. It saddens me. Really it
does.” Her phone chimes and she bounds over to the grill to remove the food and
place it on a metal sheet. “Follow me.”

I obey because, really, what else am I going to do?

“Do you need help?”

“Me? No. But
you
do.”

I rub my forehead and sit down at the table where
she’s prepared a plate of steaming vegetables. “How do I need help?”

“You need to live a little, Bishop.”

“I’m living just fine.”

“
Fine
.” She hands me a drink and sits across
from me. “Fine is not a way to live. Fine is something you tell your mom when
you want her to leave you alone. You deserve more than to just live a ‘fine’
life.”

Leaning back into the chair, I push the food away
from me. “Is this one of those things where you think you’re going to, like,
let me live a little before I die and then you’ll feel really good about
yourself and pat your own back at my funeral? Because you became friends with
the cancer kid
because
of his cancer and . . .”

She throws a fork at me, whizzing it past my ear,
just missing my face. “I’m not friends with you because you have cancer. Or in
spite of your cancer. You. Are. Not. Cancer. And cancer isn’t you. So don’t be self-righteous
about it, and just let me serve you vegetables and bask in the ‘oh-so amazing’
ambience of your friendship, State Patrolman Bishop’s son, Oliver.”

A laugh bubbles up inside of me, but my face has
screwed up into something very unfunny. “You have no idea what this is like, okay?
I don’t . . . I haven’t even told my closest friends about this.
I certainly wasn’t planning on telling you. As a matter of fact,
I didn't
tell you
. I barely know you. And I don’t want to come across like a
complete asshole, but the only thing you really know about me is who my dad is
and that I’ve got The Big C. And yet, you’re sitting here, trying to cure my
disease with some broccolini and grilled corn.”

“I’m not interested in curing your disease. I just
wasn’t going to cook you a steak.” Her chin is set defiantly. “You know, I
talked to you before I knew about your cancer. I talked to my dad about you –
how I’d met this nice kid at work. That maybe we’d be friends over the summer
and that you were coming to my school next year, and won’t that be awesome,
Dad? I can show him around and stuff. He’ll like Macon. I know he will. And
then my dad pushes up his glasses and gets this look on his face and says that
you were just in the hospital getting a diagnosis. Which, to be honest, I
should have known. You had that look on your face, staring out the window.”

“He’s not even my doctor. I should be pissed he’s
telling you stuff. It’s against a HIPAA law or two, right? I could get him
fired.”

“Get over yourself. You’d never.” She rubs her eyes
and adjusts in her chair. “Wouldn’t it freak you out if I took my hair off
right this second and was like, ‘Oh my god, Oliver, I had cancer, too!’ ”

“Don’t lie. That’s a shitty thing to lie about.”

“Is it?”

I shrug, trying to control my emotions. “It would
explain why you changed your hair, I guess.”

She straightens her spine. “I guess it would. Or
maybe it makes sense that my mom had cancer. And lost her hair. So I dyed my
hair and cut about sixteen inches off to donate to her for a wig. That might
make sense, too.”

Hannah Hartwell is weird. And she’s awkward. But at
this exact moment she is not a liar.

“I might not know what you’re going through first
hand, okay? But I know what it’s like to see it from the sidelines. My mom
didn’t even tell me that she was going in for testing. Didn’t tell me she got a
diagnosis. She just called me on a Wednesday and said she was going in for
surgery on Friday, and could I please make sure to pay my phone bill on time
this month? It was like, how did she just go to these appointments without
telling anyone? So blasé. Like you. It baffles me.”

I’m silent as she talks because I have nothing to
say.

“It’s kinda ironic that the woman who leaves an
oncologist because he’s ‘married to his job’ ends up getting the one thing he
could potentially help her with.”

The room is so quiet that I can hear the music from
outside filtering into the house between the window panes and cracks under the
doors. Our food is going to go cold, which bothers me a little, even though I’m
no longer hungry. She
did
spend a long time cooking it, after all.

Instead of saying anything about her confession, I
pick up the ear of corn and start eating.

“This is good,” I say. And I mean it.

She forces a tight smile and picks at her own plate.

“It’s not ‘cure my cancer’ good. But it’s good.”

This time, it’s a spoon that she throws at my head.

5.

TUMORS. BIOPSIES. SICKNESS. These are the words that
run my life now. These words . . . and Hannah Hartwell.

“What are you doing?”

“Sleeping.”

“I’m sure you need it, but there’s a Super Moon
tonight. Think you’re up for some sky gazing?”

I fight the urge to tell her to leave me alone and
let me die in peace. She hates it when I say shit like that. “I have my first
radiation tomorrow.”

“Then it’s the perfect night to stay up and live
like there’s
no tomorrow
, wouldn’t you say?”

“Fine.”

“Don’t say
fine
.” I can hear her huffing on
the other end of the phone.

“Okay. All right. Yes, ma’am, Miss Hartwell.”

“Better.”

She disconnects and leaves me in peace to sleep
more.

***

 “Super Moooooooooooon.” The whisper startles me
awake and into the sitting position while Hannah clicks on the lamp next to the
chair in the corner of my little room. “Mr. Bishop, you rise.”

“How the hell did you get in my room?” My head hurts
and my throat is really dry. I would kill for some water.

She holds up a bottle in her hands. “Want this?”

“You’re incredibly perceptive.” I take the bottle
and drink the whole thing in a series of painful gulps. Her eyes are trained on
my throat and I know she can see the swollen nodes sticking out from beneath my
jaw. It aches. I feel lightheaded. I’m too tired for this.

“Your mom let me in. She only gave me one weird look
when I told her I was coming to wake you up.” Hannah’s attention is focused on
my bookshelf instead of my throat now, and I feel much less self-conscious.

“I doubt she’s worried that you were gonna come up
here and crawl into bed with me.” The truth of the matter is that I don’t think
Hannah sees me that way, but even if she did, I wouldn’t be up for it.

“The moon is going to be its brightest in the next
hour. Is that enough time for you?” she asks, completely ignoring my comment
and solidifying my previous thought.

I nod and move as fast as I can to the bathroom to
brush my teeth and run a comb through my hair. It’s not very fast at all, but
it’s all I can muster at this point.

When we make it down to our rocks at Flat Creek, she
hands me some children’s plastic binoculars.

“What?” She shrugs. “It’s all I could find on short
notice. At least
you
didn’t have to buy them from The Family Dollar.”
Rummaging in her bag, she starts to hum, and doesn’t stop as she hands me a
small bag of popcorn. “Organic. Seasoned by yours truly.”

I laugh because I wouldn’t expect anything less. “If
the moon is so super, why do we need the binoculars?”

“What if it’s not as super as they claim? Then what?
We came out here for a big fat nothing.”

I nudge her with my shoulder. “It wouldn’t be for
nothing.”

It’s not as magnificent as we expected, but sitting
there on those rocks with her, it feels appropriate. A big fuss over something
that didn’t live up to expectations. Maybe that’s all life really is. Moving
forward to the next big thing to make a fuss over and being disappointed time
and time again. I wonder if I’ll make it long enough to be disappointed a few
more times.

She drives me back to my house a couple hours later,
and I give her a half-hearted hug goodbye.

“I go in at eight.” I don’t know why I’m telling her
this. I could just call her when I’m up for it.

“Okay.”

“What? No ‘good luck’ or anything?” I smile as much
as I can, given how tired I am.

“You don’t need luck.” She pops the car locks and
motions with her chin that I should get out of the car. “Luck is for people
that don’t know if they’re going to make it.”

I stand outside of the car and look down at her face
that’s staring back at me with such determination.

“You don’t need luck because you’re not going to
die.”

I close the door and watch her taillights dim into
the distance, hoping for the first time that she’s right.

***

At precisely eight forty-five in the morning, I’m
admitted to my very first treatment. Dressed in a hospital gown, my nurse
wheels the bed down the hall, with my mother fretting and wringing her hands by
my side.

Just as I am turned down a particularly long
corridor, I see Hannah Hartwell standing there with a bright–ass yellow poster
board that reads “I Told You to Eat Your Veggies, Bishop.”

She smiles.

And for once, I can see it waver just the tiniest
bit.

6.

“TERRENCE HAS CALLED YOU EVERY FIVE MINUTES.”

“I should have turned my phone off.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have ‘checked in’ at the
hospital.”

I sit up a little and glare down at the edge of my
bed where Hannah is applying pressure to my feet with her thumbs. “I didn’t
check in on
Foursquare
. My friend finder app was on and when I didn’t
answer my phone, Terrence saw I was there.”

“Likely story.” She moves her hands up to my ankles
and higher, making small hits against my calf muscles with her fists. The
cramps and aches associated with the treatments are more than I bargained for.
I have to admit I’m really glad she’s around so damn much because she does
things like this without me actually having to ask. She crawls onto the bed and
sits up on her knees while she works on my thighs.

“Your bromance is really cute. I think Kayleigh is
warming up to me, too. When I answered your phone while you were taking a nap,
she didn’t cuss me out. She just hung up.” She smiles. “Definite progress.”

“She’ll warm up to you. Her social skills are
lacking. Plus, she thinks of me as the brother she never got to have.”

“She’s
a girl
,” Hannah says with a pointed
look, as if that should answer every question about the subject at all.

Between the chemo, the radiation, prednisone and a
plethora of other things, I’m feeling worse for the wear. I vomit and sleep –
pretty much exclusively. But
this girl
 . . . she keeps a
smile on my face no matter what. I’ve come to not even be surprised when she
shows up randomly in my room or at my visits.

She flexes her fingers and cracks her knuckles
before going back to patting her fists against my left thigh, right where my
boxers touch my leg. “So, tell me something.”

“What?”

“Anything. I don’t care.” Her hair falls over her
shoulder and hangs in her face while she works. “First girl you kissed.”

I think for a second because my brain seems to be
processing things a little slower these days. The memory of a little blonde
haired girl with a braid comes to the surface and I chuckle, but it comes out
as a wheeze. “Her name was Melanie. I was seven.”

“Hot damn. Look at you.” She’s grinning. “Did it
rock your world?”

“Nah. I’m sure there’s better to be had.”

“I’m sure there is,” she murmurs and starts on my
other leg. After a second of silence, she looks up. “Last person you had sex with.”

There’s a possibility that I don’t have enough blood
pressure in my body to make my face red, but it happens anyway. “Shut up.”

“Come on. I’ll tell you.” She looks back down at my
thigh to continue her work. “Guy named Ryan. Who met a girl named Tricia. This
was pretty much the reason I fled home for the summer, you know. Because Ryan
was an idiot and I’m a stupid girl. Had I not found out about it, then I
probably would have stayed closer to him and then I never would have met you.”
She stops and glances up at me again with a wry smile. “And then I would have
missed out on
all of this fun
.”

I shift on the bed and she moves away from my legs
to lie down next to me, face to face on my pillow. We don’t touch; we just look
at one another.

“Rebecca. She was my one and only girlfriend. Junior
year.”

“First and only real girlfriend,” she muses. “Did
you love her?”

I ponder this and the answer becomes apparent. “No.”

Hannah smiles and closes her eyes. Her head shakes
back and forth on my pillow and I think I like the way she smells more than
anything else in the entire world.

“You’re such a boy.”

“I am. And she was a girl . . .
Actually, she was one of Kayleigh’s best friends.” It suddenly dawns on me that
this might be the reason for the animosity between the girls.

“Oh my God, Bishop.” She puts her fingers together
like she’s about to say ‘here’s the church and here’s the steeple’ while making
an over-exaggerated face of shock. “Puzzle pieces. Coming together, No wonder
that girl hates me.” She laughs again and closes her eyes, shaking her head at
her newfound knowledge.

I close my eyes, too, and imagine what life would
have been like if I’d never met Hannah. If I’d never fallen on that track
during practice. If I’d kept seeing Rebecca and just gone about my life like
everything was simply ‘fine.’ If cancer had never happened.

Then I open my eyes and stare at her with hers
closed, noting that this was definitely the better of two roads, even with a
diagnosis.

***

My hair begins to fall out right before my birthday.

It’s
not
the present I was hoping for.

I’m brushing my teeth and raise my unoccupied hand
to shift the hair out of my eyes when the first clump falls out.

It’s surreal, looking at the strands sitting there
between my fingers, like I’d just used a trimmer to get rid of it.

My first reaction is to call Hannah. I tell her in a
hoarse and constricted voice that I need her; I know that she senses my urgency
because she hangs up before she can say goodbye. And by the time she makes it
to my house, I’m crumpled against the wall in my bedroom, my belongings
scattered everywhere because I lost my damn mind and just started breaking
shit. I’ve cleared the top of my dresser and strewn books all over the floor.
And my face is soaking wet from my tears.

Everything aches, and I try my hardest not to touch
my head because I’m more afraid of pulling my hair out than I am of it coming
on its own. I’ve got my face buried in my knees and I’m wailing, which scares
the shit out of my mom, but I tell her to please go away. I need her to give me
space. I need the minutes before Hannah arrives to come to terms with the fact
that this is all real and not just something I made up.

Hannah clears the room in record time, and I can
hear her speaking to me in gentle reassuring tones as she caresses each elbow.
My arms are squeezing my knees to my chest in an attempt to not completely fall
apart. But it’s not helping. She wraps her arms around my legs, too, and rocks
with me while I cry. And when I’m no longer making the god awful noises that
she walked in on, she works her hands between my arms and opens me up so that I
embrace her instead.

“It’s okay,” she whispers.

“It’s not.”

“You’re getting better.”

“I’m not. What if I’m not?”

Hannah slips her hand up my neck and presses her
palm to my scalp. I flinch but she holds me tighter.

Clad only in pajama pants, I can feel her against my
tear soaked skin, warm and soft, consoling me, and I start to cry even harder.
She shouldn’t have to see me like this but I need her.

“Shh,” she coaxes me and runs her hand across my
head. “My mom said this was the hardest part. The ‘physical manifestation of
letting it go’ is what she called it.” Her hand continues to smooth back my
hair. “Maybe when it grows back it will be curly and black. Wouldn’t that be
something? You’d look completely different.”

“Shut up,” I whisper and squeeze my eyes shut
tighter.

She nods against my chest and sits up a little so
that I can feel her nose touching my own. “I’d do the same thing for you that I
did with my mom. I’d shave my head and give you every last hair I own if it
made you feel better.”

It makes me laugh a little but the tears are still
flowing. “Don’t.”

“I could just shave my head for solidarity. I think
I might not have the face shape for it, but I’d do that. Keep it long on top
and dye it blue? I am pretty sure I have a perfectly symmetrical skull.”

I open my eyes and stare into hers, to see that
she’s not smiling. She’s serious. She’d do all of that for me. After all she’s
already done, I know for a fact that Hannah Hartwell wouldn’t joke about this,
of all things.

She’s so close that I can see her irises dilating
smaller to bigger as she searches my face for an answer. Some sort of response.
So instead of saying how I’m feeling, I lean forward and kiss her on the lips.

She hesitates for a heartbeat’s worth of time, and
then she kisses me back.

Her lips are softer than I imagined. I’m kind of fascinated
by how they feel against my own, until I open my mouth wider and boldly touch
my tongue to hers. It’s like every last inch of my body hurts, except the
points where we’re touching. My mouth, my head beneath her palm, where her
knees are touching my hips because she’s pressed up against me so closely.

Her kisses remind me of fireworks. Every big kiss
makes my heart swell and then she follows it up with small little peppered
pecks against the sides of my mouth. I feel like I’m on fire, but nothing . . .
absolutely nothing is happening below my belly button.

I hug her against my chest and break the kiss to
press my lips to her freckled shoulder. She kisses my neck softly and runs both
hands across my scalp over and over until it begins to lull me to sleep. When
my body finally relaxes, she helps me to my feet and leads me to my mattress,
tucking me in before she walks back over to where we were just sitting.

My eyes close just as I see her discreetly trying to
clean up the hair that she had gathered in her hands and let fall to the floor.