فصل ششم

CHAPTER 6

WILL

I open the door to my room, surprised to see Stella backing up against the wall on the other side of the hallway. After the stunt I pulled yesterday, I thought she’d steer clear of me for at LEAST a week. She’s wearing about four face masks and two pairs of gloves, her fingers wrapping tightly around the plastic handrail on the wall. As she moves, I catch the scent of lavender.

It smells nice. It’s probably my nose craving anything that isn’t bleach.

I grin. “Are you my proctologist?”

She gives me what I think is an icy look from what I can see of her face, leaning to peer past me into my room. I glance behind me to see what she’s looking at. The art books, the AffloVest hanging on the edge of the bed from when I shrugged it off as soon as Barb left, my open sketchbook on the table. That’s about it.

“I knew it,” she says finally, like she confirmed the answer to some great Sherlock Holmes mystery. She holds out her double-gloved hand. “Let me see your regimen.” “You’re kidding, right?”

We stare each other down, her brown eyes shooting daggers through me while I try to give her an equally intimidating glare. But I’m bored as shit so my curiosity gets the better of me. I roll my eyes and turn to go rip apart my room looking for a sheet of paper that’s probably already in a landfill somewhere.

I push aside some magazines and check under the bed. I riffle through a couple of my sketchbook pages, and even look under my pillow for show, but it’s nowhere to be found.

I straighten up and shake my head at her. “Can’t find it. Sorry. See ya later.” She doesn’t budge, though, and crosses her arms in defiance, refusing to leave.

So I keep looking, my eyes scanning the room while Stella taps her foot in the hallway impatiently. It’s useless. That thing is—wait.

I notice my pocket-size sketchbook lying on my dresser, the regimen crammed into the back of it, neatly folded and just barely sticking out past the small pages of the book.

My mom must have hidden it there so it didn’t end up in the garbage bin.

I grab it, heading back to the doorway, and hold out the paper to her. “Not that it’s any of your business . . .” She snatches the paper from me before pressing back up against the far wall. I see her furiously looking at the neat columns and rows that I made into a pretty sick cartoon, imitating a level of Donkey Kong, while Mom and Dr. Hamid chatted. The ladders sit on top of my dosage information, rolling barrels bounce around my treatment names, the damsel in distress screams “HELP!” in the left-hand corner next to my name. Clever, right?

“What is—how could you—why?”

Clearly, she doesn’t think so.

“Is this what an aneurysm looks like? Should I call Julie?”

She shoves the paper back at me, her face like thunder.

“Hey,” I say, holding up my hands. “I get that you have some save-the-world hero complex going on, but leave me out of it.” She shakes her head at me. “Will. These treatments aren’t optional. These meds aren’t optional.” “Which is probably why they keep shoving them down my throat.” To be fair, though, anything can be optional if you’re creative enough.

Stella shakes her head, throwing up her hands and storming off down the hallway. “You’re making me crazy!” Dr. Hamid’s words from earlier surprise me by playing through my head. Don’t get close enough to touch them. For their safety, and yours. I grab a face mask from an unopened box of them that Julie put by my door, pocket it, and jog after her.

I glance to the side to see a short, brown-haired boy with a sharp nose, and even sharper cheekbones, peering out of room 310, his eyebrows raised curiously at me as I follow Stella down the hall to the elevator. She reaches the elevator first, stepping inside and turning to face me as she hits the floor button. I move to step in after her but she holds up her hand.

“Six feet.”

Shit.

The doors slide shut and I tap my foot impatiently, pressing the up button over and over and over again as I watch the elevator climb steadily up to the fifth floor and then slowly back down to me. I glance nervously at the empty nurses’ station behind me before sliding quickly into the elevator and jamming the door-close button. I meet my own gaze in the blurry metal of the elevator, remembering the face mask in my pocket and slinging it on as I ride up to the fifth floor. This is stupid. Why am I even following Barb Jr.?

With a ding, the door slowly opens, and I power walk down the hall and across the bridge to the east entrance of the NICU, dodging a few doctors along the way. They’re all clearly on their way somewhere, so no one stops me. Gently pushing open the door, I watch Stella for a moment. I open my mouth to ask what the hell that was all about, but then I see that her expression is dark. Serious. I stop a safe distance away from her and follow her eyes to the baby, more tubes and wires than limbs.

I see the tiny chest, struggling to rise and fall, struggling to continue breathing. I feel my own heartbeat in my chest, my own weak lungs trying to fill with air from my mad dash through the hospital.

“She’s fighting for her life,” she finally says, meeting my eyes in the glass. “She doesn’t know what’s ahead of her or why she’s fighting. It’s just . . . instinct, Will. Her instinct is to fight. To live.” Instinct.

I lost that instinct a long time ago. Maybe at my fiftieth hospital, in Berlin. Maybe about eight months ago when I contracted B. cepacia and they ripped my name off the transplant list. There are a lot of possibilities.

My jaw tightens. “Listen, you’ve got the wrong guy for that inspiring little speech—” “Please.” She cuts me off, spinning around to face me with a surprising amount of desperation in her expression. “I need you to follow your regimen. Strictly and completely.” “I don’t think I heard that right. Did you just say . . . please?” I say, trying to dodge the seriousness of this conversation. Her expression doesn’t change, though. I shake my head, stepping closer to her but not too close. Something’s up.

“Okay. What’s really going on here? I won’t laugh.”

She takes a deep breath, taking two steps back to my one step forward. “I have . . . control issues. I need to know that things are in order.” “So? What does that have to do with me?”

“I know you’re not doing your treatments.” She leans against the glass, looking at me. “And it’s messing me up. Bad.” I clear my throat, looking past her at the small, helpless baby on the other side of the glass. I feel a twinge of guilt, even though that makes no sense.

“Yeah, well, I’d love to help you out. But what you’re asking . . .” I shake my head, shrugging. “Eh, I don’t know how.” “Bullshit, Will,” she says, stomping her foot. “All CFers know how to administer their own treatments. We’re practically doctors by the time we’re twelve.” “Even us spoiled, privileged brats?” I challenge, ripping the face mask off. She isn’t amused by my comment, and her face is still frustrated, distressed. I don’t know what the real problem is, but it’s clearly eating away at her. This is more than control issues. Taking a deep breath, I stop screwing around. “You’re serious? I’m messing you up?” She doesn’t respond, and we stand there, staring at each other in silence, something bordering on understanding passing between us. Finally, I take a step back and put on the face mask again as a peace offering, before leaning against the wall. “Okay. All right,” I say, eyeing her. “So, if I agree to this, what’s in it for me?” Her eyes narrow and she pulls her heather-gray hoodie closer to her. I watch her, the way her hair falls over her shoulders, the way her eyes show every little thing she’s feeling.

“I want to draw you,” I say before I can stop myself.

“What?” she says, shaking her head adamantly. “No.”

“Why not?” I ask. “You’re beautiful.”

Shit. That slipped out. She stares at me, surprised and, unless I’m imagining it, just a little pleased. “Thank you, but no way.” I shrug and start walking toward the door. “Guess we don’t have a deal.” “You can’t practice a little discipline? Stick to your regimen? Even to save your own life?” I stop short, looking back at her. She doesn’t get it. “Nothing’s gonna save my life, Stella. Or yours.” I keep going down the hallway, calling over my shoulder, “Everyone in this world is breathing borrowed air.” I push the door open and am about to leave when her voice rings out from behind me.

“Ugh, fine!”

I spin around, shocked, the door clicking shut.

“But no nudes,” she adds. She’s taken her face mask off and I can see her lips twitching into a smile. The first one she’s given me. She’s making a joke.

Stella Grant is making a joke.

I laugh, shaking my head. “Ah, I should’ve known you’d find a way to suck all the fun out of it.” “No posing for hours on end,” she says, looking back at the preemie, her face suddenly serious. “And your regimen. We do it my way.” “Deal,” I say, knowing that whatever she means by her way is going to be a gigantic pain in the ass. “I’d say let’s shake on it, but . . .” “Funny,” she says, looking at me and then nodding toward the door. “The first thing you have to do is get a med cart in your room.” I salute. “On it. Med cart in my room.”

I push open the door, giving her a big smile that lasts me all the way back to the elevator. Pulling out my phone, I send a quick text to Jason: Get this, dude: a truce with that girl I told you about.

He’s been getting a real kick out of the stories I’ve been telling him about her. He cried from laughing over the door alarm incident yesterday.

My phone buzzes with his reply as the elevator slows to a stop on the third floor: Must be your good looks. Clearly not because of your charming personality.

Pocketing my phone, I peer around the corner to check that the nurses’ station is still empty before sliding off the elevator. I jump when a loud crash reverberates out from an open door.

“Ow. Shit,” a voice says from inside.

I peek in to see the dark-haired dude from earlier wearing a pair of flannel pajama pants and a Food Network T-shirt. He’s sitting on the floor next to an overturned skateboard, rubbing his elbow, clearly post-wipeout.

“Oh, hey,” he says, standing up and picking up the skateboard. “You just missed the show.” “You doing stunts in here?”

He shrugs. “No safer place to break a leg. Besides, Barb just went off shift.” Valid point. “Can’t argue with logic.” I laugh, raising my hand to do a small wave. “I’m Will.” “Poe,” he says, grinning back at me.

We grab chairs out of our rooms and sit in our respective doorways. It’s nice to talk to someone around here who’s not mad at me all the time.

“So what brings you to Saint Grace’s? Haven’t seen you here before. Stell and I pretty much know everyone who comes through.” Stell. So they’re close?

I lean my chair back, letting it rest against the doorframe, and try to drop the B. cepacia bomb as casually as I can. “Experimental trial for B. cepacia.” I usually avoid telling CFers because they make it a point to avoid me like the plague.

His eyes widen, but he doesn’t move any farther away. He just rolls the skateboard back and forth under his feet. “B. cepacia? That is rough. How long ago did you contract it?” “About eight months ago,” I say. I remember waking up one morning having more trouble breathing than usual, and then I couldn’t stop coughing. My mom, being obsessed with every breath I’ve taken my whole life, took me straight to the hospital to run some tests. I can still hear her heels clicking loudly behind the gurney, her ordering the people around as if she were the chief of surgery.

I thought she was obsessive before the results came back. She always overreacted to every loud cough or gasp of breath, keeping me out of school or forcing me to cancel plans to go to doctor’s appointments or to the hospital for no reason.

I remember doing a mandatory chorus performance back in third grade and coughing right in the middle of our shitty rendition of “This Little Light of Mine.” She literally stopped the concert midsong and dragged me offstage to go get a checkup.

But I didn’t know how good I had it. Things are so much worse now than they were then. Hospital after hospital, experimental trial after experimental trial. Every week it’s another attempt to fix the problem, cure the incurable. A minute without an IV or not talking about a next step is a minute wasted.

But nothing is going to get me back on a lung transplant list. And every week we waste, more of my lung function wastes away too.

“It colonized so freakin’ fast,” I tell Poe, putting the front legs of my chair back on the ground. “One minute I was at the top of the transplant list, and then one throat culture later . . .” I clear my throat, trying not to let the disappointment show, and shrug. “Whatever.” No sense dwelling on what could’ve been.

Poe snorts. “Well, I am sure that attitude”—he mimics my shrug and hair flip— “is what’s driving Stella crazy.” “Sounds like you know her well. What’s that about, anyway? She said she’s just a control freak, but . . .” “Call it whatever you want, but Stella’s got her shit together.” He stops rolling the skateboard and gives me a big smile. “She definitely keeps me in line.” “She’s bossy.”

“Nah, she’s a boss,” Poe says, and I can tell from the expression on his face that he means it. “She’s seen me through thick and thin, man.” Now I’m curious. I narrow my eyes. “Have you guys ever . . . ?”

“Hooked up?” Poe says, tilting his head back to laugh. “Oh, man. No way! No. No. No.” I give him a look. She’s cute. And he clearly cares about her. A lot. I find it hard to believe that he never even tried to make a move.

“I mean, for one thing, we’re both CFers. No touching,” he says. This time he’s giving me the calculated look. “Sex isn’t worth dying for, if you ask me.” I snort, shaking my head. Clearly, everyone on this wing has just had “fine” sex. For some reason, everyone thinks that if you’ve got a disease or a disorder or are sick, you become a saint.

Which is a crock of shit.

CF might actually have improved my sex life, if anything. Besides, the one perk of moving around so much is that I don’t stay anywhere long enough to catch feelings. Jason seems pretty happy since he got all sappy with Hope, but I don’t really need more serious shit in my life.

“Second, she’s been my best friend practically my whole life,” he says, bringing me back to the present. I swear he’s getting a little teary eyed.

“I think you love her,” I say, teasing him.

“Oh, hell yeah. I fucking adore her,” Poe says like it’s a no-brainer. “Would lie down on hot coals for her. I’d give her my lungs if they were worth a shit.” Damn. I try to ignore the jealousy that swims into my chest.

“Then I don’t get it. Why—”

“She is not a he,” Poe says, cutting me off.

It takes a second for the penny to drop, but then I laugh, shaking my head. “Way to bury the lead, dude.” I’m not sure why I’m so relieved, but I am. I stare at the dry-erase board hanging on the door directly above his head, noticing a big heart drawn on it.

If Stella’s trying to keep me alive too, she must not completely hate me, right?