Life and Other Complications Page 2

  The three of us met in the kids’ group. But at age 13, you move up to the Teens Living with Life Threatening Conditions Support Group. The chairs are taller for the teen version and the language is harsher. But otherwise, it’s the same. Kids still look like they’ve been blindsided the first time they come through the door. You don’t have to be terminal to end up here, but something has to be working pretty hard to kill you. And you see it in their eyes, that hunted, desperate look.

  If they last long enough, the new kids make it through what we call the three stages: crying uncontrollably, breaking things, and finally laughter. I guess that’s our version of acceptance, when you can laugh at the thing that’s trying to end you.

  “Go ahead and take your seats so we can get started,” Dr. Klein said this afternoon.

  So I sat down in my usual seat in the circle of blue plastic chairs. Luke sat on my right. The seat on my left has been empty since Caroline stopped coming.

  “We have a new group member today,” Dr. Klein said. “So I want to go over the rules. We have two. What’s said in Group, stays in Group. And we tell the truth.”

  Really, we only have one—we’re honest with each other. Or at least that’s the ideal.

  Dr. Klein looked at the new girl to be sure she understood the guidelines, and then said, “Let’s go around the room. Tell us your name, age and diagnosis. Kyle, why don’t you start us off?”

  He frowned. “Kyle, 16, smurfing osteosarcoma.”

  The new girl looked confused.

  Kyle lost most of his right arm to bone cancer and is still pretty irate about it. When he first came to us, every other word out of his mouth was an F-bomb. Dr. Klein explained that strong emotions were accepted in our group, but not cursing. You have to wait for adult Group for that. She gave him the word Smurf to use for all of his cursing needs. It’s a term he now throws down so often, I wonder if he ever slips up and uses it other places.

  As much as Kyle complains, he’s usually the first one here and the last to leave. In his own way, I think this group matters to him. None of the rest of us have lost an arm. But we’re still the closest thing he has to people who understand.

  Natalie was next.

  “Natalie, 15, leukemia.”

  Natalie is our tiny resident romantic. She’s always been little, but lately she’s gotten so thin that her arms look like matchsticks. She won’t be the first kid that we lose to cancer. But repetition doesn’t make the process any easier.

  The next girl said, “Josie, 16, thyroid cancer,” and then started crying. Josie has been with us for three months. She cries a lot. We’re not sure if it’s because of the cancer or because she goes to Saint Margaret’s, an all-girls school that could be the inspiration for every mean girl movie ever made.

  Dr. Klein nodded to Ben to keep things moving as Natalie put an arm around Josie’s shoulders.

  “Ben, 17, cystic fibrosis.”

  Ben has a deep, almost raspy voice. When he first started coming to Group, we called him Batman. Natalie worried that the nickname would hurt his feelings—until he showed up in a t-shirt that said, Always be yourself. Unless you can be Batman. Then always be Batman. After that, Natalie relaxed.

  The new girl’s voice quivered. “Miranda, 14, neuroblastoma. It’s a kind of brain cancer.”

  She looked like she just got hit by a truck. I think those first few times you say the words really are the hardest. Because saying something out loud makes it real.

  Dr. Klein nodded to Luke.

  “Luke, 18, inoperable brain aneurysm. I call it Larry.”

  Luke’s is by far the most unusual diagnosis in the room. He has a huge inoperable brain aneurysm, a weak spot in one of the major blood vessels in his head. It’s been slowly growing for years, stretching out like a balloon. When it bursts, Luke will die. No slow decline. He’ll just be gone. It’s a reality I don’t like to think about.

  The circle of faces all shifted to me, and Dr. Klein nodded. I hate this part. Maybe it would be different if I had cancer or a heart defect or something. But I don’t. I have HIV, a virus that attacks your immune system. It literally targets the body’s defenses. Which is kind of brilliant and kind of wrong all at the same time. Machiavelli would have loved it. Personally, I’m not a fan. Eventually HIV progresses into AIDS. You get sick with something your body can’t fight off, and you die. Death used to come fast, but now they have medications that help fight the virus. They can’t kill it. But they can buy you time. Enough time to end up in a place like this.

  But none of that is why I hate saying the words. I hate saying them, because HIV is a sexually transmitted disease. Sex isn’t the only way to get it. But it’s the most common, and the one people usually think of first. Which means HIV isn’t exactly a comfortable thing to talk about.

  But Dr. Klein gave me another look that told me to get on with my introduction.

  As I spoke, I didn’t look at Miranda. Because I knew that if she’s like most people, she wouldn’t be able to mask her reaction. I don’t blame her. I just didn’t want to see her face when I said, “Aly, 17, HIV.”

  I wasn’t looking at her, but clearly my friends were because Kyle said, “Aly’s not a slut.”

  Natalie jumped in. “She got HIV from her mom at birth, and then her mother died when Aly was seven.”

  “Oh,” Miranda said. “That’s awful.”

  I hated the way she was looking at me, with both pity and fear. It was a relief when the conversation moved on.

  We finished the introductions, and Dr. Klein opened the floor. She usually lets us steer the conversation and then finds a way to tie it all back to what she calls purposeful living. The woman is masterful. She has managed to compare living intentionally to everything from baseball to calculus. Today, the conversation settled on prom. It was a cakewalk.

  “It’s easy to focus on how things aren’t perfect,” Dr. Klein said. “How the dress might show a procedure scar, or you don’t have the energy to dance to all of the songs. But you can also see prom as a chance to embrace the now.”

  Agreeing with Dr. Klein is typically the easiest way to get her to move on. So lots of people nodded. I don’t know if I didn’t nod noticeably enough, or if I hadn’t said much today, but Dr. Klein zeroed in on me.

  “Aly, are you planning to go to prom?”

  Everyone in the room was staring at me. “No.”

  “Why not?” Dr. Klein said.

  Because I’m the girl with HIV.

  But I couldn’t say that. So I threw out another truth. “I don’t have a date.”

  Luke turned to face me. “I’ll take you to prom.”

  I felt the flush in my cheeks.

  Luke could go to prom with anyone, and the whole school knows it. If he took me, it wouldn’t just be a pity date. It would be a public pity date. And that is a humiliation that I don’t need.

  “I don’t want to go, but thanks,” I said.

  Dr. Klein looked disappointed in me but didn’t comment.

  When we got out to the parking lot, I told Luke, “You should ask Madison.”

  “She’s going with Troy.”

  That was surprising. “I thought she had better taste.”

  “So did I.”

  “You could still ask someone else.”

  “I know.” He unlocked the car. “And I asked you.”

  “But I don’t want to go.”

  Luke looked at me over the top of the car. “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  And finally, he dropped it.

  It’s not that I’m against proms on general principle. It’s that no one thinks of me as someone to date, and everyone knows it. Deadly, uncurable, sexually transmitted diseases are not romantic.

  HIV isn’t all bad. You can’t give blood. So there’s no pressure there.

  And dating isn’t everything. There are lots of other things to do. And you can still have amazing friends.

  When Caroline started chemo, Luke and I decided
to shave our heads as a sign of solidarity. Luke’s parents helped him. Mrs. Miller almost killed me. But either way, if you could have seen Caroline’s face the day we showed up in her hospital room bald—she knew we loved her.

  Ironically, Caroline didn’t lose her hair to chemo. For a while, she was the only one of the three of us who had hair. Then she decided to shave her head in support of us. So we were all bald together. I wish everyone had friends like that. Because I don’t know what I would do without mine.

  Friday, May 13

  Today, when Luke picked me up for school, he waited until I had my seatbelt buckled and then handed me a piece of blue construction paper. Written on the small rectangle were the words: Good for One Favor, in my handwriting. It was from a pack of coupons I gave Luke as a birthday present when he turned ten. I couldn’t believe that he had kept it for all these years, and that I hadn’t thought to include expiration dates.

  There isn’t much I wouldn’t do for him, just because he asked. Which meant that he wanted something big.

  My face apparently matched my thoughts, because he said, “I’m not asking you to help me move a body.”

  “What are you asking?”

  “I want to take you to prom.”

  I groaned. “Luke, I don’t want a pity date.”

  “Where does pity come into this?” He backed out of the Millers’ driveway. “We hang out all the time. All we’re talking about is moving it to a new location with a more formal dress code.”

  “This isn’t a fair use of a coupon.”

  Luke put the car in drive and looked over at me. “Life isn’t fair, Your Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

  “And modified Princess Bride quotes do not apply to this situation.”

  “The Princess Bride always applies. The question is, are you going to honor your promise?”

  That was low, and I told him that. But he didn’t look the least bit remorseful.

  “This’ll be fun,” he said.

  “I’d rather move a body.”

  Luke grinned at me. “Maybe next time.”

  When Caroline got into the car, she didn’t seem the least bit surprised that Luke had used an eight-year-old piece of construction paper to get me to go to prom with him.

  “He’s Luke,” she said. “And tonight is Friday, the thirteenth.”

  “You want to watch horror movies,” I said.

  Caroline’s eyes twinkled. “Yes.”

  I hate horror movies. But I love Caroline. “I’ll ask Mrs. Miller.”

  “We can run tomorrow afternoon,” Luke said.

  “You don’t want to see us bright and early on a Saturday morning?” Caroline asked him.

  “You don’t do bright and early,” Luke said. “And Aly’s going to be in the same building as the mural. I’ll be lucky to see her before noon.”

  “It’s like he knows us,” Caroline said to me.

  Mrs. Miller said yes. So tonight, Caroline and I scrounged for dinner and then ended up in her bed eating ice cream while Hacksaw House IV played on mute in the background.

  “You don’t want to go in there,” Caroline said to the three girls who were approaching the ridiculously creepy house.

  “You know they aren’t going to listen.”

  “I know. It’s as if they have no sense of self-preservation.”

  The girls went into the house and explored, giving us plenty of time to build up our sense of dread before the shadow of a man wielding an ax appeared on the wall.

  I pointed at the ax with my ice cream spoon. “You would think the ax would be a clue that it was time to leave.”

  “No,” Caroline said. “They haven’t run yet. They have to run and scream and one of them has to sacrifice herself to try and give the others a chance to escape.”

  “They could have just not gone into the house in the first place.”

  “But then there wouldn’t be any blood or horrible acting.”

  “They could have had horrible acting somewhere else.”

  Caroline shook her head. “It wouldn’t be the same.”

  On the screen, one girl got an ax to the stomach, and I had to look away. “That’s disgusting.”

  Caroline looked from me to the girl whose guts were pouring out of her belly. “Then why are we watching this?”

  “Because you like it.”

  “Aww.” Caroline wrapped her arms around me. “You’re such a good friend. I would let myself get eviscerated for you.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  “How about Hacksaw III? Everyone dies off-screen.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Caroline switched movies, and we started again with three other girls approaching the ridiculously creepy house. The makers of the Hacksaw series apparently don’t believe in deviating too far from a theme. Shockingly, they haven’t won any Oscars yet.

  Eventually, Caroline fell asleep. But I lay awake staring at the images on the screen.

  I don’t know why Luke and Caroline became my friends. I just know that I love them, and I don’t want to lose them.

  But the trial changes everything. They’re going to find out about Rick, and what happened in Boston, and that I lied to them. That I’ve been lying to them since the day we met.

  On the screen, a girl ran silently through the house. There was no escape. She couldn’t change what was going to happen. All she could do was postpone the inevitable. But she kept running. Because she couldn’t bring herself to let go.

  Not yet.

  Saturday, May 14

  Early this morning, I left Caroline asleep in her bed and put on my painting clothes: worn-out jeans and an old button-down shirt of Luke’s, both splattered with paint. Caroline calls it “Jackson Pollock the Outfit.” My painting clothes are practical, but don’t really fit with the elegant lobby that Mrs. Reese has worked so hard to recreate. So I used a series of back passageways to reach the mural room on the other side of the hotel without being seen by guests.

  When Luke and Caroline and I were growing up, we used to pretend that these passageways were tunnels or sections of a labyrinth. The entire Ballentine was our playground. We transformed one of the tool sheds into a clubhouse and used the surrounding woods as our enchanted forest. The hotel itself played the parts of castle and doomed ocean liner. The glass copula at the very top of the central tower was the crow’s nest of our pirate ship. And a portrait on the fourth floor served as a hidden entrance into Narnia.

  The only section of the hotel that we didn’t go near was the north wing—where the fire started. The north wing was too dark and unstable. And we would never admit it to each other, but we were all afraid of ghosts. Because not all of the children who played in these halls made it out alive.

  I used to imagine what this wing was like before the fire. I could picture the girls with huge hairbows and the boys in their knee-length breeches. Through the windows of the mural room, they likely saw the storm gathering in the mountains. They may have even heard the first rumblings of thunder. But I doubt they worried. They were safe inside thick walls. So they went to bed with rain pattering against the windows and woke up to voices screaming, “Fire!”

  By morning, the flames were out.

  The front of the building looked untouched. There were still flowers in the window boxes. But inside, the hotel had been ravaged. The damage was so extensive that the owners didn’t even try to rebuild. They abandoned the place and moved on.

  The north wing is where the devastation started, and the north wing is where the renovations will finish, complete with my mural.

  I love this project. I love all of the colors. I love imagining children smiling when they see it and getting excited as they pick out the different characters. I love how lost I can get in the process of creating. With a paintbrush in my hand, I can forget the rest of the world exists.

  This morning I was so absorbed in my work, that I didn’t notice the time until my med alarm started
going off.

  Usually, Mrs. Miller comes into my room and watches me take my pills, leaning in close enough to be certain that I swallow them. When I stay at Caroline’s, Mrs. Reese is entrusted with making sure that I take my meds. But Caroline’s mother has a much more relaxed approach. She set an alarm on my phone.

  “When the alarm goes off, take your meds,” Mrs. Reese said.

  This morning, when my med alarm went off, I climbed down off the ladder and was headed back to get my pills, when Caroline came into the room carrying steaming mugs and my pillbox.

  I accepted the mug of hot chocolate and pill case with a thank you.

  “In your case we support drug use,” Caroline said before taking a sip of her beloved.

  I had just put my meds in my mouth, when Caroline said, “Who’s Olivia?”

  I choked and almost spit out my pills. When I had finally gotten them down, I managed the word, “What?”

  “I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. And your notebook had fallen on the floor.”

  My heart had risen up in my chest. Every beat was huge. I could feel blood gushing out into my system. The letter to Olivia said too much. And what was on either side of it wasn’t any better. How much had Caroline read?

  “I didn’t read it,” Caroline said. “I just saw the name.”

  For a second, I didn’t know if I could believe her. But then I remembered that for all of Caroline’s flaws, she doesn’t lie. If she had read it, she would have told me.

  “Aly?” Caroline said.

  I pulled in a breath. “Um, Olivia is what I call my diary.” It was true, in a sense.

  “You named your diary?”

  “It felt strange writing to something that didn’t have a name.”

  Caroline considered that for a second. “If I was going to name my diary, I would pick something more interesting than Olivia.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Marco the Magnificent.”

  “Your diary sounds like a self-absorbed circus performer.”